Trigger.io has been a great platform, counting reliability, ease of use and support. We're having no platform related issues with a forge/backbone/requirejs approach to our app.
I highly suggest a look if you're currently using something like Sencha Touch/PhoneGap.
Well, I even made an app on this a while back. https://github.com/rocky-jaiswal/rafflerv2 would have blogged about it if I knew it would make it to the front page of HN. #Facepalm
Their pricing is high, but not infeasible; in theory, if you ship over 50k units, you hopefully have the resources to afford $300/month (though perhaps not, if your model is based on free + network effects).
What I find interesting is that the key differentiator between plans is the number of "Reloads". This implies that when you reach the cap, the app continues to work, but doesn't update for another month. This isn't great for users, and it kills much of the benefit they offer for sub-$300 plans, especially if you wish to update often, or you've built your server-side around all users always being up-to-date.
Brass tacks: their platform looks great, and the cost isn't a deal-breaker, but the level of moral hazard and vendor lock-in spooks me a bit. If they were to start raising rents or misbehaving, moving the codebase away from their platform would represent a non-trivial amount of work. For the client mobile project I'm starting soon, I'll probably use PhoneGap coupled with a homebrew dynamic updating system. And it's a shame, because I'd much rather use Trigger Forge.
We were concerned with keeping our platform affordable when we launched our pricing: we added the $19 / month tier specifically for indie developers.
We grandfather plans so if you sign-up now you've locked in that pricing, which most people think is fantastic value relative to the time they will spend developing and iterating their app :)
Reload is a unique feature not available on other mobile platforms, but it is perfectly possibly to launch an app with us without ever using it or upgrading higher than the $19 / month tier.
Thanks for the reply. Can you tell me the exact behavior when Reloads run out? Even 50k seems like a small number, especially if iterating frequently. (A 2nd question: do Reloads block UI, or continue using the old version until background updating is done?)
It looks like I could potentially roll my own updating solution on Trigger using the File API. I didn't realize that Trigger was feature-comparable with PhoneGap + plugins. I'll evaluate a little further.
Reloads will still be applied beyond the limit - you'll just get a nice email from us :). In the future we will charge an overage rate.
Reloads do not block the UI, by default the old version is used until the updating is done. We check and apply updates when the app gains or loses focus, but you can modify the update behavior using the Reload API:
http://current-docs.trigger.io/modules/reload.html#modules-r...
