Introducing unlimited private repositories - <AUTHOR> https://github.com/blog/2164-introducing-unlimited-private-repositories <comment><USER4> 1\. Take a gazillion dollars in funding on an over-hyped valuation,

2\. Go through significant organizational changes that end up with the departure of a co-founder (and more suits in the building).

3\. Notice that a significant segment of your growth (VC-funded startups) are running out of money.

4\. Switch to a user-based pricing to generate more revenue for investors, but spin it as a freebie "Hey! Look at the cool unlimited shit! No, no! Don't pay attention to the fact you're gonna be charged 3 times as much as before for the same service".

The bottom line is that GitHub is free to do whatever the heck they want; if they believe that charging per user is going to make more (financial) sense to them, then they can go ahead and do it.

But I'd appreciate if their PR department didn't expect us to swallow this as a positive change. Most coders understand basic maths.

<comment><USER5> Per user pricing makes a lot more sense than per repo pricing. This way larger organizations pay more money than smaller ones regardless of how they structure their code.

This is a good deal for small organizations that like to have many small repositories (for internal libraries, utilities, micro services, modules, etc).

Sure, it screws up a few models that rely on external collaborators to get access to private repos, but those can stick with the old model for a while (at least 12 months). And in the meantime GitHub may adjust their model to accommodate those situations too.

Lastly, this is a huge freebie for individual accounts that now get unlimited repos for $7/month. That will benefit a lot of people.

So I don't see this as PR spinning, but rather as an overdue move on github's part to a model that makes a lot more sense and benefits small organizations and individuals.

<comment><USER6> I work for a non-profit open source organization that collaborates on github ([https://github.com/edx/](https://github.com/edx/)) We have lots of people who aren't employees, but have signed a contributor agreement with our organization and contribute changes to our software. Our bill will go up from $200/month to over $2000/month with this new pricing. We can afford it (it's still a small fraction of our AWS bill) but it will force us to look at other alternatives. Github's code review tools are already pretty mediocre compared to other tools like gerrit, and we've long since moved off of github issue tracking due to lack of features compared to JIRA.

<comment><USER7> > We have lots of people who aren't employees, but have signed a contributor > agreement with our organization and contribute changes to our software.

So you have volunteers, working on your proprietary, private software for free. The labor is free & now you're complaining that you'll have to pay a per-free-laborer fee for the infrastructure to manage all these free-laborers? I hope I'm missing something here...

<comment><USER6> the software is AGPLv3'd, and run by hundreds of educational organizations around the world. Those organizations typically contribute changes back via Github. Non-employees don't contribute to our private repositories. We gain quite a bit from maintaining a large open source community, but it's not "free labor."

<comment><USER8> From the announcement:

"These users do not fill a seat:

 _Outside collaborators with access to only public repositories_ "

<comment><USER6> Ah, I didn't see that part of the announcement at all. That makes the new pricing much closer to what we were paying before. Thanks for pointing it out!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> A small comparison:

Team | Cost Before | Cost Now

1 repo, 5 users | $25 | $25

1 repo, 10 users | $25 | $70

11 repos, 5 users | $50 | $25

11 repos, 10 users | $50 | $70

5 repos, 50 users | $25 | $430

50 repos, 5 users | $100 | $25

50 repos, 50 users | $100 | $430

I'm not sure how common are organizations with few users and large number of repose - I guess software houses that keep old projects (for maintenance and future requests from clients) fall into this category, but who else?

The other case where it becomes cheaper is personal accounts.

In all the other cases - it just looks like a raise of prices.

<comment><USER10> Even for software houses, it's VERY problematic as we add customers to projects as external collaborators and we're going to get billed for that forever, even if most customers have very light usage, and even for non active projects.

I was thrilled by this news but it's going to be completely unaffordable for us. We have 29 users and 51 external collaborators. We have recently upgraded to the Platinum plan ($2460/yr), but switching to the new user plan would raise the bill beyond affordable for us ($8k+ per year).

I think it is a big mistake to bill for external collaborators, it completely screws software houses that need this model to use GitHub.

<comment><USER11> I keep my eye on Microsoft's Visual Studio Team Services. It has a bit of a clunky name and aimed more at enterprises but I think at some point they will position it as a competitor to GitHub. It's free for the first five developers, and no charge for "stakeholder" user accounts.

[https://www.visualstudio.com/pricing/visual-studio-team- serv...](https://www.visualstudio.com/pricing/visual-studio-team-services- pricing-vs)

So 29 users would be $182/m (check my maths) and you'd pay nothing for the external collaborators (assuming they fit the "stakeholder" role ... no need access to the code).

<comment><USER12> If you no longer want/need the social aspects of GitHub, you can just move to GitLab. Much more affordable and you can self host it yourself. We have an on premise GitLab installation. Besides the rare upgrade, it's pretty hands off. And it's costing us $0 in licensing fees for over 60 users ;-)

<comment><USER11> I looked at GitLab, it seems to come off second best in terms of features [1].

[1] [https://www.visualstudio.com/get-started/overview-of-get- sta...](https://www.visualstudio.com/get-started/overview-of-get-started- tasks-vs)

Hard to argue with free though, if that's what you're looking for.

<comment><USER12> I've always found VSTS to be at the same time expensive, bloated and missing essential functionality. I think the mentality of .NET / Microsoft developers is strange. By following Microsoft's lead, wherever that may take you, you're missing out and you don't even know what :-P

<comment><USER13> I'm a PM on VSTS. If you're willing to share what we're missing and what's bloated, I'd love to hear it. firstname.lastname@example.com or a reply here would be much appreciated. Thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The incentive changes for this are so massive, nice "experiment" from an economics perspective.

1\. penalizes OpenSource organizations that need a few private repos for password, server configuration or other things. Was 25$ before, now for example Doctrine with 48 collaborators it would be 394$. Even if just the admins have access to that repository.

2\. penalizes collaboration, inviting every non-technical person in the company? 2-5 employees of the customer? not really. Will lead organizations to create a single "non-technical" user that everyone can use to comment on stuff. not to mention bots, especially since you need users for servers in more complex deployment scenarios.

3\. rewards having many repos, small throw away stuff and generally will lead to "messy" repositories lying around everywhere that are committed on once or twice and never touched again. "Not having to think about another private repository", imho will produce technical debt for organizations.

4\. users in many private orgs will need to pay or get paid for every organization each. I myself will be worth 45$ now for Github, being in private repositories of five different companies.

All in all, this just shows that Github does not care as much about open source anymore as it cares about Enterprise.

Btw: Mentioning the price jumps in repository usage of the old pricing is not really helpful. Consider a pricing that would be per repository (1$ for personal, 2$ for organizations) and doesnt have jumps and compare that to the new per using pricing. The new pricing only feels better for some, because you pay marginal costs for every single user instead of the old pricing where every 50 repositories you have to suddenly pay 100$ extra.

Edit: Forgot about bots, and deployment machine users (which even Github recommends for many scenarios)

<comment><USER15> Yup, #2 would hits us very hard. We have just over 40 people split between two organizations; everyone has access to Github and all have been trained to use it. Only about half are developers; are a lot of rules in a simple DSL that business analysts maintain and designer need to be able to update art and that's not even counting the bots. We have about as many Github users as repos -- we archive anything that's out of date to long term storage. If we are forced to switch to the new pricing model Github will likely lose us as a customer. The new model is just insanely expensive. The main reason we choose Github was the ability to have everyone use it. Feels like an outright cash grab honestly, especially with #4.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> What about companies like Epic Games that have few repos but many users?

With their 2 private UnrealEngine and UnrealTournament repos they would have been paying $25 a month and under the new pricing structure will have to pay $815,913 per month...

edit: That's based on what I can see as a UE4 subscriber, 2 private repos and 90657 users.

<comment><USER17> We are reaching out to customers that are in unique situations such as the one you're mentioning here. If you have questions about how the pricing changes affect you, please don't hesitate to contact firstname.lastname@example.com.

