Introducing unlimited private repositories

https://github.com/blog/2164-introducing-unlimited-private-repositories

by fuzionmonkey • 10 years ago

1576 636 10 years ago

petetnt2• 10 years ago

Links not up yet, but you can already switch your plan https://github.com/organizations/your_org/settings/billing/p... 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!)

konole• 10 years ago

Link to plans: https://github.com/pricing

grawlinson• 10 years ago

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.

dchest• 10 years ago

GitLab too.

nametakenobv• 10 years ago

Visual Studio TS too.

k__2• 10 years ago

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

rplnt2• 10 years ago

But does bitbucket/etc have emoticons in commit messages?

nateguchi• 10 years ago

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.

mistircek• 10 years ago

I'm not sure, Bitbucket's price effectively is $1/user and Github's $9/user. I wouldn't expect organisations to move to Bitbucket either, as change is generally costly in terms of man-hour, but current price structure makes Bitbucket eight-fold cheaper.

Cozumel3• 10 years ago

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.

matthewmacleod• 10 years ago

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.

k__2• 10 years ago

BitBucket is okay, but not superior in any way.

It's cheaper and has private repos for free and that's it.

The UI is clunky and the community is much smaller than Githubs.

I also don't understand why they try to sell it with the Jira integration as if it was a good thing. The only people I heard saying good things about Jira and this marketplace where working on companies that sold stuff there.

vacri5• 10 years ago

It's not really price gouging. GitHub's product is GitHub. Atlassian's product is Jira, which nets them a tidy penny, and BitBucket is their loss-leader value-add that they can use to undercut GitHub.

zcam• 10 years ago

Not really, I personnaly see no point of moving our (dozens of) repos to github at the moment. It would cost us a lot more than $0, for no advantage that justifies paying a premium. I am not sure what you mean by ecosystem, but we don't really miss anything from github. Yes the UI is more polished but who cares when 99% of the interactions with the repos are done with git clients (in various flavors).

rspeer• 10 years ago

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.

0xmohit3• 10 years ago

s/many/most

discodave2• 10 years ago

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

voltagex_3• 10 years ago

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?

majewsky2• 10 years ago

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.

discodave2• 10 years ago

Even if you hit the limit it's $1 per 1000 requests after that... still potentially cheaper than GitHub.

http://aws.amazon.com/codecommit/pricing/

AndrewGaspar• 10 years ago

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

0xmohit3• 10 years ago

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

0x02• 10 years ago

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. :)

lucaspiller• 10 years ago

Personal accounts get free unlimited repos

And teams of up to 5 people.

Ghostium• 10 years ago

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

marcosscriven• 10 years ago

Does anyone know how Gitlab plan to sustain that?

hvidgaard• 10 years ago

For the vast majority of users the repos use almost zero ressources except for some tiny amount of space - limiting the amount you can have is artificial. Many repositories is no different than facebooks mega repository pattern, but that is allowed, so why not give the customers what they want? If they want a "sustainable model" they'd have to set an upper limit on space and reqs/day.

stephenr4• 10 years ago

They basically use the hosted environment to get a better understanding of how their software runs at scale, so they can improve it.

It's all funded by enterprise licenses.

EuAndreh2• 10 years ago

I believe that their profit comes from selling the Enterprise Edition of GitLab and support. gitlab.com and the Community Edition are all free, and I believe they intend to keep it this way.

educar3• 10 years ago

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.

Vespasian• 10 years ago

As others said, Gitlabs business comes mostly from clients who want or have to have their own on premise solution.

sytse20• 10 years ago

We think repository hosting will be like email hosting, for most people it will be free. See https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/#why-gitlab-com-will-be-...

jtchang• 10 years ago

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

wfunction• 10 years ago

BitBucket allows unlimited private repos for free; GitHub's seems to be just for the paid plans?

opless• 10 years ago

Yup no reason to move from bit bucket yet.

jaredsohn• 10 years ago

If you are interpreting this post as suggesting that github private repos are free, you are mistaken. It just means that if you pay for private repos, you don't have to worry about how many of them you have.

t3nary2• 10 years ago

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 makes it sound like this is for free student plans as well

JDevlieghere• 10 years ago

Under the billing tab in my account it says: "Sit tight! We’re in the process of upgrading your account to unlimited private repositories."

bkeepers4• 10 years ago

Good question! Students get free private repositories for 2 years. You can request the student discount at https://education.github.com/

t3nary2• 10 years ago

Awesome, thanks for the confirmation :)

wlk• 10 years ago

Yes, students will also get unlimited private repos.

Confirmation here: https://www.facebook.com/GitHubEducation/posts/5987704836162...

alanfranzoni2• 10 years ago

Do outside collaborators count as paid users?

Xylakant22• 10 years ago

I'm curious as well.

bkeepers4• 10 years ago

Outside collaborators count towards a seat on private repositories and are free on public repositories.

vinmat2• 10 years ago

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!

Xylakant22• 10 years ago

That means that the same user that is member of multiple organisations gets paid for multiple times? We're doing a lot of consulting and thus we do have a lot of people from other companies that get to have a read-only peek at some of our repos - the price would increase at least tenfold for us.

giovannibajo18• 10 years ago

That is really unfair to software houses that need to add customers to projects. We have 29 users and 51 outside collaborators, and 60 repos. You can see that this plan change is going to be unaffordable for us.

j4mie• 10 years ago

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.

femto113• 10 years ago

Is there no distinction for "read-only collaborators"? We build software for many clients, they often request some (say 2 to 10) of their own users be added to the repository but only for viewing our work, not committing new code. If they are charged at the same rate as our own users the effective cost per repo for this model becomes $10-$50 per month!

alanfranzoni2• 10 years ago

This helps as a clarification. But doesn't help for usage. I was happy about the unlimited repos feature, and willing to pay the surplus. But if an outside collaborator with access to one repo out of 100s of ours must count towards headcount, that's a pretty useless model for us.

