Would you buy a starter app?

That is some-quality code in there! Where’s the option for more than $3,500?!

Jason,

This is an interesting idea and we have been building an app like this for over a year now. We went with Rspec, jQuery, etc.

I would imagine not many people would pay for something like this, as most shops already have something like this built. If it is a person who is learning rails that might be interested - why wouldn’t they use bort?

It belongs on GitHub where it can be forked, improved, and customized by the shops that are going to use it. Buying/licensing adds an unnecessary layer of complexity to the inherent problem of the client owning their code. It also prevents sharing, which is key to something that will continually evolve as Rails evolves.

I agree with James and Josh. Of course I understand your goal is to derive some benefit when others are using your code since they will be profiting by not having to start from scratch themselves. Obviously if it is on github and someone adds some interesting pieces on a fork then you can take that in. Any bug fixes or comments to help with your code base will be a benefit as well. One of the biggest wins though can be if it is heavily used and known to come from you or your company then it is good publicity.

I don’t know about you guys, but my contract specifically states that I:

1) Use open source code, that no one owns, in the solutions I provide 2) Will bring my own custom code to the table when implementing solutions 3) Will write more custom code to achieve the solution 4) Provide the rights the composite results of 1+2+3, but not any of the individual pieces.

This allows me to reuse code on other projects, and license them as I see fit, including both re-selling the code (as long as it is not the composite pieces, i.e. their app/site) or giving it away under the GPL.

No pay,

for our society we use this beautifull plugin: http://github.com/Lipsiasoft/lipsiadmin/tree/master

that have all we need.

Auth, Attchments, Pdf, Beautifull Backend etc…

On the face of it, nothing.

Here’s why. While you may think that certain components are really great, some of us may want to replace those. So the value of the stack will go down.

If you want to be opinionated in the stack like rails, then I think that you might make some good money from this.

hummm, I wonder if it’s a good strategy to make money … why ? just imagine this scenario:

• DHH have developed Rails

and then will say (something not too far from what Jason said): “lot of development shops have a code … that they start with for their applications. If you’re like us, you (do not)reinvent the wheel on similar projects…. But I’m not going to do that anymore. I wrote (what I think is) an awesome FRAMEWORK with some standard features that I wanted. That’s where you guys come in. I thought other dev shops might want to have something like this but might not have the time/inclination to code their own. So I ask: what’s the most you would pay for a A WEB APPLICATION FRAMEWORK with the following features:

• migrations,
• activerecords,
• scaffild,
• activeresource, ....”

If this happened, I’m pretty sure of one thing : Rails would not be what it is now …

But there is another alternative : share the application and let people decide how worth it is …. a freelancer may put 10 or 100$ .. a small/medium company may put 500$ ... etc. :-)

its just my two cent ;-)

Adam

Nothing…. which seems to be the consensus here.

Every shop or freelancer should build and maintain their own base cms/skeleton app/engine. It should be a living and evolve project that gets some attention with each app that is spawned from it. Poach like crazy from what you like in all the other open source rails cms/skeleton apps that are out there and bring it across while absorbing the knowledge and giving it your own flavor. When you are done go ahead and put it up publicly on Github for some review/glory.

There’s absolutely no reason why doing client work should puts all code ownership in the hands of the client.

For the starter code itself, probably very little - there’s quite a few such projects out there.

However, if it came with great documentation (screencasts?) on how to work with the individual components and turn the starter code into something else, I am sure many people would be interested. The first purchase as a learning exercise, and once the user becomes familiar with it, it can be used again and again for new projects.

I agree that as a learning tool people might pay for it, if it came w/ screencasts etc.

However, given that stuff like that is already available for free, and that it would take people fairly little time (if any) to build, I myself wouldn’t pay for it.

However, what would be worth paying for might be something like:

A rails app with memcached stuff setup, with a full guide to how to get it working on your server.

A rails app with email / attachment receiving setup (a la backpack)

A rails app with full subdomain stuff setup, and a guide to get it setup on your server.

This kind of advanced stuff that is a bit harder to implement, I might imagine people paying for.

Bort like stuff would probably get bought if it would be custom for everyone. But that’s just like consulting.

Otherwise, if it gets more specialized, isn’t it just like http://railskits.com/ ?

I personally don’t use starter apps like Bort, or anything else for that matter because Rails changes too fast and I change how I approach problems. I’ve used something similar to the new app generator stuff, and I think once that’s out there we’ll see more solutions around that instead of a ‘pre-built’ application.

There’s a lot of value in seeing how the “experts” write code, but it would be nicer to see more open-source solutions. In honesty, I’ve been less than successful with many of the starter-kit systems I’ve found. One even required a substantial rewrite just to make it work as advertised for our situation, so even after paying some cash for it we still ended up writing it from scratch. It’s not really the fault of the starter app, it just wasn’t designed to meet that specific need.

If you’ve got neat ideas to share, spend your time making and selling screencasts. You’re very, very good at that. Teach people how to write really good code. In fact, there are so many people who could benefit from screencasts that would walk them through building something difficult from start to finish. What if you did a cast on building out this starter app, so people could learn how to build out their own? You could certainly charge for that.

I concur with many of the above sentiments for open-sourcing it and forking it. But on the other hand I would purchase some Railskits given the need to do so. The value to me in your list above would just be to scan your code for best practices, as a learning exercise, since I already use and am familiar with many of the pieces you are using. You don’t have to base your decision of whether to sell it or not based on the opinion of many experienced developers, but rather your market of someone (or a firm) who needs a good foundation. starting with 100% coverage is a great place to throw in young developers too, since there aren’t many examples applications that apply the latest techniques.

At giraffesoft we use Blank ( http://github.com/giraffesoft/blank/tree/master ), so we obviously wouldn’t pay.

One of the clauses in our standard contract is that clients let us contribute improvements to our open source tools. All rails shops should have this clause!

I started looking at Rails when I was finally fed up with applications like Microsoft Access and Apple Filemaker Pro nickel and diming me on every little tiny thing. The entire community, especially the Filemaker one, thinks that their idea’s are worth a fortune which makes it very difficult for a noob to get started. I’ve seen silly plug-ins going for hundreds of dollars that should have actually been integrated in the desktop version to begin with!

If you do provide a starter app, I would suggest the entry cost be extremely low, the source be open, and you allow the community to improve it. It never ceases to impress me how people will pay for something that outsiders perceive as “free.”

If there is an opportunity for you to make a little extra cash in a project like this, I would suggest you create a super-simple cost model for reviewing your customer’s attempts at integrating your starter app in their solution. This way a beginner in-house developer can feel confident that they will have some training wheels at a known cost to help them on their way.

I wouldn’t pay for a starter app, but I may pay for a screencast addressing using a starter app, showing the different plugin features and design patterns related to common web applications like a blog, cms, social networking site etc. based on it.

I agree with Andre. I’d definitely pay for a screencast showing the inner workings of the starter app, but the app itself should be free. I’ve actually been looking for this for quite a while - it would be a great way to get better at rails.