<comment><USER18> If you need to give Epic Games special treatment just because they have a huge amount of outside collaborators, then your pricing model is broken.

It would be more fair to charge _$9 /mo per organization member + $1/mo per active outside collaborator_ (somewhat similar to AWS CodeCommit) than to charge for every single active and inactive member and collaborator equally. Maybe throw in a 50% bulk discount for active outside collaborators over 1000.

This is not a "unique situation", it's how many organizations use GitHub (just on a smaller scale than Epic Games). As giovannibajo1 puts it[1], this change is very unfair to software houses. Giving Epic Games special treatment is only avoiding the issue.

If 5% of Epic Game's 90664 collaborators are active for a given month, then with my proposed pricing model it would now cost them ($9/organization member + ~$2766)/mo, instead of >$800k/mo. No special deals needed, and everyone (presumably) is happy.

This proposed pricing model also scales well for software houses that have have many active outside collaborators. For example, a company with 20 employees and 50% of 100 outside collaborators active in any given month would be charged $230/mo. With 50 employees and 50% of 500 outside collaborators active, it would be $700/mo.

This should also work well for large companies. 200 employees + 30% of 4000 outside contributors active = $2900/mo.

[1]: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11673352](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11673352)

<comment><USER19> Business are free to close deals with clients in their own terms whenever is lucrative for them. Almost every single company will have "unfair" treatment for big corporations... That way they can get big paying clients. clients that could possibly host their own solutions... It might be that Epic Games in the old business model, with so many users, was not profitable for github, but they are open to negotiate a middle term. It's just business. It is fair.

I think github is on their own right and if you have a case where you think you would be able to negotiate with them, you can send them an email as well... If not, go search another company that have a better cost/benefit for your use case.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I find it interesting that so many people here are unhappy with the change. Sure, prices will go up for a lot of organizations, but is $9/worker/month really a lot to pay for all the stuff GitHub offers? At Bay Area prices isn't that about 5 minutes of developer pay per month?

For independent use it seems like a very positive change, in fact I'm guessing it's a direct challenge to GitLab. I was considering moving my stuff to GitLab simply because I'm tired of bundling experiments/prototypes into umbrella repos just to stay under the 10 repo limit at GitHub. For people like me this will be awesome, and I take it as a good sign that they're responding to the competition.

One thing I don't get however: how do they count shared access to private repos?

If I have a private repo and you have a private repo, and we each grant access to the other's repo so we can collaborate, do we now have two or four billing units?

They say "you can even invite a few collaborators" \-- but how are you billed if it's more than a "few?"

I don't mind if they try to close the loophole of making up an "organization" out of a lot of "individual developers" but it seems a little vague.

<comment><USER21> > At Bay Area prices isn't that about 5 minutes of developer pay per month?

I work for an academic nonprofit. Asking to spend any money is like pulling teeth, and any purchase I make has to go through many layers of bureaucracy who don't understand or care what I do and have no incentive to make my life easier. I don't want to leave Github, but now I _have_ to, because I just won't get the approval to spend hundreds a year. But I know that's nothing to Bay Area companies, so the rest of us will just go kick rocks or something.

<comment><USER22> > I don't want to leave Github, but now I have to, because I just won't get > the approval to spend ~100's a month.

No you don't have to leave GitHub now. GitHub isn't forcing existing customers onto the new pricing, and it says in the post that if that changes at least 12 months notice will be given.

<comment><USER23> What announcement are you reading? It states very clearly that this is the new pricing model, period.

Yes, existing customers have a 12-month grace period before they're impacted by a price change... but that clock just started ticking. There isn't an indefinite opt-out for this model change.

<comment><USER22> I'm looking at this one [0]. Specifically this item in the FAQ:

> Will GitHub force me to move to per-user pricing after 12 months?

> No. At this time we are not enforcing a timeline to move and if in the > future we do decide to set a timeline we are committing to giving you at > least 12 months.

[0] [https://github.com/blog/2164-introducing-unlimited- private-r...](https://github.com/blog/2164-introducing-unlimited-private- repositories)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> That's cool but seeing as Bitbucket has unlimited private repos for everyone, I'll be sticking with Bitbucket for private trash and Github for public trash.

<comment><USER25> Same here. That's the cool thing about Git. Everyone uses the same "protocol" so you can simply move your stuff around.

<comment><USER26> But does bitbucket/etc have emoticons in commit messages?

<comment><USER27> This is why github is going the way of alta-vista. They should be focusing their energy elsewhere.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> What's with all the negativity? This is really good pricing - all individuals now pay much less (a flat rate of $7), all small shops pay almost the same thing ($30 to $90 for 3 to 10 people). Both groups no longer need to think twice about creating repos, which has always been a huge pain that I've seen. I've even thought twice about microservices because the repo cost would be a pain.

This will affect enterprises - but then they're either already on Github Enterprise or are used to per user pricing anyway. Google Apps, Slack etc all have (quantitavely similar) per user pricing. Google doesn't charge you based on the number of emails you send, nor does Slack charge based on the number of private rooms there are - that would be dumb.

The band of companies between small shops and enterprises are likely to be affected, but then this is really employee lunch money.

<comment><USER29> > This will affect enterprises - but then they're either already on Github > Enterprise or are used to per user pricing anyway

my organization currently contains 15 github users. 2 of which are used by error reporting tools to open bugs (Sentry, Crashlytics), one of which is used by Jenkins, 3 of which are outside contractor for which github now will get the money multiple times as companies move to the same billing method.

We had 9 repos on github (and about 20 smaller ones with less collaboration on a self-hoste gitolite installation), so we paid $300 per year.

Now I have unlimited repos of which I still only use 9, but now I pay $1300 per year, whereby 3 of these accounts I'm paying for aren't actually real people and another 3 of these accounts I'm paying for even though multiple other companies are also paying for them.

Aside of the nearly 5x increase in price, I think it's also unfair having to pay for practically unused bug-reporting-only accounts and having to pay for accounts that are already paid for by a multitude of other companies.

I don't think this is good pricing for me.

Also as this isn't just a moderate increase, but a whopping 5x increase, I also strongly consider moving back away to a self-hosted solution because increasing the price by 5x is breaking the trust put into github as a third- party provider.

Increasing the price a bit is fine. But 5x is excessive.

<comment><USER30> It sounds like it would be a big help if github offered unlimited read- only/bot accounts. Not sure how technically feasible is that but it doesn't sound impossible.

<comment><USER31> Or as someone mentioned above, if they went the Slack route of not charging for users who don't push/pull code in a 30/60 day period. That way you could still have collaborator users (issues, PRs, etc) and only pay for the users who actually code.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER32> This is, of course, a positive way to spin the fact that they're raising prices significantly for many organizations.

I'm glad there's at least a year that we can keep using the old plans.

<comment><USER33> s/many/most

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This has almost quadrupled our monthly cost ($850 vs $2914). We have ~300 users which will have to be reduced massively to save costs - perhaps with non-engineers sharing accounts or having no access at all. I'm not sure if charging per user is really in the spirit of open collaboration that GitHub champions.

I slo wonder if charging per user rather than per repo will also discourage the creation of open-source repos from orgs? There's no longer a (reduced) cost benefit after all, even if that was a minor influence compared with the other benefits of open-sourcing your code.

<comment><USER35> You have 300 employees and an extra $6/mo/em is going to break you? How much do you spend on toilet paper? :)

<comment><USER36> Doesn't say they are employees.

<comment><USER35> So it's an open source project?

I guess it can be a NFP that has closed-source repos. But why?

<comment><USER37> Doesn't have to be OS. It could be a commercial product that grants access to the source.

<comment><USER35> It's possible, but that's a weird requirement (weird you'd want all your clients on the same repo, anyway) and you'd be able to circumvent this and come out pretty swell on the other side if that money is really worth it to you.

