Well now, this changes everything.

The previously planned crazy installment (I was going to install my own Launchpad instance) has been cancelled (or maybe deferred) to bring you this important announcement.

For those who still haven't heard yet (sorry about the late blog -- this happened around 4AM my time), Atlassian have bought Bitbucket and are doing crazy awesome things with it.

They changed some pricing plans, too. If you remember my graph from last time, it now looks a bit more like this:

[[posterous-content:MGLlpFXYHW3ksEDqpcWR]]

If you remember my previous rant, the big problem I had with Launchpad was pricing. Specifically, I think they charged based on the wrong property: number of projects versus size of team.

So Bitbucket went out and did just that. Every Bitbucket plan now gets an unlimited amount of space and repositories (both public and private!). What they charge on is size of the team. Get this: everyone now gets infinite private repositories that they get to share with 5 people. That pretty much means that Atlassian just gave 80% of the small commercial dev houses I know free hosting. Even better, if you change your plan before October 3, you get 10 users for a year. That's 90% of the small commercial dev houses I know right there.

That's pretty darn cool.

Disclaimer about the graph: my idea of "big dev house" probably isn't your idea of big dev house. Obviously the $80/month = $960/yr you'd pay at Bitbucket for unlimited private collaborators is about four times what you'd pay at Launchpad for an equally sized (that means "more than fifty", mind you) team if they only work on one project. Since they charge based on different properties it's very hard to make a sensible price comparison: I think Launchpad has to compete based on features, and not on price, because fifty people working constantly on one project doesn't sound like the kind of dev team I'd like to see more of :)

I think it's time to revisit Bitbucket. Even if most of the tools end up being horrible, you just can't argue with 'free'. If feature X in Bitbucket ends up being unusably bad, I can just install my own code review tool. I've been told Bitbucket repositories are accessible over SVN, so it may even be possible to hook it up to Rietveld and end up with something where I do zero hosting.

Regardless of what happens to Bitbucket, I'd like to congratulate Jesper on Atlassian buying Bitbucket and wish him the best of luck in whatever he does next, be it Bitbucket or something else.