Hey! I'm the creator (fork-er?) of Plain. I have mixed feelings too — if all this does is help spur some new activity around Django, that would be a good outcome!
Lol, that's why I added the "or watch the video / read the Forge start page". 50% off right now though! Still thinking through some of these things. Not sure how to let people "try" it without basically giving away all of the value (code, which you can't take back).
Yeah I'm not 100% sure yet what level of Django experience is required to use (or at least appreciate) Forge? Should you have used Django at least once before on a project? Gone through the official Django tutorial maybe (https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/4.0/intro/tutorial01/)? At the moment, if you have not actually used Django before then I probably would recommend you go through their tutorial and THEN try Forge (or watch the video / read https://www.djangoforge.dev/docs/start/).
Some differences will immediately jump out — they'll tell you very (very) little about how to manage your dependencies, local environment, hosting/deploying, configuring settings with "secrets" for local vs production, the fact you'll probably want a custom AUTH_USER model later and it will be super hard to change, etc. But yeah, to sell those as differences, you do need to have a baseline familiarity or else I need to do a really thorough job of explaining and pointing them out ahead of time.
I think the gist, if you compared vanilla Django to Forge, would be that vanilla Django is almost completely open-ended. There are a lot of decisions you're going to have to make, and research you're probably going to have to do. Forge removes a lot of those decisions and makes them for you. Some are easy to spot up front, but others not until you're further down the road or have more experience...
> Can you make a video, where you show how to make a full fledged SaaS with django-forge and deploy it? How long would that video be?
Videos are absolutely the way to go. I'll try to do more and run through more of the parts and maybe a complete process. That first video I made stops short of deploying to Heroku, but it's maybe 5 minutes away from being deployed. Beyond that, basically every "topic" in the sidebar could use at least one video.
I haven't actually tried Pegasus, so I can't say exactly. In a lot of ways I'm sure they're similar. Some differences with Forge might be the removal of options:
- Pegasus looks like it supports multiple CSS frameworks, Forge only comes with Tailwind
- Pegasus talks about multiple deployment options, Forge focuses completely on Heroku
- Pegasus talks about creating venvs or using virtualenvwrapper (+ pip-compile?), Forge uses Poetry
From what I understand, the update process for Pegasus is also a little bit more manual? Forge is intentionally set up to be a git remote, with directories and stuff named so that an update is essentially `git merge django-forge/main`.
Probably lots of little differences when you get into it — just different decisions from different people. Hoping to document more of Forge soon!
Yeah I could see that argument too. Lots of hard decisions and interesting questions in terms of how to navigate what people want/need. Honestly I don't envy their situation. It has even made me think crazy things like what a Django fork would look like... the thing has some bloat that could stand to be removed too. And some legacy decisions that are super hard to change, but also need to be changed.
Kudos to czue and Pegasus! I haven't used it before, but if that's a better fit for what you want, go buy it!
Honestly I feel a little weird "competing" directly with something like this, but such is life. Thanks to everyone who has made something similar (in any ecosystem), which is part of what got me over the hump of thinking it was even possible. I'm glad Django is getting some options and new ideas!
All good ideas — thanks for taking the time. I've been thinking about some of these but not all.
On the 1 customer vs 100, I totally lean towards the 100. I have a blend of these with https://www.pullapprove.com/ and the higher the price, the more it feels like you just work for them. Pros and cons, but personally I don't want something that looks like freelance/consulting/employment.
Good point. Still trying to figure out who is interested, but I'll probably add a student/educational discount too. (If anybody sees this and wants that, let me know.)
I could absolutely see the "borrow some code" angle. Especially if you have an existing/established project where it would be pretty hard to integrate everything anyway. $1000 is not much for a company looking for another "professional Django resource" (if that's what it is).
Would have no issue with some people paying for access, borrowing some stuff, and being a part of a "community" of people sharing variations of the ideas and occasionally factoring that in to the Forge code itself, copying it out, etc.
> Things like django-coookiecutter are great, but they only really cover the project structure.
This is an important point, for me anyway.
Yeah $1000 can be a lot for an individual (myself included), especially for a hobby/side project. For individuals, at this price, it's probably more of "I've built a small revenue generating project before, and I'm going to skip some steps this time + connect with some other people doing it in a similar way"?
Yeah I've been considering that. Probably more likely that I'll lower the price, learn some things, then ramp it up. Free feels hard to reverse and the difference between "I wouldn't pay at all" vs "I'd pay less than that, but something" is pretty big (and important to me unless I figure out another way for the project to get paid for).
Thanks. Completely agree on the contrast to rails... This has been a super interesting process for myself in thinking through "what are the parts of Django that are either way too clunky, or just completely outdated?" I think there's more than a couple... There are a lot of things I realized I have just gotten used to, but people new to Django would find super odd (why aren't emails required to be unique on users by default?).
Would also recommend people listen to the first episode of https://www.frameworkfriends.com/ if they are thinking about these kinds of things.
Thanks! I found Reactive somehow yesterday — haven't looked closely at it yet but I will. Always cool to see more stuff in the ecosystem. But yeah, personally I feel like there are few things the Django community could learn (or at least try) from the Laravel (and Rails) communities. I love free software, but it has downsides too! (Like the fact that I can't justify spending all my time on it.)
Might be too high — not sure yet. It is partially based off of https://bullettrain.co/pricing#now (and I know they're making that work... but there are some differences).
> why would any business want this?
An existing business building a new product? A new business getting off the ground? Don't know exactly yet.
> Like others I also wonder who's the intended audience.
Me too — trying to figure that out!
> but that project needs to be basically non existent while also being somewhat serious
Super interesting point. I've helped integrate it into some existing projects and it is not fun.
> In what way is it more than an expensive cookiecutter repository?
I don't disagree with this. A couple differences in my mind are support (that you're paying for, and has an incentive to be as helpful as possible) and on-going updates (a cookiecutter won't help you integrate improvements over time, as far as I know).
Pricing is totally an experiment right now, and I shot high on purpose. Suggestions?