<comment><USER37> Why would they not use the same repo? It can easily be a standard product - look at the example further downthread of the unreal engine: All clients get access to the code. 2 private repos and 90657 users.

That's an extreme example, but we also have a single repo that a lot of collaborators get access to.

<comment><USER35> That's a good point. It still seems like an odd use-case!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> With this change, BitBucket pricing [0] gets to appear pretty attractive.

(If you were an organization with few private repositories and large number of users, Github was earlier more affordable.)

[0] [https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing?tab=cloud- pricing](https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing?tab=cloud-pricing)

<comment><USER38> It was already pretty attractive: Personal accounts get free unlimited repos (so inf% cheaper than github), and for organizations with few numbers of users but a huge number of repositories, github's largest plan was too small. :)

<comment><USER39> > Personal accounts get free unlimited repos

And teams of up to 5 people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> Nothing beats [https://bitbucket.org/](https://bitbucket.org/) when it comes to free, unlimited, private repositories. It has seen the first hosted repositories of far more startups than github ever will. Which is special achievement in itself.

<comment><USER41> You should check out gitlab.com

<comment><USER42> I have, I'll continue to use bitbucket.

<comment><USER43> Any reason why? Just wondering.

<comment><USER44> GitLab's UI is pretty terrible, even compared to the not-so-great-either BitBucket UI.

GitLab's UI/UX is regressive to the point that when you visit a repo, you have to click another link just to see the damn sourcecode. It's as though they ignored every advance in source-code UX post-Sourceforge.

The stacked global and per-repo sidebars are confusing in a way that baffled me for several minutes, as well. They need a serious rethink of their UI/UX.

<comment><USER45> IDK, you have the option of whether to show files vs readme on landing but I actually actually prefer landing on readme first as it gives me an idea of what it is I'm looking at before deciding to dig into the code or not.

The main issue with GitLab right now IMO is that it's so fucking slow at times -- ike seconds per page slow...

<comment><USER46> Sorry that GitLab.com is slow. We're working on it in the appropriately numbered issue [https://gitlab.com/gitlab- com/operations/issues/42](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42)

BTW on-premises GitLab installations should be fast already

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER47> Have been using Github for a community radio station, have been encouraging all staffers to use github accounts to file issues against our private repos, etc. The friendly policies for many collaborators have made this attractive, even though most users have rarely interacted with the repos, if at all.

Now each user for the private repo has a significant cost (pretty significant for a non-profit community radio station); looks like we'll have to rethink this whole Github thing.

<comment><USER48> Certainly appreciate your question around pricing for non-profits here - <USER2> you applied for non-profit status through GitHub?

We do have discounts to support eligible non-profit organizations, and you can request the discount at [https://github.com/nonprofit](https://github.com/nonprofit). Feel free to reach out to Support ([https://github.com/c](https://github.com/c)) if you have any further questions around this!

<comment><USER49> Out of interest, why do you require charities to have no religious affiliation at all? Perhaps there's some US tax or legal aspect to it?

At at first glance from overseas, it seems oddly churlish and monoculturalist (dare I say "fearful of the prayerful") to disallow community groups and charities where actually yes their beliefs did prompt them to step out in service, and they are not ashamed of that.

I can't imagine it's a big part of your revenue base, and I wonder if there's more people like me who casually read it and quietly think "ooh, that's a bit inward-looking and snarky -- and goodness they put it on the page twice to make sure" than groups who are actually affected by it.

Suddenly those cheery octocats under "We love people who are changing the world" seem just that bit more limited and exclusionary. If I was in a satirical and provocative mood, I might ask, are they holding hands in togetherness, or to keep the undesirables out?

<comment><USER50> Excluding religious groups from special nonprofit deals is pretty normal in the US. For example, my employer does donation matching for non-religious nonprofits. You're reading a lot more into it than you probably should.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER51> I see absolutely no reason why one would pay GitHub for private repositories when there is Bitbucket, or much better alternative to GitHub altogether - GitLab.

<comment><USER52> Yeah, this makes internally hosted GitLab VERY attractive for us now. Even the Enterprise edition is going to be significantly cheaper than GitHub.

<comment><USER46> Glad to hear you're considering GitLab, our on-premises pricing can be found on [https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/](https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> It seems most users here don't have gitlab.com in their radar and only mentioning Bitbucket as competitor. I've recently switched all my private personal repos to gitlab.com which also allows unlimited private repositories because gitlab.com seems to have better UI and more features than Bitbucket (when not buying any additional Atlassian Jira etc. products).

<comment><USER27> Same here I love gitlab and especially their UI. I've seen some gitlab devs on here before too and they were really friendly. Only draw back is that the sites kind of slow for me, but so was github.

</comment></comment><comment><USER53> This is absolutely fucking atrocious news for any company who wants to run an agile operation.

I always framed the "Github vs Bitbucket" as an "agile vs enterprise" mentality -- BitBucket made you think hard about adding new people, and air on the side of limiting access -- ie. conceal by default. That's perfect for enterprise, but the worst fucking incentive ever for an org that wants to make as many projects as possible accessible to all company members. GitHub (in times past), removed this cognitive burden of thinking "does this person /really/ need access....?" \-- ie. transparent by default.

But now they've fucked up.

I was always in favour of avoiding self-hosting when there was a great hosted service like GitHub available. But I would now never advise any company that I cared about to use GitHub. It will contort and twist the openness you wish to imbue in your growing company

</comment><comment><USER54> This is an awful pricing model.

⇒ One-size-fits-all never fits all. Getting rid of tiers is naïve and misguided. Even if just for anchoring and the illusion of choice in face of terrible choices, tiers are a necessity. Sales will suffer, customer satisfaction will suffer.

⇒ I don't care if existing private customers pay the same or less. The price points should have been retained, and customers let to switch to a lower tier if they wished. Capturing consumer surplus leads to increased revenue. Github needs that money; the more money they throw away foolishly, the closer they are to bankruptcy.

⇒ "Starting today"?! At least current developer plans have been grandfathered in, with a 12-month notice period. Still, if an org has been in the process of planning a move to Github, they will have to re-evaluate.

Github has been such a great platform. A major stumble like this, I'm worried they may not be with us for much longer.

</comment><comment><USER55> Does anyone know if this will effect student plans as well? So far it included a free micro plan with the usual 5 private repos. Would be pretty awesome, I just had to host a repo somewhere else a few days ago because I ran out of private repos.

Other than that it sounds like a great improvement, it'll make it a lot more likely that I'll pay for GitHub when I'm not a student anymore.

/edit: [https://github.com/pricing](https://github.com/pricing) makes it sound like this is for free student plans as well

<comment><USER17> Good question! Students get free private repositories for 2 years. You can request the student discount at [https://education.github.com/](https://education.github.com/)

<comment><USER55> Awesome, thanks for the confirmation :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> It would be interesting to know how many users and repositories a typical organization has on Github.

To me, it looks like they're just "optimizing" their pricing, as I would guess that most large organizations using Github have significantly more users than repositories, especially with the recent trend towards "mono-repositories".

That said, SaaS pricing is really hard to get right from the beginning. I run a code analysis company ([https://www.quantifiedcode.com](https://www.quantifiedcode.com)) and we thought a lot about which kind of pricing would be the best for us and our users (we decided to use per-repo pricing). In the end, your pricing needs to support your business model, so it's normal to change it especially if you have a lot of data on how your users use your product.

I wonder though if this will drive organizations to other solutions like Gitlab or Bitbucket, as those are significantly cheaper and pretty easy to set up these days (and you get the extra benefit of a self-hosted solution that can be hosted in your own, secure infrastructure)

</comment><comment><USER57> I find it quite hard to comprehend why people use Github for private repositories. There are many free alternatives. BitBucket seems to be the famous one, but Gitlab has grown into an amazing product with 3 different offerings; On premise community edition, on premise enterprise and hosted (like Github).

