Great comments. So I just answered about pricing on a comment below, but here's the gist of it:
We charge per day to give you the flexibility of the cloud. Cloud9 is not an IDE alone, it's your tooling + test environment in the Cloud. So it's hosted, hosting costs money and we charge you for it. The idea is that if you are doing a commercial project with a good hourly rate, then paying 50 cents a day for the platform isn't a lot if it saves you significant time. If you're working on an open source project, Cloud9 is free.
The value is that you don't have to configure your systems, you dont have to keep them up to date and you'll be developing on a system that is identical to your deployment target. We're adding good deployment support soon to many different cloud hosters. This way deployment should be really a click of a button. Then there is the value of collaboration. Being able to work together with others from within Cloud9, editing and running code.
We are adding Ruby support soon, including step through debugging and gem support. We have webdav support and we'll soon support mounting your drive on your local machine for external applications to access your files.
For now, try Cloud9 for your open source projects and see how you like it. There are many more features to come in the coming weeks and months.
So, the one thing that you didn't answer was the difference between a "project" and a "workspace" if there is one. I do have hobby things that aren't open source where 50 cents per day would be doable, if unwelcome. However, if it's 50 cents per day per project, that can add up pretty fast and $55/mo isn't a trivial cost considering that I can run my development and test stuff off my machine (granted, with the caveat of having to do all the annoying setup myself).
I'll probably get an account for open-source later today to play around with, but if your Ruby stuff is really good (when it lands) and works well for collaboration, I could easily justify $15/mo to my boss and sometimes one isn't trying to create the solution for every cheap hobbyist out there. It can be good to be the Basecamp of IDEs and maybe that's how you should sell it (in contrast to my comparisons to Eclipse and RubyMine).
We charge per day to give you the flexibility of the cloud. Cloud9 is not an IDE alone, it's your tooling + test environment in the Cloud. So it's hosted, hosting costs money and we charge you for it. The idea is that if you are doing a commercial project with a good hourly rate, then paying 50 cents a day for the platform isn't a lot if it saves you significant time. If you're working on an open source project, Cloud9 is free.
The value is that you don't have to configure your systems, you dont have to keep them up to date and you'll be developing on a system that is identical to your deployment target. We're adding good deployment support soon to many different cloud hosters. This way deployment should be really a click of a button. Then there is the value of collaboration. Being able to work together with others from within Cloud9, editing and running code.
We are adding Ruby support soon, including step through debugging and gem support. We have webdav support and we'll soon support mounting your drive on your local machine for external applications to access your files.
For now, try Cloud9 for your open source projects and see how you like it. There are many more features to come in the coming weeks and months.