BradRuderman• 10 years ago

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.

voltagex_3• 10 years ago

Couldn't you use some other kind of display for these users? Seems like you'd only need 2 or 3 of these to justify a small project to get them the information they need without needing to be a paying GitHub user.

majewsky2• 10 years ago

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

Xylakant22• 10 years ago

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

meetbryce• 10 years ago

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

lox7• 10 years ago

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?

myhf• 10 years ago

Deploy keys

lox7• 10 years ago

https://developer.github.com/guides/managing-deploy-keys/

giovannibajo18• 10 years ago

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

lox7• 10 years ago

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/

It's also what GitHub does internally.

cheshire137• 10 years ago

Semaphore works the same way.

ponytech• 10 years ago

Why don't you just add the SSH public keys of your CI machine to your own GitHub account?

giovannibajo18• 10 years ago

I wouldn't want a CI to store a key that has R/W access to all my repos in all my organizations. I'm in at least 5 active organizations that I would be putting at risk

manmal• 10 years ago

CI machines cause most of their traffic, why should they be free?

piyush_soni• 10 years ago

Still, not even a couple of free private repositories?

voltagex_3• 10 years ago

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

vinmat2• 10 years ago

Yes, you can pay for a year upfront for a personal account.

Illniyar• 10 years ago

Can two individual priced accounts collaborate on the same private repository?

bkeepers4• 10 years ago

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

n9com• 10 years ago

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

elmigranto• 10 years ago

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

https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing

xillion5• 10 years ago

Free != better

aavotins• 10 years ago

Christmas is early this year.

arnvald5• 10 years ago

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.

chippy• 10 years ago

The numbers in the above chart are dollars, not number of repositories for those who are puzzled by it.

It appears that along with this announcement they are raising the prices of an account.

arnvald5• 10 years ago

Hey, thanks for pointing that out, I updated it to be more clear!

reycharles• 10 years ago

At work we have a bitbucket server with 6 users and 25 repositories. We recently switched to bitbucket server a few months ago. I'm sure we will get more repositories in the future. Some of the repositories are just a small collection of scripts while others are fairly big software projects.

arnvald5• 10 years ago

Are you working on projects for clients or on your own product?

Also, maybe I'm mistaken and this change actually makes sense. Until now I had a one repo called `utils` and we kept random scripts there. Now there won't be any cost for adding new repository, so it might happen we'll start splitting that one.

giovannibajo18• 10 years ago

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.

Xylakant22• 10 years ago

we're in the same situation. I'm looking at at least a tenfold increase. All of a sudden self hosting a gitlab instance looks cost-efficient.

taspeotis2• 10 years ago

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...

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).

jon-wood• 10 years ago

It feels to me like there needs to be a distinction between users and developers now they've changed their pricing model, with developers getting full git access, and users getting read-only source viewing through a browser, issues, and wikis. That way agencies can add customers for collaboration without having thousands of users to pay for.

rdancer7• 10 years ago

At those price points you don't have a sales rep and individual pricing?

rpedela• 10 years ago

Would billing your customers for Github access be a solution?

mrweasel3• 10 years ago

We have a tons of repositories, most are currently on BItbucket, because GitHub was to expensive. Only our largest projects are on GitHub. Our team is maybe 8 developers, depending on consultants, interns and other temporary employments, but we have 20 - 30 repos.

I think for small companies that do all development in-house, having large number of repos, and few developer is a pretty normal.

The way I look at it, GitHub is moving to a model where they assume that the number of employees is more indicative to the amount you can afford to pay, compared to previously where having a large number of repos meant you could pay more.

It will certainly help attract smaller businesses to GitHub.

pron2• 10 years ago

Except that now GitHub is 9x more expensive than BitBucket (and for a team under 5 developers, GitHub is $25 vs. BitBucket's $0).

thesimon• 10 years ago

I guess software houses that keep old projects (for maintenance and future requests from clients) fall into this category, but who else?

Companies using micro services? Companies that don't want to have one big repository for their software?

arnvald5• 10 years ago

Good point. Also, before having 1 repository was a way to avoid higher bill. Now it'd require to have just 1 user which I doubt anyone will try to do.

corecoder• 10 years ago

What made our small team choose BitBucket over GitHub was the consideration that having to pay for # repositories would force us (and about everyone) to organise code not based on development convenience, but on $ convenience, which means put everything in a few very big and messy repositories.

lifeisstillgood• 10 years ago

But to me this makes sense - one naturally will have more repos than developers, and as it is costly to add a developer to your team, but adding a repo is a command line, then making cost a function of developers seems to align most software teams with githubs incentives.

caf• 10 years ago

Right - and the total cost of a developer is far more than $9/month.

The real place where it hurts is users who aren't paid employees.

bergie• 10 years ago

At least in our case the new pricing would be couple % below what we used to pay under the per-repo pricing scheme. And about 30% less if we merge our two organizations.

daemin• 10 years ago

The last few places that I worked at only had one big repository hosting all of the projects. They weren't using Git though, SVN and Perforce.

In some ways I can see the ability to have fewer users and more repositories suited towards consultancies (specifically web development). Where there are a lot of projects and customers.

arnvald5• 10 years ago

Yeah, I worked at a company that used one big repository for all their software. It wasn't to save money (they were spending quite a lot of money on other tools), but it was just more comfortable for them - in terms of code management, deployment etc. But still, with the old Github pricing, they were paying just a few bucks for a team of 10 people, so in this case getting paid per user makes much more sense.

EnderMB• 10 years ago

That kind of thing is quite common in small agency environments, where you might have a bunch of different clients on support contracts paying for x hours a month of time.

With that being said, in those types of environments, cost is everything, and BitBucket is still the cheaper option.

simon_renoult• 10 years ago

I'm a nodejs developer. I use its package manager `npm` on a daily basis. `nodejs` packaging philosophy enforces you to break every lib into smaller modules in order to have small, consistent, easy to reason about, modules. While being a great philosophy, it requires developers to maintain many projects, thus owning many github repositories (often private when working for clients).

