I have the same concern. At Assembla, we feel that we need to work on being best of breed for repositories, and ticketing / issue management. Some of the collaboration features are not at the level of single-purpose providers, but we include them and incrementally enhance them because we think it is important to get project IP in one place. So, that is the focus that we have chosen. I am sure that we can be more focused. Please send us a note if you have specific areas of concern.
I run Assembla, but I will say that Github is a good service, and they do a better job with code sharing and individual repositories. Assembla is more oriented toward managing teams. This is not a move to go against Github. We still offer Github as a repository tool. You can use Assembla ticketing / collaboration / team management tools, and link them to code commits on github.
Interesting, given that GitHub is several years old and has a huge user base there must be something right for GitHub to have not needed a teams feature up until now. Was this a feature that users were asking for or a feature that when watching users they would very much benefit to have?
We just turned two and folks have been asking for team support since before we launched. We've never been in the habit of building features we merely think people want.
We did offer free services for about 3 years. Then we had to reduce the free services because of rising hosting costs. No repositories were made public. We maintained private service for everyone for four months, and then restricted usage to read-only, for the people that didn't subscribe. So, no repositories were made public, people got three years plus another four months of free service, and the average charge for people that did subscribe was about $12 per month. If you can't afford that, you don't have a serious projects.
In this round, we have made substantial changes to the business model. Only the repository is free, so we can sell our premium ticketing, collaboration, and management tools. And, we have hosting affiliates that pay us for leads. Plus, the underlying service is profitable and supports the level of admin quality that is required.