We have used the on premise community edition for about 3 years now. I first installed it when you had to run about a billion commands manually and it was great even then. Now you can install it with an apt-get and a few lines.

Lets not forget about the obvious negatives of Github (ignoring pricing).

1) Its hosted which means it can go down 2) It is closed source 3) Feature based is quite small (compared to Gitlab)

Gitlab is a regular release cycle, once a month which always comes with new features.

I personally think it is a no brainer.

<comment><USER58> If every organization went to free alternatives, not only would those free alternatives need a source of revenue to support the new business, I think you'd find they too will change their pricing structure to better fit the people that use their product.

One thing I also have to mention is a majority of for profit organizations have no problem paying for services they use. HN is a special snowflake on the internet, it's not a reliable source of market research by any means.

I can guarantee you none of the competitors are in it to provide a charity. They all want and NEED to make money somehow, I think you'll be surprised how long free solutions tend to last.

<comment><USER59> On Gitlab.com's homepage[0] there is a giant product listing showing you exactly what you are saying they need to have: A source of revenue (GitLab Enterprise Edition).

[0]: [https://about.gitlab.com/](https://about.gitlab.com/)

<comment><USER58> I understand their Enterprise offering offsets the costs of hosting the open source version for you. But should another product be the dependency of determining if the open source version is free? What if the Enterprise offering stops making money? Wouldn't you rather pay for the service you use so it supports future development? It's like Apple depending on product A to give away B for free, that doesn't seem like it'd scale a whole lot. Product B will just reach into the resources needed to build and manage product A.

Just my 2c anyways, happy to hear feedback on why I'm wrong :)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER60> Now I have to pay for external collaborators? Are you kidding me? We are a small team of 5, but making softwares for other, I'll have to move away from github with the new pricing, we have nearly ten people per repository that might just be exec who never accessed the repo but must have access to it.

<comment><USER19> git is distributed. You can give access to a mirror of your git repo for execs that don't access the repo or contribute to it. They don't need to be github users, they just need git access to an url. If github is still convenient for you, there is a solution to avoid paying for this users. It only really makes sense to have developers added as github users (of course, it used to be convenient to just ask them to be github users, but it never really made sense)

<comment><USER60> I know git is distributed, that's not the point. Github as a platform is convenient and understood even by non technical people. They can browse files, even edit on the web.

<comment><USER19> I hope they create a stakeholder account for that. But it is wrong to put all your eggs in one basket. Github is nice to show to non technical people but it is definitely an over kill.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> The linked page is telling us that eventually, only the new plans will be available. For my case (15 users in the organization, using the bronze plan with a lot of not-so-important repos on our own server), this will be a price increase from $300/y to $1380/y - nearly 5x more expensive.

I really hope the old plans stay around as long as possible.

Also, consider external collaborators that are part of multiple organizations: Github will now receive the $9/month per external collaborator and organization they are in. That's one hell of a deal for github.

<comment><USER61> I'll assume that none of your 15 users are software developers and that none of your users live in a first world country. I'll assume you pay a user $15,000 USD per year in salary. $225,000 for all 15 total. Cost of Github: $1,380. New operating costs: $226,380. I see that they have gone up by %0.6. Crushing.

<comment><USER29> Some of these users are used for various error-reporting tools to report issues as. I'm not paying these any salary, nor are they actual, you know, people.

Some of these users also aren't developers but just need access to the bug tracker. Some of them are outside contractors for whom multiple companies are now paying the github tax.

But sure. $1.3K isn't much, but it's 5x more than what we had to pay previously and it's being sold as an _improvement_.

It also means that I have to be much more mindful what other bot-accounts I'm going to add to the organisation. Plus now that github has increased the prices by 5x, who's to say they don't do it again at a late time?

I don't have a problem with moderate price increases. But 5x is too much.

<comment><USER61> $1,380 is so small an amount that when I worked at BigCorp I could expense that and more each month without approval. No one cares about a thousand bucks.

<comment><USER37> That amount may be change for $BigCorp, but I do care about 1380 USD. If you have them and want to get rid of them, care to send them to me? I'll use them for a good purpose.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> Pretty angry that Github have made this change with no mechanism for adding machine users without paying a per month charge. It seems like a key feature, which is currently horribly painful to manage and now expensive.

How does everyone else create credentials that CI can use to checkout code?

<comment><USER10> Both Travis and Circle automatically install a deploy key into the project. It doesn't require additional machine users.

<comment><USER62> That's fine if you have a single repo, but CI normally needs to access lots of different repos. GitHub's documentation describes why you need machine users for anything but the most trivial deployment.

[https://developer.github.com/guides/managing-deploy- keys/](https://developer.github.com/guides/managing-deploy-keys/)

It's also what GitHub does internally.

<comment><USER63> If I understand that page correctly, the only real difference is that Github arbitrarily prevents you from using the same deploy key for multiple repositories. If they lifted that restriction, this problem would go away.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> If you happen to be a group that will be affected negatively by this move because you have a need for read-only users...

Gogs has mirror functionality where you could self-host access for those users in a fairly painless way. Screenshot of import screen: [http://i.imgur.com/J4vWCIB.png](http://i.imgur.com/J4vWCIB.png)

More on gogs here: [https://github.com/gogits/gogs](https://github.com/gogits/gogs)

(no association with gogs, just thought it might be helpful)

</comment><comment><USER65> The number of very small teams or individuals this encourages to start using github probably allows every organization who can't afford this to leave and github to still increase the money they're making. It seems like a good move based on my imagined profile of their user base. 1 million teens and young 20-somethings just decided they'll give 7$ a month to github.

For bigger organizations, this is practically no money compared to other software they're using. So they'll just take the hit.

Sounds like the only customers being lost were those using github for no- commit users. Is that really a huge segment? If so they just need a special account status to fix this.

I think the question is why this took so long.

<comment><USER66> > Sounds like the only customers being lost were those using github for no- > commit users. Is that really a huge segment? If so they just need a special > account status to fix this.

I would think this is a large segment, or at least Github would like it to be. Any software company that sells its software directly, and so has a sales team, a support team, marketing and so on will need to make all of those people users in Github if they're going to raise GH issues, see the code, prototype something for a client, help with branding, or anything else. If you're using Github the way they want you to (issue tracking, wiki, all of the things Github adds over vanilla Git that are "sticky"/hard to transfer to a competing service) you don't want to restrict access to just your developers. You want your whole company to be using it.

In any software company I've worked for, those non-developer users number 3-4x the actual number of developers. And I've never worked for a company that would consider restricting which users could raise issues with the product.

I agree that having a non-commit account status that didn't count toward the per-user pricing would fix this, for that particular (I think common?) case.

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> TL;DR - GitHub is switching to Bitbucket's pricing model, but with a monthly charge of $9/user rather than $1/user.

Seems bizarre to me. The "enterprise" market they're chasing are largely Atlassian customers already, and Bitbucket has a competitive edge there with its JIRA integration. GitHub's distinguishing characteristic was a different pricing model, that for some organizations makes more sense than Atlassian's does.

If they start competing apples-to-apples, but at 9x the cost, why would any enterprise use GitHub unless they have a hipster CIO/CTO who just thinks it's a "cooler" brand?

<comment><USER67> Github is betting on stickiness aka lock-in. That might prove to be bad bet. Short term everybody who saves (small teams) will switch to new price model. No sane org will opt to multitude of price increase voluntarily. So github looses revenue short term. If github forces the switch on everybody many big orgs will jump the ship one way or another. So github looses again.

</comment></comment><comment><USER68> Hopefully this opens the eyes of at least _some_ people into realising that GitHib !== git, and GitHub !== dvcs (similarly, git !== dvcs). There are several alternatives out there, almost all of which provide _more_ options at _lower_ cost than GitHub.