This is a great news for me.

jvvw• 10 years ago

We have a few users and a large number of repos - small team of developers supporting research projects in a university department.

wbillingsley2• 10 years ago

BitBucket is free if you have an academic email address https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing

0xmohit3• 10 years ago

It's possible that people have started realizing the advantages of monolithic version control [0] which prompted Github.

Team | Cost Before | Cost Now

1 repo, 100 users | $25 | $880

[0] http://danluu.com/monorepo/

odonnellryan8• 10 years ago

I think this price increase is OK. You'd be hard pressed to find any enterprise product that would only charge you $25/mo for 100 users.

snorremd• 10 years ago

At my workplace we have 1/5 ratio of users to repositories on our git server. We tend to create separate repositories for modules, applications and even prototypes. In any case if we were to use Github their new pay-per-user model would make more sense for us than the pay-per-repository model.

tedmiston3• 10 years ago

Any company with 5-10 users, has at least 5-10 repos if they're structuring things properly. That said, I prefer self-hosted GitLab (free) when there are a large number of repos.

mindcrime3• 10 years ago

I'm not sure how common are organizations with few users and large number of repos

My feeling is that this is VERY common. Most of the software companies I've worked for had between 5-25 people, max, who would need github access. But if you break things up in a granular fashion repo-wise, you can easily have dozens or more repos.

In my own case, we only have about 5 people who need access, but we're already sitting on a bunch of repos and will be needing more soon'ish. I was just debating about if/when to upgrade to the next plan level w/ github, and now I don't have to.

Obviously different companies have different scenarios, but this is a win for us, and I expect it's a win for a lot of other organizations as well.

apocalyptic0n3• 10 years ago

We're at 394 repos and 13 active users (with 32 disabled users) on our self-hosted GitLab install. All repos are private as well. We're a software agency that usually has 15-20 different projects being actively developed. It adds up quick

dimino2• 10 years ago

For a 50 person group, $430 is peanuts, it's just peanuts.

I'm sorry, I just don't feel for these people, this is getting upset about the $0.10 charge for butter when you paid $10.00 for the popcorn.

cheeze• 10 years ago

Yeah, who cares if they hiked the prices up by an insane amount, right? /s

alfg• 10 years ago

We have about 300+ users and 100+ repos. We moved to Bitbucket because it would be too expensive to keep using Github. Looks like the pricing change would make it even more expensive for us.

I personally also use Gitlab for private side project repos and only use Github now for open source projects.

krschultz4• 10 years ago

At Gilt we had a ratio of ~10 repos per engineer. #microservices.

hc000• 10 years ago

wow... our bill will be 8x.... $xxx to $6xxx

HeyLaughingBoy• 10 years ago

Put me on that list: small business doing lots of very small projects. I just upgraded my gh account to the next tier a few months ago and now it looks like my bill will be going back down.

msbarnett3• 10 years ago

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?

Any startup architected around microservices, for one

imron• 10 years ago

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...

dawnerd• 10 years ago

Also https://step-3.app.box.com/s/k77k28sy0bdpo2drg2sqrbjhht25k9a...

red_admiral• 10 years ago

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

mcintyre1994• 10 years ago

As has Bitbucket. Unlimited users too if you have a .edu or equivalent email.

sytse20• 10 years ago

And on top of that we don't charge for collaborators.

pilif4• 10 years ago

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.

heartbreak3• 10 years ago

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.

pilif4• 10 years ago

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.

gelatocar• 10 years ago

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.

petetnt2• 10 years ago

Make "Epic Games" a personal account and add everyone as collabs and it's 7 bucks a month, down from 25?

Strom• 10 years ago

The post says this about personal accounts: you can even invite a few collaborators. I can't find the exact definition of "a few", but I imagine it's less than 90657.

bkeepers4• 10 years ago

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 support@github.com.

Sephr• 10 years ago

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

stephenr4• 10 years ago

So what you're saying is - you know your new pricing is even more ridiculous than your old pricing, but you're willing to burn a little profit to keep big-name clients for the sake of PR.

Gotcha.

hallatore• 10 years ago

The new plan doesn't fit wide organizations at all. With 300+ users we are looking at $30000 pr year for 70 repositories..

We get the freedom to create more repositories for the price of having to actively kick any inactive user out to save cost.

PS: Please make it like Slack. Don't pay for inactive users that doesn't commit anything that month.

friendzis• 10 years ago

If I understand this model correctly you fail to admit that there are at least 3 distinct types of users: developers (full access), users (read-only), issue trackers (wiki/issues only). And this model is geared toward a very specific type of organization with a relatively low number of users/trackers compared to developers.

Epic's example is just silly, but nevertheless the world is not black and white. I guess there should be a large number of organizations with multiple CI/CD agents each using distinct credentials for each target. Or examples of software houses requiring client access to issue tracker/wiki.

I guess GitHub analysed their data and made the best decision, but this really does not seem geared toward Enterprise in traditional sense of the word.

Some $vendors (just using familiar terms here) somewhat cover the gray areas pricing $x per unit, where unit is e.g. 2 users or 5 repos, whichever is higher.

gnufied• 10 years ago

It is interesting that - this change will force organizations to pay for "bot" users - that exist for deployment/notifications etc. Our payment bill just doubled from $50 to $106 now (including the bot accounts).

Kerrick• 10 years ago

What about organizations that have many members, but few that actually contribute code? We have accounts for most of the people at our company so they can view issues and pull requests, but only about a dozen ever push code.

dhorrigan• 10 years ago

Epic Games could just move to BitBucket, where you get Unlimited Users for $200/mo.

samrift• 10 years ago

We are a small shop that has 4 repositories and 36 users (over half the company). About 10 of those users actually contribute code, the others are monitoring issues, pulling code just to run tests or create distributions, or bots.

If we accidentally hit the upgrade button (we won't), our cost would go from 300/year to 3,648/year. Since only a small number of projects are on github - we use TFS for our main project and github for tools - its just a non-starter.

