I wrote the article on Medium. I was in contact with 2-3 ex-students of that course. None of them received refunds several months after my article (I imagine I received the refund because I started the "movement").
While it is incredibly flattering for a small startup like ours to have an open-source derivative, stealing our interface and design patterns for a project that you charge hundreds of dollars in installation fees definitely leaves a bad taste.
Do it right and we'd have probably helped you promote it. But this just doesn't seem cool.
I didn't realize you owned the exclusive use of the large leaderboard images and rounded buttons design patterns. I'm sure there are loads of people out there profiting off of your patented design that you should probably be harassing as well.
Looks like it goes deeper than that considering his onedayrails.com landing page is the same design, sequence and structure as the default Fedora landing page as well as the internal lessons experience and design
I very much didn't intend to offend you, copy you or cause you to be upset.
That homepage design is based on what Udemy looked like before their update and that's why I felt okay to use it as a starting point.
That said, I'll update the homepage for the course today with a new design as a gesture of good faith.
I think the platform itself, not the homepage/sales page is what the people using coursify like. I suspect many of them won't even use that homepage. It's just a starting point.
Again I'm trying to make friends not enemies. Hope I didn't offend you.
I second Ankur's thoughts here. We've put a lot of time and energy into making our user experience simple and beautiful and while we take it as a compliment that you liked it enough to use our design, we would appreciate it if you came up with your own original design as to differentiate from us.
We're not just a random online education platform that popped up out of the blue - we're real people working very hard to build a quality product.
Congrats on your launch! Just wondering, how did you come up with this pricing model? I think you need to change it because majority of the buyers can wait for 1 day than paying $400. OR am I missing something here?
Question: from the video I get the impression that this platform can handle only ONE course, is this right? Still a very nice implementation, good interface work!
Of course multitenancy [1] is a nice feature to have for every web based software, however I just wanted to clarify if it was possible to use your product if one has more than one course to offer.
Really neat! online courses are on the rise and having such a platform just makes it easy to start one.
Just found a typo -
"That means you'll get the best developers from all over the world, working hard to make Courify an excellent platform for you to sell your online course."
Is your target market individual education entrepreneurs and small teams, or do you have plans to offer this product to universities? The reason I'm asking is because many colleges would spend money on a lightweight course builder that hooked back into their existing learning management system, especially if it gives them flexibility to develop their own courseware, or hosts it for them.
great job! it looks like a good replacement for people trying to juggle with the complexity of a software like moodle. I'm also interesting in knowing if it will support some type of assessment, because it looks like so far it's only a paywall for content. Do you have plans to add support for any type of assessment?
I actually don't see the value in the comment you just made, besides making an Ad for moodle. This guy made an app, open sourced it and you pay him if you want him to install it for you. I do not see a problem here. This product is not geared towards programmers, it for people who do not have technical skills and if you have you can build your own or use his for free. I think your feedback is very unhelpful for someone that is trying to make money from their skills why not say something positive or encourage rather than call them a beginner and tell them to go hang out in their sandbox. Well he is on the front page of hacker news so clearly other people here see the value in what he is doing.
You may or may not have a point, but I don't think you are making your case. The complexity of a piece of code is not a means of detecting its value. Facebook was originally written in something like a weekend or less. Twitter was not originally a complex piece of code. Also, writing the code is only half the battle. The other, and often more difficult, half is getting the word out, and this guy has managed to get a very visible notice on Hacker News, so he's way ahead of the curve. Also, you don't really prove that the code was easy to write, we just have to take your word for it.
Ref. 2: Moodle [1] is a learning platform designed to provide educators, administrators and learners with a single robust, secure and integrated system to create personalised learning environments. According to their own stats, it is installed on 50k sites, and hosts millions of courses (but many of those could be samples or now defunct).
We used Moodle at my last University (UON) (transitioned from blackboard) but this is a very lightweight product for a very different purpose (Online courses).
Granted It didn't take too long to build (about 13 weeks in my spare time) but It's actually a lot more work than you might think.
The challenge is not in the "coding" but getting the user experience right.
Beginners cant install this. Someone has to do it for them :).
His product doesn't seem to do everything Moodle does but maybe that simplicity or lack of extra features is what some people want. In any case, he's created something and is trying to make money from it, as well as offering a free MIT-licensed version - nothing wrong with that IMO. No matter how many lines of code, why not let customers (or lack of) decide whether he's created something of value?
We actually drop the transaction fee once you're actually making money. Check it out: usefedora.com/pricing.
To your point, if there's a free tier with a transaction fee, doesn't that mean it's totally free to use? We handle all the hosting for you, so it's a little misleading to call this system free.
With Fedora, we make money when you do - which is an amazing alignment of incentives if you ask me. This really helps people who are just starting out and want to use a robust product. Right now folks using Fedora teach near 400,000 students in any language you can imagine.
Disclaimer, I Co-Founded Fedora and you have any questions, feel free to reach out conrad@usefedora.com.
When Udemy decided to start charging 50% of every sale, I needed another way to sell my Online Courses.
I looked at a few self-hosted Online Course platforms, but they all wanted a monthly fee + transaction fees, which I think is excessive.
So I started working on Coursify. With Coursify, you can download it, install it and use it without paying.
If you don't know rails, you can pay me a one-time installation fee and you can use it forever without any more charges from us...
I also released it under the MIT licence, so others can improve on it.
Thank you.