I know, I know "everyone is familiar with github". If your developers can't function without GitHub specifically, you have a bigger problem than the new GitHub pricing.

</comment><comment><USER69> Hmm, I still will use Gitlab instead of Github. Unlimited public and private repos for free is nice.

<comment><USER70> Does anyone know how Gitlab plan to sustain that?

<comment><USER71> a) They are vc funded

b) They give things free to drive up adoption. For example, I don't think it will be free anymore if it was as popular as GitHub. Since that would not be sustainable.

IMO, it's a poor decision by gitlab to give things out for free. Instead of innovating on features, they try to keep it cheap.

<comment><USER46> Having a free GitLab.com doesn't mean we don't innovate on features. See [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/blob/master/CHANGELO...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab- ce/blob/master/CHANGELOG) and [https://about.gitlab.com/2016/03/29/gitlab- runner-1-1-releas...](https://about.gitlab.com/2016/03/29/gitlab- runner-1-1-released/) for features we recently added.

<comment><USER71> Sorry, I didn't imply GitLab was not innovating. (Apologies for wording my comment poorly). In fact, quite the opposite. I want to see GitLab build a product that people willingly pay for.

(I say the same for all companies. Charge money for your product. If people see value, they will pay.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER72> I'm glad. Occasionally I would delete abandoned projects to make space and now they can live forever to remind me of my failure!

</comment><comment><USER73> Its unfortunate that this doesn't promote trying to get business users to look at the code. In our organization 3 or 4 users are read only and really just go in at times to check specific errors, or logic for certain SQL queries, they don't really contribute. We will now have to pay $9 per month for these type of "read only" users.

<comment><USER74> Couldn't you just use the same account for all of them, with a shared password?

<comment><USER37> how would you restrict to repositories then? Given a large enough set of external stakeholders using a single account is not feasible.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> This change worked out well for us. Gone from paying $200/month to just $25/month for our 5 person organisation.

<comment><USER76> You could've had it for free this whole time. (And still can!)

[https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing](https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing)

<comment><USER58> Free != better

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER77> Github is... adopting the old Visual Studio logo?

[http://static.flickr.com/2768/4307936121_5b5e51a790.jpg](http://static.flickr.com/2768/4307936121_5b5e51a790.jpg)

</comment><comment><USER78> As a solo developer who had currently paid up for monthly access annually, I feel obligated to feed back that this is pretty good news for me. Go github.

The 5 private repositories was a bit grating and making me considering a move elsewhere. I was going to have to consider changing how I stored/structured my projects in order to stay under what seemed to me to a relatively arbitrary limit, which interfered with some of my automated tools and how I'd set them up to assume a separate repository for each project.

I realise there are a number of bigger organisations for whom this realistically means a hike in prices, and I'm winning relative to their losing, but as someone who wants to keep advantages to the little guys (that's the genuinely little guys, not a bunch of 50-100 guys bankrolled by several SV millionaires/billionaires)...well, I feel its my duty to weigh in with positive feedback against what is probably going to be some negativity from the bigger guys...

<comment><USER79> Five private repos were more then enough for me.

When I ran out of them, I noticed that there's at least one that either does not need to be private anymore or just does not have to be on GitHub since I ditched that idea. It was a nice way for me to keep my GitHub profile nice and tidy.

</comment></comment><comment><USER80> I'm sure a lot of people will be moving from Bitbucket to this, Bitbucket's plans were great for hundreds of repos, but Github's ecosystem is definitely preferable.

<comment><USER81> Why? BitBucket is superior in every respect, plus importantly they give free private repos for every user. No price gouging like we're seeing with GitHub.

<comment><USER82> Oh, come on. It's OK to dislike this change, but "BitBucket is superior in every respect" and "price gouging" are far from objectively obvious.

<comment><USER81> Well look at the price changes people posting here are facing, ones from $2k a year to $8k, that's gouging!

<comment><USER83> These people are outliers --- the average developer with a handful of repos is probably going to save money with the new pricing.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER84> Very cleverly worded to sound like a price reduction when it's actually a price increase.

</comment><comment><USER81> 'unlimited private repos' if you pay. BitBucket gives you them free and always has!

<comment><USER85> bitbucket used to offer 5 private repos for free

</comment></comment><comment><USER86> So what makes them think that they can get away with it? There's already decent competitors - GitLab, BitBucket, Azure or you can just host your own git repos - gitlab will even give you a nice Web UI for it. Why do they think that people with stick with github, if we're talking $thousands/year then surely migrating to another git repo provider is worth it?

<comment><USER87> Vendor lockin. Because there is a lot more involved that accessing files in a .git directory. All those CI systems and workflow plugins and whatnots such as travis-ci work with github, not git. And all the inflight issues and pull requests etc. Migrating or giving up the features you use has a cost (not just in dollars), and if github has done their sums right most customers will realize they are better off staying where they are.

<comment><USER85> Travis CI is pretty minor player (google search 10M > hits), and I would say 3rd party service integration is exactly vendor lockin.

Imho this makes sense, because users who cared about pricing already moved on to cheaper alternatives and/or not used github to begin with. I agree, mass migration or phasing out github is unlikely because of the associated costs, however with all the other great services around new users might think twice where to sign up.

<comment><USER46> Just wanted to mention that on GitLab.com we offer unlimited GitLab CI to run your tests [https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab- ci/](https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci/) [https://about.gitlab.com/2016/04/19/gitlab-partners-with- dig...](https://about.gitlab.com/2016/04/19/gitlab-partners-with-digitalocean- to-make-continuous-integration-faster-safer-and-more-affordable/)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER88> Is there a way to get billed annually for a personal account? Makes budgeting easier and also protects me against AUD/USD changes.

<comment><USER89> Yes, you can pay for a year upfront for a personal account.

</comment></comment><comment><USER90> For small private projects, gitlab.com has had unlimited private repos for $0/month for a while now.

<comment><USER46> And on top of that we don't charge for collaborators.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> All I ask is that Github implement Slack's Fair Billing Policy. Managing who at the organization can access a service is a silly task.

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this follows that model. They're open to feedback: [https://github.com/contact](https://github.com/contact)

<comment><USER92> I wasn't aware Slack had that model. It's really interesting.

Here's the link for anyone else who wants to read: [https://get.slack.help/hc/en- us/articles/218915077-Understan...](https://get.slack.help/hc/en- us/articles/218915077-Understanding-our-Fair-Billing-policy)

</comment></comment><comment><USER93> I am strongly considering moving to gitlab.

<comment><USER94> I have some private repos on gitlab and it is sloooooooow to push and pull. It routinely takes 10 seconds to push or pull.

That itself makes deploys seem like a chore. And it's enough to make me come back to github for a mere $7.

<comment><USER46> I'm sorry GitLab.com is slow, we're working to make it faster in [https://gitlab.com/gitlab- com/operations/issues/42](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42)

<comment><USER94> No worries – It's just not a good fit right now but can change back once the performance improves. My loyalty to github is 95% about the performance, not really anything else.

I've actually been following that thread and it's been interesting to read and watch the progress.

<comment><USER46> OK, thanks!

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER95> Wow. Companies definitely suffer. For me ( freelancing dev, working primarily with startups ) it's a huge win.

GitHub vs BitBucket was always about :

1) 3rd party integrations ( CircleCI - e.g. ) - sadly bitbucket is behind that.

2) Issue management. Bitbucket's default behavior doesn't support labels or any other way of managing the issues structure.

Now, honestly CircleCI + GitHub for 7$ is just extremely cheap. ( talking solo devs / small teams ).

</comment><comment><USER96> This is way too expensive! Self-hosted GitLab is cheaper and has better uptime!

Not to mention, they should have made you pay only for users with commit rights!

<comment><USER97> Only if you assign no value to your own time, and assume you can do a better job with availability and durability than a dedicated Operations team and a multi-million dollar budget.