Heck, 5 "bot accounts" is $540/year to support CI builds and slack notifications. Yikes! More than we pay now.

It seems like the only shop that would save money would be the little in-house development departments with 5 people and tons of projects. However, even there they would probably forego using issues tracking in github because of the extra user cost.

I would be very interested to see real stats on how many orgs actually "upgrade" to this new more expensive pricing model vs how many stay with the more sane model. The real losers are orgs that can't sign up under the old model. The real winners will be the github alternatives (gitlab, bitbucket, etc) that can use this as an opportunity to grow user base.

timdorr• 10 years ago

Hopefully, GitHub can adopt a similar "non-human user" account concept as Slack has. They are free to add and don't log into the normal applications.

Of course, do you really need full accounts for those purposes? Their APIs are really extensive and should give you access to set up things like CI and notifications.

Aissen2• 10 years ago

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.

Scea91• 10 years ago

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

SyneRyder• 10 years ago

"Too cheap" sounds a fair comment to me if the price is free. Anything free is almost certainly a loss-leader, as providing the service itself is almost certainly not free (whether it's a tiny-but-non-zero bandwidth cost, or the costs of providing support).

So long as the loss-leader is paying its way via the upsell, it's fine. And if those businesses have contingency plans for moving if BitBucket shuts down the free plan, then it's fine for them too. But the fear is that "too cheap" companies also tend to be cheap when it comes to managing contingencies.

Aissen2• 10 years ago

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).

stephenr4• 10 years ago

too cheap to pay for hosting

That's your view of companies that don't throw money at an over priced service with a history of ignoring customer requests? "too cheap".

I hear that's why Linus first wrote the Linux kernel back in the day - he was too cheap to buy a license for a commercial unix. /s

nikolay2• 10 years ago

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!

glusterfuck• 10 years ago

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.

hrez5• 10 years ago

Like Salesforce has? http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/11/marc_benioff_publica...

nikolay2• 10 years ago

Only if you think GitHub is the only SaaS option... which it is not.

partycoder2• 10 years ago

I am strongly considering moving to gitlab.

EuAndreh2• 10 years ago

They have CI within gitlab.com even for private repos :)

partycoder2• 10 years ago

rad

educar3• 10 years ago

Well, I bet you won't move. Just do it and let us know.

jventura• 10 years ago

I have all my private projects in gitlab for quite some time, and only my public projects in github..

atonse2• 10 years ago

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.

sytse20• 10 years ago

I'm sorry GitLab.com is slow, we're working to make it faster in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42

bufordsharkley• 10 years ago

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.

moby• 10 years ago

Certainly appreciate your question around pricing for non-profits here - have 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. Feel free to reach out to Support (https://github.com/c) if you have any further questions around this!

rplnt2• 10 years ago

I don't think there is a question in that post. Also there's "non-profit" (business) and "non-profit" (hobby).

wbillingsley2• 10 years ago

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?

xfalcox• 10 years ago

Did you evaluate Discourse for your use case? You can self host it cheaply on a small vps, and it's great for non dev issues discussion.

robalfonso2• 10 years ago

Similar situation here, have a whole segment of our organization that is non-developer but they file issues. I'm not paying for all of them just to submit issues. We also have bot users that I'm not willing to spend good money on maintaining. They need to think about a lite user of some kind for this use case.

hartror• 10 years ago

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.

romanovcode3• 10 years ago

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.

Singletoned• 10 years ago

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

sytse20• 10 years ago

Glad to hear you're considering GitLab, our on-premises pricing can be found on https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/

pbarnes_1• 10 years ago

BitBucket Server (hosted) is better.

We switched from GH:Enterprise and saved $1000's a year. Worth it.

ThatPlayer• 10 years ago

When people mention GitLab I always wonder if you mean the public hosted GitLab, or running your own GitLab.

enzanki_ars• 10 years ago

Usually, they are referring to the public GitLab as it is a free installation of GitLab Enterprise Edition with free private repositories.

romanovcode3• 10 years ago

Public GitLab is amazing, especially built-in CI integration, however it is not as fast as Github (page loadspeeds)

robryan• 10 years ago

$25 a month is such a minor cost for our company that cost doesn't come into it.

xillion5• 10 years ago

Because businesses need money to survive and most have no problem spending it when it increases productivity or provides perceived value over another product.

Rapzid• 10 years ago

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

stephenr4• 10 years ago

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.

Cozumel3• 10 years ago

'unlimited private repos' if you pay. BitBucket gives you them free and always has!

a_imho2• 10 years ago

bitbucket used to offer 5 private repos for free

imcotton• 10 years ago

GitLab gets 1 point without doing anything, oddly.

jdudek• 10 years ago

Yay, no more using single repo with orphan branches to save on number of repositories :-)

kuon2• 10 years ago

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.

lucasnemeth5• 10 years ago

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)

kuon2• 10 years ago

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.

xchaotic• 10 years ago

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?

stubish• 10 years ago

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.

a_imho2• 10 years ago

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.

z3t45• 10 years ago

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.

lox7• 10 years ago

This is not how pricing works.

z3t45• 10 years ago

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.

spriggan3• 10 years ago

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.

lucasnemeth5• 10 years ago

It will attract more small companies and freelance single developers as well.

ThePhysicist• 10 years ago

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) 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)

jamies888888• 10 years ago

Very cleverly worded to sound like a price reduction when it's actually a price increase.

hunvreus2• 10 years ago

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.

nxzero• 10 years ago

Compared to products like Salesforce, GitHub seems cheap to me.

