To me hiring a professional for 20 minutes might sound enough for some small taske, but I'm not sure how well this goes for more complex tasks (e.g. where the pro has to read and understand your code). I guess you can buy couple of chunks than but I'm not sure I see the benefit. Is it just so that you don't have to pay every starting hour?
From the perspective of a person hiring, I'm sure it's better to hire for exactly as long as you need. The point of 20 minute chunks is to make the idea more appealing to experts (who are busy doing other things). As an expert, you know that if you accept a job, you only need to commit up to 20 minutes, and you'll get paid for a full 20 minutes (even if they're not all used), to justify the 'switching cost'.
Great work man! What I think it needs next is some sort of cursor indicator - preferably with some sort of user id. Something similar to how Google Docs did it. Keep it up!
From the article itself I couldn't agree more on "The ultimate resume". A passionate developer with a lot of cool tiny projects (as his playground) can get plenty of job offerings - as long as the ideas show potential and are executed well. Also, as Sahil mentioned, one of the projects can start small but grow into a big successful business.
As others said above I'd also suggest you try out pair programming (with a friend of yours). I find myself more relaxed when I'm with someone I can talk to, make jokes or just bitch about the things not working. When I feel stressed I change place with my friend and he continues with the code while I calm down. Also he might see mistakes you don't and helps you fix them right away avoiding the stress.
Another good strategy is to break everything down to small tasks. Tasks you can do in 30 minutes or less. Watching the list getting shorter makes you feel like you're doing something. I think this is part of the agile approach.
To summarize: they didn't have a sustainable business plan and when the costs got too bit they canceled free service. They say now that they're better prepared.
This is why on Indefero I offer only a limited space free account (still with your own domain). The percentage of people using for free such large offers is too high. This is because you are dealing with people who know how to integrate with different services (googlegroups, wikispace, sourceforge, etc.) and can get a really nice setup for free.
From a business point of view, I definitely prefer to have less visibility but a higher percentage of paid customers. This allows me to create a product which is of high quality on the long term because I have money to do so. And in fact, discussing with my customers, they prefer it that way.
Note that the free offer of Assembla is not free, you get direct advertising when accessing your space.
But if we do small maths and we consider that Assembla has the incredible 5% conversion rate from free to paid. This means that on average they will have for 100 users:
95 x 1GB of "free data"
5 x $49 x 2.5GB of paid data
I take the 50% usage as on the long run it what my personal stats gives me.
So about 100GB of data for $245 per month. As you need a triple backup to be robust. It means 300GB of data to maintain for $245 per month.
It is possible, but the margin will be razor thin if you want to provide quality. It is a bold move, I am eager to see how it develops.
Thanks for the nice comment! You are right, but this is not because of marketing grounds, this is because I would personally never use a software as as a service for my code/projects where I cannot move out of it without losing my data and workflow.
This is another subject, but for a critical part of my business, I want to always have full control over my data and workflow. By allowing people even with the free account to have their own domain and a full backup compatible with the open source (GPL) version, my customers can migrate out without even having their users noticing the change. This is my idea of freedom for SaaS.
Like justinchen said they already offered free SVN and GIT hosting. Then one day they sent out newsletter saying that they're not providing free hosting anymore and that all repositories will be made public. I had to move all my projects to another repository and promised myself never to go back. I don't trust them, sorry!
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.
P.S. Good luck with DubJoy ;)