<comment><USER67> Like Salesforce has? [http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/11/marc_benioff_publica...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/11/marc_benioff_publically_apologizes_over_salesforce_na14_instance_outage/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER98> For comparison, quoting from the AWS CodeCommit pricing page...

AWS CodeCommit costs:

$1 per active user per month For every active user, your account receives for that month:

10 GB-month of storage

2,000 Git requests

And the 1 year free tier is:

5 active users 50 GB-month of storage 10,000 Git requests

<comment><USER88> It took a bit of searching to find out what a "Git Request" entailed: "A Git request includes any push or pull that transmits repository objects. The request does not count towards your Git request allowance if there is no object transfer due to local and remote branches being up-to-date."

Anyone who's using CodeCommit - have you hit the limits? How much did you go over by?

<comment><USER74> I don't use CodeCommit, but I doubt that an average developer would be hitting the 2000-request boundary (that's 100 requests per day assuming a 5-day work week). Technical users like a CI might be more problematic.

<comment><USER99> I think it's 2000 requests overall, and if you add in a few buildplans for each of a few repos, you'll easily hit it. Still, it's not pricey if you do.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER100> The main image on that page looks remarkably similar to the 2010 Visual Studio logo:

[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/samer/archive/2010/01/27/quick- share...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/samer/archive/2010/01/27/quick-share-the- history-of-visual-studio.aspx)

<comment><USER101> Also [https://step-3.app.box.com/s/k77k28sy0bdpo2drg2sqrbjhht25k9a...](https://step-3.app.box.com/s/k77k28sy0bdpo2drg2sqrbjhht25k9af/1/7858651297/64780303461/1)

</comment></comment><comment><USER102> Link to plans: [https://github.com/pricing](https://github.com/pricing)

</comment><comment><USER103> How many startups have a non-core-dev-advisor who they will now pay $9/month to get occasional comments from? Or not?

One downside of this change is if you have a private Github org, you are now incentivized not to add advisors/randoms to your org/repos. I wonder how much scurrying Github sees to remove errant users from orgs.

</comment><comment><USER104> Do outside collaborators count as paid users?

<comment><USER89> Hi alanfranzoni,

Outside collaborators on public repositories of an organization are free. Only the ones invited to collaborate on private repositories are counted as paid users.

Hope this helps!

<comment><USER105> So to clarify: if I'm an organisation with 100 private repositories, and I add an outside collaborator with access to just one of them, I have to pay $9 a month for them?

I was quite excited about this change (we're an agency with a large number of repos and a relatively small number of users) until I read your comment.

<comment><USER10> Yes, they're actively screwing agencies and software houses.

When they introduced the new organization features, I smelled they were heading here, but I honestly thought that the "outside collaborator" concept was meant exactly for not billing this kind of rare users. Guess what, greediness has no limit.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER106> GitLab gets 1 point without doing anything, oddly.

</comment><comment><USER107> This change actually saved me a lot of money per month. We use micro-service architecture and furthermore do consulting work so we had a Platinum level plan with only 7 people with access. This greatly improved our billing situation.

Although I can very much see how it could go the other way.

</comment><comment><USER108> Thank you - this is very exciting. Bitbucket uses a per-user pricing and it has been extremely useful for us. People forget how useful it has been to not worry about the number of scratch repositories we can create as we experiment. Our main repo is a single monolithic repo. But do you not ask your consultants/outside resources to work on a company repo ? how do you price that I wonder.

I am not sure why people would like stuff to be priced per repo. It is a fairly unintuitive model for me and is a huge problem when you need to go an explain to the finance team that you need to spend more because you "created more repos"... say wut? Spending per user is a very clean way of pricing.

</comment><comment><USER109> While unlimited private repositories sounds good, this change means that our GitHub costs are now 2.3x higher.

If this is going to be enforced, we'll need to decide between cutting away users from the org or moving to a different platform.

</comment><comment><USER110> There is an element of "double dipping" here that I see as a problem.

I already pay $7 a month for my own personal Github account, and for me personally it's nice to have no limit.

But if we switch to the new model at work then not only am I paying my $7, but my company will have to pay an additional $9p/m for me to have access to the repos I use daily for work.

Even if they removed me from the organisation and added me as a collaborator this will be an additional cost.

They can spin it how they like but I suspect for a large number of organisations they are going to see quite an increase in cost from using Github.

<comment><USER61> Does your ISP double dip if they charge your employer for business internet access and you for home internet access?

</comment></comment><comment><USER111> But why should I use Github over Gitlab? I don't care about popularity, Gitlab already offers the minimal set of features I care about, and has demonstrated a neutral business model.

Github had leaks coming out about how 'white men' aren't suitable to solve GH's business problems, why should I want to associate with an organization that discriminates people based on the color of their skin rather than by the contents of their code?

I'm glad that they are offering this, I think their customers will put this offering to good use, but it doesn't convince me.

</comment><comment><USER112> Finally! While as others point out this can work out more expensive the improvement is is that it scales as my company scales and doesn't act as a disincentive to developers spinning up new repos.

</comment><comment><USER113> The pricing is clearly designed to make more revenue from businesses with a lot of users, which makes sense for Github but not for big teams in /mid sized shops who will be paying a lot more.

<comment><USER19> It will attract more small companies and freelance single developers as well.

</comment></comment><comment><USER114> Misleading headline alert; should say "for paid accounts" I got _way_ too excited there :-(

</comment><comment><USER115> Links not up yet, but you can already switch your plan [https://github.com/organizations/your_org/settings/billing/p...](https://github.com/organizations/your_org/settings/billing/per_seat) for unlimited private repositories at $25/month for your first 5 users. $9/month for each additional user. (Edit: Up now! Personal plans get upgraded to unlimited too!)

</comment><comment><USER116> This change was beneficial to me.

Before upgrading, a grand total of 4 users had access to our private repositories, of which we were only using 7 out of 10. I was nervous about running out of repositories moreso than the cost of adding people.

(If we grow our team, it's because we have a lot of client work that's outside my immediate strong suits and we had to hire. If we do that twice, I'll gladly pay the extra $9/month.)

</comment><comment><USER117> Well, I will say that this is a good thing, because when we had paid for ~20 repos at a last company, and eng made a new repo - number 21, that was then made public by default as we were out of private repos. FUCK THAT.

He made a mistake and checked in (yes this is on him) an AWS access and secret.

Within hours we have 1,500 machines launched in every region doing bitcoin mining....

Making a repo "public by default" is pure BS.

</comment><comment><USER118> Still, not even a couple of free private repositories?

</comment><comment><USER119> This will help organizations that keep huge monolithic repos on GH - one of my customers does that. They have one repo that should be dozens of smaller repos.

I use GH for my open source projects and code examples for my books and I use Bitbucket (which is also a great service) for my private repos. I have always felt somewhat guilty with this setup, working both companies for free services.

</comment><comment><USER120> I think the new pricing structure makes a lot of sense, however is awkwardly limiting in some respects that GitHub might not have considered.

We have essentially 2 classes of GitHub user on our organisation - developers, and non-developers. While our devs use GitHub all the time (and therefore are worth the $25 a month for the development team), our other users might edit a specific few config files, or jobs pages (for example) once a month - <USER3> $9/month each seems quite overpriced.

We want to be an open company, one that doesn't keep secrets from employees, one that doesn't create unnecessary barriers to productivity, or have unnecessary process, so giving GitHub access to everyone in the company who wants it is important to us - this stops us from reasonably doing this. As a result, we likely won't be switching to the new pricing structure for as long as possible, which is a shame, because it would be nice to not have to think about private repos.

</comment><comment><USER121> If someone is unsure about this math, our (we're [https://github.com/artsy](https://github.com/artsy)) bill goes up from 450$ to 1051$ per month.

But it's not about just the money, it's about incentives.

\- We have large amounts of open-source code, so we were encouraged to open- source more to avoid jumping to the next tier.