What to you is a fair price and why?

hunvreus2• 10 years ago

As stated at the end of my comment, a fair price is what they decide to charge. I simply don't like people to try and spin a price increase into a freebie.

vacri5• 10 years ago

GitHub seems cheap to me

At $9/user/mo, github is 900% more expensive than the $1/user/mo direct competitor BitBucket. BitBucket uses brackets rather than pure scaling, but their most expensive option - 101 users require the $200 unlimited accounts plan - is still only $2/user.

cstejerean2• 10 years ago

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.

asher_• 10 years ago

I couldn't agree more. It has annoyed me when companies charge more for decisions about how you choose to do something - in this case how you split up your code. Paying per person makes much more sense.

spraak3• 10 years ago

Best reply ITT

odonnellryan8• 10 years ago

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

I'm a small contracting shop: makes more sense to me. I might have 100 repos, but I can only develop so fast. Now all I'm costing GitHub is a little diskspace (which is insanely cheap, especially for text).

fps6• 10 years ago

I work for a non-profit open source organization that collaborates on github (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.

blktiger• 10 years ago

If you want unlimited private repositories, just use bitbucket instead. It's free instead of $7 a month.

vidarh• 10 years ago

I've personally stuck to Bitbucket for all my private repositories exactly because Githubs pricing model made it untenable. For that price I might just sign up, even though I might keep syncing to Bitbucket anyway, just because I'm paranoid.

Alupis2• 10 years ago

My company, for one, was actually in the middle of shifting to BitBucket off of Github, because the costs were becoming unjustifiable.

We have a growing number of repos that are more-or-less "finished" projects, and few if any changes are made per year. Accounting was starting to groan... and BitBucket's model fit our small team almost perfectly, although Github's UI, flow, etc, was, in our opinion, still better. New talent almost always has an existing Github account we can integrate, instead of needing to make and manage a new BitBucket account.

Now, with this news, we'll just reverse course and stick it out with Github.

hrez5• 10 years ago

Price per idle/obsolete etc repo - $1.5-$2.5/month and goes down with number of repos. Price per idle/noncontributing user - $9/month and it stays constant.

In any case, for my org it would mean ~5x cost increase. So yes, nice spin.

Thirdegree• 10 years ago

Lastly, this is a huge freebie for individual accounts that now get unlimited repos for $7/month.

It's also nice for student, like myself, who get unlimited private repos for $0 a month.

chris_wot• 10 years ago

Eh? I was very happy with my micro account, this is pretty awesome! If I ever need to recommend a corporate account, GitHub is pretty much my first choice.

ProblemFactory2• 10 years ago

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

I don't have any numbers on how people structure their accounts on Github, but my feeling is that this is a positive change for the majority of Github users.

Git encourages having many smaller repos for modules over massive single repos. $1/repo/month is fine for active projects, but gets expensive really fast if you want to keep archives of small private experiments around. Because of the per-repo pricing on Github, I've seen many friends and startups I've worked with keeping their open-source public repos on Github (for free), while moving private repos to Bitbucket.

I would not be surprised if this pricing change would be a net revenue loss for Github, but still implemented to avoid losing market share to Bitbucket.

eddieroger2• 10 years ago

Majority user, here.

I already pay GitHub monthly because I have some repos that I want private. I'm a solo dev, only hacking on side projects that may or may not be something one day, but want to keep them private anyway. My bill is about to go down, and my benefits go up. All in all, I'm quite alright with this change, agree that it's positive.

I get that it gets worse if I ever take on N number of developers, but that's a hurdle I'll deal with if I ever get there. I do imagine I'm not alone in this position.

mangeletti• 10 years ago

Wow, you actually just made me think of something that could have been a great change for GitHub.

Rather than completely limiting private repos in their old pricing model, they could have limited "active" repos, and created an archive feature, where archived repos were not available via Git, but still existed as backups and in case you ever wanted to make them active again.

I do, however, believe that the new, per-user pricing is more sustainable. File storage is rather cheap; running Git pull / push is not necessarily.

Fomite• 10 years ago

This is a positive change for me as well.

musha68k2• 10 years ago

I actually love it and I'm thankful for Github's consistently great service - looking forward to all the bitbucket/gitlab customer project migrations over the coming months.

thijsc• 10 years ago

For us as a small team it's a very positive change. Our monthly bill just went from $100 to $25.

unfunco4• 10 years ago

And for us it's negative, our monthly bill has just increased by hundreds of dollars. In theory, our respective organisations could be in competition, and GitHub has just increased our monthly bill to subsidise your organisation, instead of shouldering the financial burden themselves.

tmaly• 10 years ago

I personally like the bitbucket method.

I get my private repos free, but I can only work with 5 people on them before I have to start paying.

LeifCarrotson• 10 years ago

Agreed. The goal should be accurate market segmentation. Students, open-source devs, and hobbyists pay little or nothing, small shops pay some, and large enterprises pay more. Collaborator count seems to do that better than most metrics.

lucasnemeth5• 10 years ago

It says you will be able to add a few collaborators. So I think it will be very similar in the end.

frostymarvelous5• 10 years ago

Per repo pricing was why we didn't go with github.

Atlassian was our only option till we shopped around till we found Visual Studio Team Services.

For a team of 4. Simply great. No need to pay for Jira or anything at this point.

Now, I won't go back to github even if it was completely free. The value Atlassian gives makes it a much better and attractive offering if you don't like Microsoft.

TheOtherHobbes• 10 years ago

All the production code here is on BitBucket.

Forcing users to pay for privacy has always stuck in my throat as a business model.

I think this change is due to GitHub feeling some heat from Atlassian and GitLab.

robbiemitchell• 10 years ago

Points 1-2 seem irrelevant to your argument.

4. Switch to a user-based pricing to generate more revenue for investors

You add "for investors" as a slur, like it's a bad thing. Every company, public or private, has investors -- even if it's just the founders.

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".

Except not everyone will be charged 3x as much. Many will be charged much less. It totally depends on the setup.

I have heard countless times over the years what a pain it is for orgs to be charged per repo. It incentives monolithic repos.

