Hey, one of the founders of Pixelapse here. For context, our target demographic is graphic designers.
We initially started out with tiered pricing based on storage. However, based on usage, we actually found that people rarely hit their storage caps. A better barometer for us is the number of people working together, which we approximate with projects. In that regard, our pricing plans are similar to Github's. Public projects are free and unlimited. Private projects are paid.
What products would you say are comparable to yours? Perforce comes to mind, though that's more of a "check out, check in" model, where this appears to be more of a dropbox model?
I'm not understanding how a version is identified, though. Is a version stored on the server every time the file is saved?
I don't see anything about locking. How do you prevent two people from working on the same unmergeable file at the same time?
Speaking of merging, there is no mention of merging of text files. Is that not supported?
I'd say the model is most comparable to Dropbox in that it passively syncs your work in the background. The check-in, check-out approach works for developers but we found it to be too confusing for our target audience of designers. It's a bit of cognitive overhead to remember to constantly check-in, especially when using Photoshop, which crashes quite frequently.
Every save forms a new version online, but you can go back and retroactively mark certain versions as major milestones. Milestones are roughly equivalent to commits in Git.
Since we're primarily focused on graphic design formats, we don't attempt to do any merging of files since it's unclear that the end product would make much sense. We don't lock files either. If two users simultaneously edit the same file, one of them "loses" and shows up as a Conflicted copy that you can visually resolve in the Comparison view online.
If two users simultaneously edit the same file, one of them "loses" and shows up as a Conflicted copy.
From my perspective, that seems like a good feature to consider adding. Groups of artists are used to self-organizing so they don't end up conflicting in this way, but I think that's only because they haven't had tools to solve the problem for them. We're rolling Perforce out enterprise-wide, and trying to convince artists to start storing their working files in it (PSDs, etc) -- one of the big selling points is that you can easily see that someone else is working on this file before you jump in.
We initially started out with tiered pricing based on storage. However, based on usage, we actually found that people rarely hit their storage caps. A better barometer for us is the number of people working together, which we approximate with projects. In that regard, our pricing plans are similar to Github's. Public projects are free and unlimited. Private projects are paid.