\- We're going to probably close access to a bunch of code to a big chunk of our organization. We have hundreds of humans. Whereas before we would give them permissions to view as a default and hope they look at our code one day or at least know that they can, or sometimes would get a link to look at a change from a discussion, we'll now have to have to see whether it's worth 9x100s of people every month.

I am not complaining, Github provides excellent service. Seems worth it at 5K$ a year and probably 10K$ a year, too. I wish it didn't just double though and was more gradual.

</comment><comment><USER122> This is awesome! I'm currently paying 50 USD per month for more repos on my private account. Definitely the right way to go.

</comment><comment><USER123> I just had a discussion with my buddy about repositories yesterday. He wanted access to some code I had for uploading CSV files to iCloud and it's hosted on a private repo on GitHub. He was saying "I still use BitBucket's private repos"; My response was that the GitHub community is a lot stronger. Outside of community, it was hard for me to convince him that GitHub is worth it.

I've been using GitHub for a few years now to host private and public repos and paid private repos was always a point of contention. Now that they are unlimited, I can say that GitHub is definitely going to be the home to all of my future projects. I really feel like GitHub has been kicking it up a notch in 2016. Awesome work team and thanks!

</comment><comment><USER124> All those private repos and no way to organize them :( Where are the namespaces/projects github?

</comment><comment><USER125> I think this is a clear win for individual users that have been paying for GitHub. For organizations, I'm curious how many organizations they have just bumped above the $300-500/month mark. A lot of companies allow managers discretionary spending limits that they can spend without requesting approval, and if makes me wonder if they just made a bunch of managers need to start asking for approval for their GitHub bill. Another comment mentioned that having it filter up that the cost of a service just increase several times, will likely result in people being told to investigate alternatives. If that's the case, there are a fair number of alternatives to go to, depending on your specific situation.

</comment><comment><USER126> This is nice. Now I won't have to keep deleting private repos to make room for new ones

</comment><comment><USER127> Is there a definition of "a few collaborators" anywhere? How many people, and is it per repo or per paid account? Really need more information before I decide if GitHub continues to get my $7/month or not.

</comment><comment><USER128> The main drawback of a lot of Cloud based business model I have seen is that nobody think its fine to pay for leechers.

The per user pricing is pretty reasonable but only when you think of seeders (publishers/editors/pushers call them as you like).

For instance I would love to subscribe to a BI cloud suite that really fit my need, but I'm basically the sole query editor and I have potentially 200 private readers + some public OpenData. I simply just can't come to my boss and ask that we subscribe to this service on a 200 users basis while only one users will really have the use of the license...

</comment><comment><USER129> Can two individual priced accounts collaborate on the same private repository?

<comment><USER17> An individual on the Personal plan can add users to their private repositories for free.

</comment></comment><comment><USER130> There is one case we have where the newer per seat pricing doesn't facilitate how we're using github. One of our repositories is "docs" with a bunch of markdown files, pdfs, images, and other documents related to our tech. It's mostly used in a read only way by a bunch of non-developers while engineers contribute heavily to the documentation. Paying $9/month per biz person to be able to view the documentation is too much and will force that use case off to Confluence or some other wiki/documenting tool.

</comment><comment><USER131> We have a large number of people in our organization who have GitHub access who do not code and instead file or manage tickets. $9 a month just to be able to file a ticket is rather steep.

</comment><comment><USER132> It's amazing how cheap people/companies are if they're complaining about these prices.

$9/user/month for one of the best and easy-to-use platforms to store and manage your repos and help your software development, which for most companies is extremely important to their product.

Slack is $8/user/month and yet people have no problem with that pricing. Git is also extremely portable and easy to move and takes minutes to self-host so what's the problem here?

</comment><comment><USER133> This is awesome! I have wanted a different pricing structure for personal accounts for a long time.

And for those who have issues with the organizational changes, did you see?

> I am an existing organization customer and prefer the per-repository plans. > Can I remain on my current plan?

> Yes, you can choose to continue paying based on the number of repositories > you use. You can also upgrade or downgrade in the legacy repository > structure based on the number of repositories you need.

</comment><comment><USER134> Why don't more people use Assembla? We've used it for years and it has so many more features than Github. Tickets, milestones, time tracking, standup, wiki, unlimited repos with protected-branch merge rights, file sharing, discussions...

There is no free plan but the pricing is fair in my opinion: [https://www.assembla.com/plans](https://www.assembla.com/plans)

</comment><comment><USER135> That makes a lot more sense in term of pricing and if that had existed earlier, I'd probably not have bothered hosting my own gitlab repository. I like to have a lot of little repos even keeping some of my private experiments and so the limit of repositories never really made sense to me.

It might make sense however to not count collaborators with read-only access.

Of course, now that I have gitlab, there's very little reason for me to come back.

</comment><comment><USER136> self hosted gitlab, for about 10$/month you get unlimited repos, unlimited users.

</comment><comment><USER137> In the spirit of offering alternatives, we created a quick price calculator to show you whether you'd be better off moving from GitHub to Planio: [https://plan.io/github-alternative/](https://plan.io/github-alternative/)

But don't hate us too much GitHub. We still love you :)

</comment><comment><USER138> I like gitthub, I have my open source stuff with github, but when it comes to private repos, bitbucket just seems better pricing and in someways just a nicer and cleaner interface [https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing](https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing)

</comment><comment><USER138> I like github, I have my open source stuff with github, but when it comes to private repos, bitbucket just seems better pricing and in someways just a nicer and cleaner interface [https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing](https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing)

</comment><comment><USER139> As much as I would love to switch to GitHub for our private repos, it still is way more expensive than BitBucket.

</comment><comment><USER140> I hope this doesn't lead to less open sourced software. Since it will be easier to keep your code private.

</comment><comment><USER141> Looks like with our company the price goes from $25 a month to $133 if we move (or are forced to move) over to the cost-per-user model.

GitLab was already looking good, if we're forced to change well likely move to GitLab. Github's pricing was already overly expensive for what you get, in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER142> Seems like a good move, it's unclear to me what the difference is between Personal & Organization.

</comment><comment><USER143> Comments here are mostly from a single org view, due to the many X increase for that orgs price (large teams only)... but if I work on n_orgs repos, I'm now worth 9-25*n_orgs to github. That is a big shift from a model where I had no direct value to them as a unit.

<comment><USER143> Worth noting that for some (many) companies with large teams, this amounts to a new laptop or two in price change... and while a cost change, it really is noise (to some extent) for the value provided.

</comment></comment><comment><USER144> I know a lot of companies that are too cheap to pay for hosting (or even host in-house), and therefore use bitbucket with its unlimited private repos. It's their gateway drug, and once they get used to that, good luck having them move over to github.

<comment><USER145> Why use the derogaroty 'too cheap'? Maybe they are just not 'too stupid' to pay more than they have to.

<comment><USER144> I guess my critic is that you should always know why you use a service, and not just use it because it's the cheapest solution out there. In particular, is bitbucket(/github/gitlab…) adapted to your needs ? Will it support your growth ? Is it ok to have your source code on someone else's (or another country's) server ? Lots of question to be answered, and a conscious choice to make, without looking at only pricing. I was talking about companies doing the latter, not all bitbucket free users (of which I am one myself).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER146> So I have a normal user account at $7/month. Great, I now have unlimited private repos.

I also had an organization a/c (only 1 user) at $9/month. I switched to the $25/month, so yes, its now costing me more.

I understand math. Why not just give me $5/user? :)

</comment><comment><USER147> Yay, no more using single repo with orphan branches to save on number of repositories :-)

</comment><comment><USER148> I think this is great. I'm part of a small 2-person consultancy (my wife and I) and we've been abusing a user account for our business for sometime on the 'medium' plan since it would give us 20 private repos, although over the last 6 years, we're had to cycle stuff to backups, rotate it around in order to keep older client work in there.