Equally important: from the perspective of a company trying to maintain budgets, it might actually make more sense to _them_. Factoring Github as a per-head charge, similar to everything from Slack/Gmail/Photoshop to laptops to food and other perks to healthcare benefits, might make things easier than worrying about whether your employees are structuring their repos in a way that minimizes costs.

tjl2• 10 years ago

When I was doing my PhD I ended up putting all my development into one repo and all my documents in a second because of GitHub's per repo rules. I didn't know about an academic pricing (they might have had it, but I think it was added after I finished) and I asked about the rules because I wanted a number of small repos, but all told would only be a few hundred meg at most. I was told no, so I decided on the two repo strategy. It worked, but it was awkward.

pc865• 10 years ago

From the perspective of a customer: repositories should be cheap, users shouldn't be. This is a positive change and one that will make me strongly consider moving from BitBucket to GitHub.

I've worked at places with two developers and 150 repositories. I've worked at places with 12 developers and 5 repositories. Who do you think gets more marginal utility out of another repository?

Every place I've worked that hasn't used GitHub either did so because of a regulatory reason (HIPAA and not wanting to do on-premise) or because the per-repository pricing model made it absolutely stupid expensive, or dumped you straight into Enterprise.

If you make a lot of money off a single private repo with many users, you'll move from "so cheap you don't even need to think about it" to "market rate." If you make a little money off of a lot of repos with a handful of users, you'll move from "don't even consider it due to cost" to "let's try it out for six months and see how it goes."

profmonocle• 10 years ago

I work at a small company (7 engineers) and per-repo pricing is exactly why we chose not to use GitHub. Most of our projects are short-term, meaning we have hundreds of repos going back over ten years, the majority of which are inactive. GitHub's pricing didn't make sense for us at all. (We ended up using self-hosted GitLab which we're pretty happy with.)

mindcrime3• 10 years ago

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".

Cynicism much? I don't know how your organization is structured, but for us, this will represent a price discount. Not by a huge margin now, but as the number of private repos we use will almost certainly grow faster than the number of users we have, this is definitely a better situation for us, now and in the future.

jlarocco• 10 years ago

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

No comment on the rest of your post, but I doubt this part is true. I'm sure a lot of VC funded startups use GitHub, but there just aren't enough of them to be a "significant" part of the GH customer base.

partiallypro• 10 years ago

I use GitHub for my public repos, but use Visual Studio Online (poorly named, since it is not actually Visual Studio) for my private ones (also unlimited, but free.) I know a lot of others that use Bitbucket, etc because of GitHub's pricing. I feel like GitHub would make more sense to smaller devs, like myself, if it were bundled with other services. Like, if they partnered with Microsoft, Google & Amazon and offered some sort of bundling packages with their cloud services. I don't know, to me GitHub...from a small dev perspective only makes sense to share things publicly. I'm sure this new pricing model will help push some smaller devs onto the platform, but it's hard to compete in that space when you have others providing private repos for free.

sosuke• 10 years ago

I just looked it up again, they changed the name to Visual Studio Team Services which makes much more sense.

https://www.visualstudio.com/products/visual-studio-team-ser...

mratzloff• 10 years ago

Works well for me. I have like 10 or 12 private repos for personal projects I'm not ready to release publicly yet (or ever).

avn2109• 10 years ago

From the article: "And while we're currently not enforcing a timeline to move..."

I too was sad to see many of the new developments at Github, but if they were money grubbing like you say, wouldn't they make everyone switch faster than this?

krschultz4• 10 years ago

It's not basic math, it depends entirely on your code structure. In a world of 'microservices' repos proliferate very quickly. My last company has hundreds of repos, but only dozens of engineers. The pricing model was becoming a major pain point for us.

As an individual this model makes way more sense for me. I pay the same as before but get unlimited private repos? Awesome.

tn13• 10 years ago

It is sensible pricing model.

nodesocket• 10 years ago

I'm getting really tired of engineers complaining about pricing and being cheap (I'm a engineer + founder). User pricing is a much better model for organizations (scales as you do in terms of headcount).

And for individual accounts this is a win, win, no matter what. A flat $7 get's you unlimited repos.

GitHub is not out to get you. GitHub's "PR" department is not trying to trick you. GitHub builds and maintains a crazy powerful tool that you probably use hours a day. It should cost money, and honestly it should cost more if you ask me.

joering2• 10 years ago

Meanwhile many use BitBucket free private repos for years and are very happy about it.

manigandham2• 10 years ago

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

If you don't like PR, then why can't you just see past it? Why wouldn't an organization try to make it sound like a positive change? Do you expect them to come out with negative changes?

What does valuation or organization changes have to do with this anyway? Are you somehow unhappy with their company? Sure they have issues but they have also created a great platform with lots of networks effects and value. It works, and it's very cheap for what it does. And if you don't like it, there are tons of competitors.

Seriously, what's the problem here?

abiox• 10 years ago

I'd appreciate if their PR department didn't expect us to swallow this as a positive change.

it really depends on your perspective. i significantly prefer per-user over per-repo. i can see how per-repo might benefit others, however.

Cerium• 10 years ago

Why not have both options continue to be available?

mmaunder• 10 years ago

I had no idea about any of the above, but for our team this is awesome. I love that they're doing this because limiting repo's based on price is a serious PITA - it really is the way GH described is which is that every time a user wants a new repo, they have to ask billing/accounting for permission. For us and any company that uses github heavily, which is pretty much everyone in tech, this is awesome!

skywhopper• 10 years ago

40 times as much in our case. But sounds like they aren't forcing it on us right away.

erikb• 10 years ago

I think before it was $5, now it's $7? Three times? Anyway... both below $10, so no problem I see here, young padawan.

tjl2• 10 years ago

It's been $7 for a while. It was $7/month when I cancelled my service back in 2013. I was paying for private repos when I was doing my PhD thesis and once I finished I just kept my local copies and deleted the GitHub version. Now I just use my GitHub for public projects. All my private projects are on GitLab at the moment.

Twisell• 10 years ago

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...

andreamazz• 10 years ago

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

jiang101• 10 years ago

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.

sandGorgon2• 10 years ago

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.

mnml_• 10 years ago

too expensive

jrgifford• 10 years ago

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.

timvdalen• 10 years ago

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.

drinchev• 10 years ago

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 ).

bsnape4• 10 years ago

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.

