Today we released a huge update to Beanstalk’s plans based on months (years?) of customer feedback. While most of the updates seem straight forward, we spent a long time coming up with the right approach to provide more value to our loyal paying customers. Here’s a quick overview of the update:
- New plans, split into Personal and Business groups.
- Increased repository limits for Silver plans and above!
- Specific business-focused features for our Business plans.
- Reduce the free plan to a trial.
- Updated public site to better demonstrate Beanstalk’s offering.
New plan names
As part of the process of separating the business accounts from the personal, we have renamed all of our plans. The changes are:
- Personal → Bronze
- Team → Silver
- Business → Gold
- Corporate → Platinum
- Giant → Diamond
New business plans
For a long time, we’ve had requests for business-specific features like custom backups, an SLA, and improved security. Over the years we refrained from implementing most of the features in order to keep our pricing cost-effective. After a lot of discussion (and enough requests) we decided that it made sense to split our plans into two groups: Personal and Business.
The Personal plans will continue to offer the great reliability and features you’ve come to expect. Our new Business features start at the $50 Gold plan, which include:
- Enhanced Security - forcing SSL on SVN and detailed access logs
- 100% Uptime Service Level Agreement
- Backups to your own Amazon Web Services S3 account
- Deployments to multiple servers at once
- Priority support
Our goal is to offer specific features and peace of mind that larger teams require. We also have some features in the works that will be provided for business level accounts that have been requested for a while, such as granular permissions. Keep in mind, with all of these updates our pricing has not increased at all.
More repositories, same price
As the saying goes, you’ve asked and we’ve listened. We’ve added more repositories to the Silver plans and above and kept the pricing exactly the same. The new repository limits are visible in the Plans page in your account. You can now store some projects that may not be used at the moment, but not have to upgrade to the next plan.
Changes to the free plan
With all of these changes, our goal was simple: bring more value to our paying customers without charging them more. Since we haven’t figured out how to print money yet, we needed to evaluate where all of our costs come from. A large portion of our time, server usage and support goes towards our free plans. While we love being able to offer our service for free, we also need to be sure it is not taking away from what we can offer our paying customers. By increasing the offering for our paying plans, we restructured the free plan, it will now be called a Trial account. Don’t worry though, it’s not timed, it’s still forever.
The new trial plan will still provide a free, private Git or Subversion repository and 100MB of space. Instead of 3 users there will now be one, but we have added 10 free deployments so customers can test out the feature before paying. This change is immediate. We have migrated all free accounts fitting into the Trial account automatically. The remaining free accounts will have 60 days to either upgrade to a paying plan or remove users.
With this change, we have also introduced a 15-day money back guarantee. You can now try a paying Beanstalk account at no risk. If in 15 days you are not happy with the service for any reason, you can contact support and we will refund you the monthly cost. Simple and easy, because we are sure you will love it.
New design focused on our full offering
Over the last three years Beanstalk has evolved from a simple Subversion hosting provider to a more robust tool to make you more effective, with collaboration tools and deployments. We wanted to more clearly demonstrate this on our public site. We made some simple, but important design updates to show that we offer version control, collaboration tools and deployments.
We hope you like it!
We hope you find these updates valuable and positive. We tried to provide more without charging more, and we feel like this has been accomplished. By separating the individuals/small teams from the businesses we can better concentrate on providing tools that fit their needs. Now, we know that having fixed plans means that some people will fall out of the limits. We did the best we could to accommodate the largest group of people while keeping the plans simple.