After Assembla’s frankly rather sneaky decision to start charging for its services, which I was using for code repositories both for pobo projects and for If Looks Could Kill, I took the hump and started looking around. A lot of people in this area offer a lot of stuff: project management, bug tracking, file storage etc etc. These kind of features always seemed nice but I never actually used them. I just wanted enough repositories for my needs, for my favourite price, with the option to have a handful of users join in if I needed it.

I looked at several, including Beanstalk (limited to one repository) and Project Locker, which offers a lot for nothing, but ultimately I chose Unfuddle for individual work. It only allows one project for the free option, but within that you can have unlimited repositories, and one more user if you need. It has a nice web interface, but the point with these services is that you can choose never to see that after you sign up: if it’s working, you just check in, update and commit in your SVN client (Subclipse is my choice) and that’s all.

Which helps my other winner, XP-Dev: it’s quite new and is still finding its feet, but it offers unlimited projects, repositories and users with a generous 1.5GB space limit. Its interface is pretty basic, but didn’t we just agree that that didn’t matter? Assembla has taught us (again) about free lunches, but the XP-Dev guys are aware of how annoyed that apparent U-turn made previously evangelical users, and seem determined to remain free. I’m already using them for a couple of projects and things look good: free, private, multi-user, multi-repository Subversion hosting. Too good? We’ll have to wait and see.