Etheryte3• 10 years ago

If you already invest into this monthly, why don't you just have GitLab on premise?

bsnape4• 10 years ago

We like to use hosted services rather than host them on-prem where possible (AWS, Artifactory, Slack, GitHub).

For the size of our company we have relatively few engineers. Not hosting things ourselves increases our productivity and we can concentrate on our own products :-)

odonnellryan8• 10 years ago

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

smackfu• 10 years ago

Doesn't say they are employees.

bsnape4• 10 years ago

Haha we probably spend a lot on toilet paper as we have ~5k employees (FTSE 100 company) but that isn't the point I was trying to make :-) it doesn't matter how big or rich you are - if costs for a thing increase by x3.5 it's probably going to have an impact. I'm no enterprise-lover and we spend tons of money on crap with annoys me but I'm not in a position to change that.

We are not a "technology company" (and unfortunately I'm not the CTO!) so we will have to report upwards that costs will be increasing x3.5. Their reaction will probably be to ask us to investigate alternatives.

It looks like smaller companies/startups will benefit much more from this change which is fair enough to charge the big boys more really.

I'm not asking anyone to get their violins out but it makes me a little sad that we may have to move away from GitHub. On the flip side, GitLab has been looking great lately!

WillAbides6• 10 years ago

This has almost quadrupled our monthly cost ($850 vs $2914)

Has it really? Existing orgs aren't being forced to change, and on top of that they say they will give at least 12 months notice if they decide to force existing orgs into new pricing.

bsnape4• 10 years ago

Sorry, yes, will change in 12 months time. I'm sure they will force the new pricing structure then (and that's cool).

Billing screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/k1F0BxA.png

chj• 10 years ago

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

keithnz2• 10 years ago

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

keithnz2• 10 years ago

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

sudhirj• 10 years ago

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.

Etheryte3• 10 years ago

As pointed out by numerous other comments, this pricing model makes no sense for a lot of use-cases: external collabs, inactive collabs, wide org structure etc. Many companies would expect to now pay a magnitude or multiple more than before, this is hardly "lunch money".

pilif4• 10 years ago

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.

VLM2• 10 years ago

There is the threshold effect to consider also.

Maintaining a gitlab instance is kind of ridiculous vs $300/yr.

On the other hand, its not exactly rocket surgery and $1300/yr would probably cover it.

So its not a theoretical issue in an isolated abstract sense but market position issue. The competition isn't the employee lunch fund but is actual competitors.

Aside from maintaining your own instance, I have no experience or contact with them but githost.io offers quite a bit for less than $100/month.

skywritergr• 10 years ago

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.

bsimpson• 10 years ago

Are the bug-only accounts reporting against your private repos? Public contributors are still free.

tanepiper• 10 years ago

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.

heartbreak3• 10 years ago

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

benguild• 10 years ago

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

erikrothoff• 10 years ago

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

kapv89• 10 years ago

Nothing beats 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.

therealmarv9• 10 years ago

You should check out gitlab.com

dreamsofdragons• 10 years ago

I have, I'll continue to use bitbucket.

xillion5• 10 years ago

Do you have numbers behind the first hosted repositories statement?

tyingq• 10 years ago

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

More on gogs here: https://github.com/gogits/gogs

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

joeblau• 10 years ago

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!

gommm• 10 years ago

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.

oneeyedpigeon• 10 years ago

Misleading headline alert; should say "for paid accounts" I got way too excited there :-(

ACow_Adonis• 10 years ago

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...

r3bl• 10 years ago

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.

samir16• 10 years ago

Its awesm

caseymarquis• 10 years ago

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.

matthoffman• 10 years ago

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.

therealmarv9• 10 years ago

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).

zxcvcxz2• 10 years ago

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.

BinaryIdiot2• 10 years ago

For all of my personal projects I use GitLab. It has about the same amount of features as GitHub (more in many areas, in fact) and it's free for most usage, even private.

GitLab and BitBucket are going to eat GitHub's lunch if they don't change this crazy pricing model.

sytse20• 10 years ago

Glad to hear you like GitLab!

pwny• 10 years ago

Good to note that self hosting Gitlab (CE in my case) is a breeze. I'm pretty bad at infra and sysadmin stuff and I've been maintaining an instance for a group of friends for about a year now with no issue.

Installation is easy, upgrading (even between major versions) is completely painless, you get integration with Gitlab Continuous Integration, the Community Edition doesn't feel artificially gimped to get you to switch to a paid plan, Gitlab is great at fixing security issues. I also love the UX and it's not missing any feature in my experience compared to GitHub/Bitbucket.

I'm not affiliated with Gitlab in any way but it's honestly one of the rare pieces of software I only have praise for.

kaffeinecoma• 10 years ago

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.

cwmma• 10 years ago

and bitbucket's sole reason for existing has gone away

biztos4• 10 years ago

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.

Xylakant22• 10 years ago

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?

4. Each of you has 2. One for yourself and one for the collaborator. Which answers the question of why some people are unhappy with the change: it punishes organizations that collaborate a lot.

zymhan• 10 years ago

it punishes organizations that collaborate a lot.

Then shouldn't they be using the organizational plan?

krstck2• 10 years ago

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.

threatofrain• 10 years ago

Are you guys going through the nonprofit or the academics pricing?

WillAbides6• 10 years ago

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.

eightbit• 10 years ago

but is $9/worker/month really a lot to pay for all the stuff GitHub offers?

You make it sound like they're curing cancer. What does GitHub really offer above and beyond the other providers?

As an example, their PR reviewing systems sucks balls. It chokes on larger PRs (250 files!? Really?). Also, with files which have been essentially replaced, the diff can become so large that GitHub won't even show it, and since you can only add comments on PRs, you're sunk. I have to resort to sending around emails with code lines and comments on them.

