A potential customer recently wrote to me to ask for a comparison between Centripetal Retrieve for Basecamp and a competitor of ours. I thought it was good information so I am sharing my response with everyone here.
Thanks for checking us out. The differences that I have seen are as follows:
1) Our service works. I have had an account with our competitor for a few months now and am yet to receive any files or data from my Basecamp backup with them. They are very focused on growing their user base around twitter and gmail and seem to have let their Basecamp integration lapse. Basecamp's login process recently changed and it may be that this competitor has not updated their system yet, although it didn't work for me prior to that change either. I would love to hear if you are able to get it working. From our side, we are focused exclusively on being the best at backing up Basecamp. We support backing up all data, files and Writeboards. Because we are more narrowly focused in what we are doing we are able to more quickly react to changes from Basecamp and keep our service working. We have been in beta for about a month and a half in which we did consistent back ups for about 30 customers. Just yesterday we completed a backup for a customer in our full release, that had 42GB of files and delivered it to their Dropbox account. We will add services in the future, but we will always strive to be the absolute best and most comprehensive backup solution for each service we do and will not ever let our integrations lapse. We want to build a product that our customers can depend on.
2) While our competitor is free now, their model is to charge based on the amount of data you store with them, which with a significant amount of data, may cost more than our service. Our plans and pricing will always be transparent so that you know exactly how much you will be getting billed each month, it is not going to change based on an amount of data or anything else that may surprise your wallet. We will likely offer a managed storage solution as an option with a set rate not based on a per GB storage cost, but right now we give your data to you. This can be done via FTP or Dropbox.
3) Another difference is on the focus of each company in the options provided. Our competitor is focusing on giving their users lots of options on what services to backup, they support twitter, facebook, gmail, flikr, etc. We have chosen to focus in on Basecamp exclusively for the current time and provide the options on the storage side of the equation. We currently allow you to choose to have your files stored by Dropbox or FTP. We are working on a DVD mailing service as well as some other online storage options. We have heard from our customers that they want to integrate their data into existing backup solutions that they have and that they don't want to just copy their data to yet another cloud storage system, they want to have it on their computers. So this is where we have chosen to focus our efforts.
4) Building out lots of service integrations is probably the right thing for our competitor to do, they are focused more on the consumer side of things and consumers will likely want more of a breadth type of offering. We are focused on business users and this drives us to work very hard on reliability and correctness of the service. It is not ok to our customers for the service to work some of the time or most of the time, it has to work all of the time. As companies move more and more of their data into cloud based applications they want to know that those services are going to be available to run their businesses, so when they invest in a backup product for those services they also want to be sure that the backup is going to work all the time in the event that something happens that causes them to need that backup.
In the mean time, our competitor is free and we offer a 30 day free trial so you can certainly run your own comparison of the two services. If you do I would love to hear about what you find out.
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