Show HN: Sitebulb, a website crawler and auditor for SEOs (opens in new tab)

The app store has a few benefits. The biggest one, for paid software is that if I format my computer or move to a new computer my license come over with my Apple account. I don't need to worry about remembering an account and license keys for each each.

I can't count how many apps I've paid for but I don't have installed right now because I lost a hard drive and my license keys with it.

Though I'm guessing with monthly billing it is more a username / password thing for you vs a key. (I haven't tried it yet, sorry).

The second benefit is not having to give my billing info to yet another company.

I'm not unlikely to install an app not from the app store. But I'd say I'm... complete guess here... 30% more likely to install it if it is in the app store.

And I can also say that if I have the choice between the two (same software on the app store and off), I will always do the one in the app store because of the previously listed benefits.

It's worth considering what your particular customers want. I make Photoshop plugins, and since the CC subscription came in, I've heard of a lot of customers jumping ship to one-off purchase products, like Affinity Photo and Paint Shop Pro. But some other customers are happy with it.

Also, while Creative Cloud is paid monthly, individual plans have a minimum term of 12 months. If you cancel, you have to pay out 50% of the contract term (unless you prepaid for the year, in which case there are no refunds).

http://www.adobe.com/legal/subscription-terms.html

Technically, that's correct, although it's a conceit that was foisted upon us by the software industry, partly as an artifact of copyright law and partly to gain more control over their product than others could gain.

As futile as it is, I'd rather see the concept go away than see it further enshrined in subscription services.

I am definitively not fine with that. Of course it's up to the person selling the software to decide on the pricing model, but it's also up to the customers to voice their opinion.

I refuse to buy software that is subscription based. The closest to this that I find OK is PHPStorm which has a hybrid model where if you pay for a year you get to keep the version you installed at the beginning of your subscription (or after a year of monthly payments have been made).

I don't expect companies to work on the software for free, if there is an upgrade worth upgrading I am prepared to pay for it.

How many software licences do you pay a month ? Because they add up, very, very quickly.

Thanks for all the detail! Here you go:

- Email confirmation is required for the username/password, which is how free and trial licenses are controlled, and ultimately how paid licenses are doled out. So we need it for the licensing.

- No special characters at all! Excepts periods. Sorry!

- Agreed, we need to improve the settings switcher.

- Crawl Maps is not linked - you mean on the website right? I'll fix that.

- Running audits show on the main Dashboard, seemed kinda overkill to put it on Recent Audits as well. No?

- You can switch of 'Check external' in the Advanced Settings. Kinda 'hidden away' to keep the main settings UI cleaner (otherwise where does it end?!)

- "Filtered URL Lists" - they are there because people want them ('a big list of all the URLs') and kept missing them in our usability tests!

- Why no endless scrolling in tables? It's not easy to do because the data is written to disk, rather than stored in RAM (which is the reason it can typically crawl more pages), so it needs to go and fetch/filter/etc... every time.

Yeah for really big crawls your probably better off sticking it on a server or AWS, as much as anything so you don't need to leave your computer on for ages.

But Sitebulb is not resource hungry in the same was as other desktop crawlers. It saves to disk instead of using RAM, so you don't experience the same limitations.

I'm not sure what you mean about Google. There is no link between Sitebulb and Google - it doesn't visit Google at all, so there is no risk of banning. Using it on your 100 Mb work line would be ideal.

The other big thing, in comparison to cloud software, is convenience. You can setup a crawl and start it running -and see URLs being crawled - within a minute.

On cloud software that's simply not possible, due to the way that everything is scheduled.

There are a few other small things, such as being able to view Audits offline (what we call 'train mode').

The cost structure can be a big limiting factor though, especially for smaller companies. Sitebulb effectively remove all limitations around number of domains, number of projects, total number of URLs crawled etc...

The one advantage that I can think of is this can run on websites that are in development and not accessible to something running in the cloud. A lot of enterprise websites have their dev/stage behind a VPN and being able to run this against those without having to find out how to jump through hoops would be really nice (which is looks like this is capable of doing since you just need to feed it a URL). On top of that you also don't have to worry about what they're doing with the data output by the program on their server.

"Almost everything looks like a graph. Almost nothing should be drawn as one."

It's really hard to make sense of full link graph visualisations. I'm talking about this in an upcoming conference presentation. We should share notes :)

I'm testing Sitebulb right now (trial version). The crawling is kinda slow (I'm on 100mbits fiber). Why did you choose to build eveything from scratch instead of making an application that use the results from other crawlers/spiders (ie: Screaming Frog) and just produce the audit reports?

EDIT:

And after about 3hours of crawl, this is what I got (and no way to resume it):

>Audit Stopped! >The audit stopped early because: Maximum Crawl depth limit of 50 reached

>WARNING: Audit Paused ! The audit is incomplete and did not finish properly.

I know right, SF is just too cheap for its own good! :p

We think it's a case of horses for courses. Sitebulb has the potential to save you a ton of time when auditing and reporting. If you don't do a lot of that then it might not be a good option for you. If you do, that's where a lot of the value lies.

There's a fully featured 2 week trial to give it a proper go, and the monthly billing means you have the option to switch it on/off as you need it.

We should put that on our homepage.

Hey I'd appreciate if you could ping me your email address to support@sitebulb.com so we can see what's going wrong with your account (or lack thereof).

Sure no worries..of course I personally knew that, but I thought it might be useful for you guys to know its being blocked by the AV.

It's a really nice product BTW...good job.

thanks, i'll check it out

I'd also be interested