GitHub is amateur hour. Their half-assed implementations of almost every piece of their functionality reminds me of the same BS Apple does on iOS.

leonroy• 10 years ago

Curious what you think of GitLab and Bitbucket?

biztos4• 10 years ago

I'd definitely pay more than $9 for a cure to cancer.

But since I also make my living writing software, I don't think it's wrong to charge a fair price for it.

If you think they're doing such a bad job, you can always use the competition. As with iOS.

vthallam• 10 years ago

But you do know that it's not bay area only right? Millions of people outside US use it and the price difference is a lot to bear for some of them.

biztos4• 10 years ago

Yes, of course. I'm in Europe myself. However if you're a company trying to make money I see $9/mo as a fair price for what GitHub offers, pretty much anywhere.

And if it's really a lot of money then there is plenty of free software that can solve the same set of problems, you just have to install/configure/maintain/modify it yourself. Which should be a reasonable option if $9/person/month is a lot of money where you are.

(I get that for some people obtaining the $9 is difficult because they work for highly dysfunctional organizations, but that still doesn't make it an unreasonable fee.)

romanovcode3• 10 years ago

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

Do you seriously believe that programmers everywhere in the world are making the same money as ones at Bay Area?

biztos4• 10 years ago

No. I myself do not. But it seemed like a relevant metric on this forum.

ShakataGaNai• 10 years ago

Out of morbid curiosity I switched ones of my orgs over to the new billing scheme. I have 4 users in the org team, and 1 external contributor (a client who has access). I am being billed for 5 seats.

So yes, if you invite external contributors to a single repo (Say a consultant with clients). You will pay for each and every account you invite. Gitlab it is!

cortesoft2• 10 years ago

From what I read, as long as you don't mind giving your collaborators full access, you can have as many as you want on your private repo. If you want to grant limited access (say, read but not write), then you have to use an org.

softinio• 10 years ago

This is fantastic news in my opinion.

Zypho2• 10 years ago

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.

Zypho2• 10 years ago

-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

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.

sqldba• 10 years ago

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

throwaway2016a• 10 years ago

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.

m4tthumphrey2• 10 years ago

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.

xillion5• 10 years ago

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.

m4tthumphrey2• 10 years ago

I get that, but and most of these companies do offer paid alternatives. My point is that if you are able, why not self host? There will always be companies that cannot self host which pay for the hosted solutions.

seanclayton• 10 years ago

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/

sytse20• 10 years ago

Thanks for mentioning GitLab!

edpichler• 10 years ago

To me this is a good change, I have lots of private repositories and a small team.

ismyrnow• 10 years ago

Github is... adopting the old Visual Studio logo?

http://static.flickr.com/2768/4307936121_5b5e51a790.jpg

shrugger• 10 years ago

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.

donatj• 10 years ago

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.

danvoell• 10 years ago

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

wtbob• 10 years ago

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.

CiPHPerCoder• 10 years ago

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.)

willcodeforfoo• 10 years ago

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.

patcon• 10 years ago

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

beberlei4• 10 years ago

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)

sdm• 10 years ago

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.

snikch• 10 years ago

Your #1 isn't correct. Collaborators don't count as a seat if they don't have access to a private repo.

These users do not fill a seat: Outside collaborators with access to only public repositories

https://github.com/blog/2164-introducing-unlimited-private-r...

bfrog• 10 years ago

github, soon to be the next sourceforge

alchemical• 10 years ago

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)...

unethical_ban• 10 years ago

What are you going on about? You're bringing in National Security Letters into a discussion about public vs. private repos on Github? Do you know what a threat model is?

I wager they've kept people using public by default for several reasons, among them these:

* It gives them something to upsell on. If you're not completely poor, giving $7/mo for a code repo is not unreasonable. Or, to price it in a more relatable manner, 1.5 mochas.

* It encourages the "social coding" ecosystem. I believe the network effect of Github is the strongest thing keeping people using it instead of dispersing across Bitbucket/Gitlab/etc. a lot more.

And as a simple point of disagreement, I think fewer people would pay for a Github client than a private Github repo. And why is charging for a client so much more ethical to you than charging for a service, with ongoing maintenance costs?

pothibo• 10 years ago

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.

emodendroket• 10 years ago

So basically they're going to start using the same model as BitBucket?

mark_l_watson• 10 years ago

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.

tedmiston3• 10 years ago

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.

mattyohe• 10 years ago

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

jackweirdy• 10 years ago

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...

cloudjacker• 10 years ago

bitbucket: still unlimited free private repositories

mikey_p• 10 years ago

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.

benbenolson• 10 years ago

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?

BinaryIdiot2• 10 years ago

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.

jonmaim• 10 years ago

Sorry it's too late, I already migrated to bitbucket 6 months ago.

rdancer7• 10 years ago

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.

StevePerkins2• 10 years ago

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?

hrez5• 10 years ago

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.

danpalmer• 10 years ago

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 - paying $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.

wickedlogic2• 10 years ago

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.

wickedlogic2• 10 years ago

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.

ausjke• 10 years ago

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.

andrewljohnson• 10 years ago

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.

shepbook• 10 years ago

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.

manigandham2• 10 years ago

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?

samstave• 10 years ago

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.

alexchamberlain• 10 years ago

This is great for private accounts; it encourages better practice of smaller repos.

derrekl• 10 years ago

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.

gohrt• 10 years ago

What's the delta from the old model?

ArtDev• 10 years ago

I will stick with GitLab.

gshulegaard• 10 years ago

So...GitLab looks better and better every day.

dblock• 10 years ago

If someone is unsure about this math, our (we're 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.

kazinator• 10 years ago

For less than these price plans, you can have your own domain and server.

NicoJuicy• 10 years ago

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

arc_of_descent• 10 years ago

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? :)

mikeflynn• 10 years ago

Sounds like a lot of companies are going to end up with multiple GitHub orgs.

geostyx• 10 years ago

I think I'll stick with my own private Gogs instance anyway.

napperjabber• 10 years ago

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.

Revisor• 10 years ago

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

thomascarney• 10 years ago

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/

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

Introducing unlimited private repositories

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