It's been hard to justify upgrading to an organization for awhile, since our work is hit or miss and we both have other jobs form time to time. We aren't much in terms of load on Github, but we'd like to be able to store 40-50 private repos or add more without worrying about our limit. The new organization pricing makes tons of sense for us since it's very close to the old 'medium' plan we were using, instead of being 2.5 times as much, which we never felt we could justify.

</comment><comment><USER149> > Over the next few days, we will automatically move all paid accounts, from > Micro to Large, to the new plan. If you're currently paying for one of those > larger plans, look out for a prorated credit on your account.

Bravo, GitHub.

</comment><comment><USER150> Christmas is early this year.

</comment><comment><USER151> So basically they're going to start using the same model as BitBucket?

</comment><comment><USER152> bitbucket still sounds like a better deal as far as money goes, though github somehow catches all the eyeballs. bitbucket has been providing similar service for less since long time ago.

</comment><comment><USER153> I'm really looking forward to no longer having to figure out which project I have to axe to keep my "small" plan under the 10 repo maximum. That was always annoying.

</comment><comment><USER154> Pretty sure this wont end well for Github. They seem to be making a lot of moves like this recently. It's only a matter of time until a mass migration begins IMO.

</comment><comment><USER155> This is just another reason to move to something like Gitlab or just self-host your Git repos. It takes literally seconds to set up your own Git server, so why not?

</comment><comment><USER156> What's the difference between a GIT server and say a HTTP server? To my understanding, Github are unable to scale GIT, so they have to price accordingly.

<comment><USER62> This is not how pricing works.

<comment><USER156> You would need a lot of margin to not base the price on the production costs. If 200 users cost double as much as 100 users, it's hard to not base the price on number of users.

<comment><USER62> Pricing is a function of what people will pay for it, not what it costs to make. Consider Slack as a fine example.

<comment><USER156> I read an article not long ago that Github had to spin up three physical machines, just to handle one customer. Although it was an extreme example. Compared to slack, who could probably have a million users one a single machine, making it almost zero marginal cost per new user. While a user for Github means buying more hardware and a notable marginal cost.

If you for example are a reseller of commodity goods, you can't have a lower price then the price you buy it for. So you can't have a model of say unlimited goods for a monthly fee. And the price will most likely be based on per good.

<comment><USER157> I think you're referring to the GitHub Engineering blog post [1] about our git storage tier. We [2] store your code on _at least_ 3 servers, which is an improvement in many ways from our previous storage architecture. There are a lot of servers [3] powering things but not the millions it would require to give every customer three dedicated machines. Developing efficient solutions to problems is a requirement (and a fun challenge!) for anything at GitHub's scale.

[1] [http://githubengineering.com/introducing- dgit/](http://githubengineering.com/introducing-dgit/)

[2] I'm a GitHubber. [https://github.com/jssjr](https://github.com/jssjr)

[3] [https://twitter.com/GitHubEng/status/730429227896463360](https://twitter.com/GitHubEng/status/730429227896463360)

<comment><USER156> It was another post about someone using Github to host "packages".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER158> Definitely cool, but I honestly think that if your organisation needs more than a handful of repositories then it's very likely doing something wrong.

</comment><comment><USER159> I really don't understand why Github sets their prices higher while GitLab ( mostly) is gaining more and more traction...

</comment><comment><USER160> So...GitLab looks better and better every day.

</comment><comment><USER161> This is great for private accounts; it encourages better practice of smaller repos.

</comment><comment><USER162> To me this is a good change, I have lots of private repositories and a small team.

</comment><comment><USER163> Sounds like a lot of companies are going to end up with multiple GitHub orgs.

</comment><comment><USER164> For less than these price plans, you can have your own domain and server.

</comment><comment><USER165> Sorry it's too late, I already migrated to bitbucket 6 months ago.

</comment><comment><USER166> I think I'll stick with my own private Gogs instance anyway.

</comment><comment><USER167> bitbucket: still unlimited free private repositories

</comment><comment><USER168> What's the delta from the old model?

</comment><comment><USER169> github, soon to be the next sourceforge

</comment><comment><USER170> This is fantastic news in my opinion.

</comment><comment><USER171> I love the clickbait. It's missing 3 words - "for paid users". Everyone has clicked it to be disappointed. GitLab++.

</comment><comment><USER172> Yay! No more bitbucket for all my private repos. I wonder if this change is because of competition?

<comment><USER173> BitBucket allows unlimited private repos for _free_ ; GitHub's seems to be just for the paid plans?

<comment><USER174> Yup no reason to move from bit bucket yet.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER175> I will stick with GitLab.

</comment><comment><USER176> too expensive

</comment><comment><USER177> I'm a member of a Github organisation with 63 members and 20 private repositories. As far as I can see, this changes our yearly cost from $600 to $6564.

</comment><comment><USER178> Its awesm

</comment><comment><USER179> and bitbucket's sole reason for existing has gone away

</comment><comment><USER180> Everyone who is crying right now would be crying more if Github were to make the price free for private repos because with that, the amount of open source libraries they use would be cut in half.

<comment><USER180> -points but no reasons?

Agreed this will impact some organizations in negative ways such as the non- for-profit orgs. To that Github offers support in this sense here: [https://github.com/nonprofit](https://github.com/nonprofit)

Like others, without specific data, I would assume this will impact the majority of users on Github for the better and that organizations with many contributors needing access to private repos are the minority. In any pricing structure change, there is always going to be a minority that is impacted negatively. I don't think Github would have made this decision without analytics to back it up.

Another fair point is I think this structure is more appealing to companies who prefer to look at cost-per-employee for something that is an everyday tool rather than cost-of-architecture.

</comment></comment><comment><USER181> Honestly when I read the title I thought GH switched their business model and offered _free_ users the ability to start a private repo, but this is not the case.

If it is the case that I have to pay to have privacy on Github, then it imposes a privacy-rich versus privacy-poor dichotomy which I am uncomfortable with. Now I know as far as these things go (GH can be subject to National Security Letters), that GH is not really absolutely private. (Backdoors into people's 'secret' GISTS anyone?).

GH had an opportunity here to change their business model so that free users can avail of private repos, and GH could still manage to bring in revenue. GH primarily makes the bulk of their income from what I call 'stakeholder accounts'. That is; those companies who simply couldn't function correctly if GH didn't exist. It is in these stakeholders that there is a symbiotic relationship of revenue for GH, and value for the stakeholder(s).

There are very little lone private individuals who have that kind of symbiotic relationship, and so at least give these low income users the same equal rights of privacy as behemoth tech organizations. It makes sense.

In terms of how GH gets revenue from these users, there are countless other ways to do this instead of relying on the monolithic device of a premium subscription model. Offer paid licenses for their proprietary GH clients. (A one off payment of $20.00 for the GH Windows client is something I would actually pay money for)...

<comment><USER182> It's 7$/month. You sure can be made uncomfortable easily.

If someone wants a private repo but doesn't value his/her private code to the amount of 7$/month for ALL their private repos, then I guess it shouldn't have been made private in the first place.

FWIW, a Big Mac combo is around the same price. One is junk, the other is where you showcase/store all your professionnal knowledge and experience.</comment></comment>


Set server timezones to UTC (2015) - <AUTHOR> http://yellerapp.com/posts/2015-01-12-the-worst-server-setup-you-can-make.html <comment><USER2> A thread from 2016: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12106478](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12106478)</comment>


ESports: The missed billion-dollar opportunity for publishers and platforms - <AUTHOR> http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2017-01-31-esports-the-missed-billion-dollar-opportunity-for-publishers-and-platforms <comment><USER2> On top of not opening up the ecosystem so that it can expand it's crazy how some companies don't even support eSports. Take for example Nintendo and how they handled EVO last year. They wanted to promote Sm4sh and so they tried to ban streaming of the Melee tournament.</comment>