So the recent discussions on the future of the Codaset business model were a lot more fruitful that I had expected, and resulted in some additional proposed enhancements to the system. I want to talk about one of those today.

Under the proposed "pay as you go" model that Codaset will employ in the new year, every time you create a private project, you will be charged a set monthly fee (the first will be free). This works out great, but may not be so great for companies or organisations who tend to have more private projects than public. So every time a company employee forks one of the company's private projects, they will effectively be charged for the usage of that fork.

A number of you raised a few concerns with this little gotcha, and I actually sided with you all a little. So I came up with the idea of groups.

A group can be seen as an umbrella for a collection of projects and/or users, used by a company or organisation. It actually turns out to be a great way to manage a group of related projects. And because a group is not a real user account, each user still has full reign over the projects that they create, but can still assign any one of those projects to a group. That user can then invite other users to be a part of their group.

I think this answers the forking private projects gotcha quite well, as I plan on allowing group members to fork any group project at a lesser or even no charge. Group creation will be free, but there will most likely be a monthly fixed fee for creating a private group. And that fee will allow you to fork your groups private projects as many times as you wish.

There are still a few details to be thrashed out and confirmed, but I think groups could well become another really useful feature. Questions? Thoughts?