Github: Free micro plan for a month

https://github.com/blog/754-octocat-wednesday-—-free-micro-plan-for-a-month

by bradly • 16 years ago

79 40 16 years ago

github.com

yellow• 16 years ago

I have been on the fence about getting a private account. I'm now officially sold.

snprbob86• 16 years ago

... so it's a 30 day free trial?

I love GitHub (and am a happy micro plan subscriber), but this deal just seems... well... kinda yawn.

thibaut_barrere• 16 years ago

The deal seems yawn because as micro-plan subscribers, we're not able to take benefit of it!

If I hadn't a micro plan already, I would definitely give it a try.

igravious• 16 years ago

So would I, and I did! Sweet nectar baby.

kneath2• 16 years ago

Or maybe we're just testing out a new feature we just built that might be a bit bigger than 30-days free micro before we start pushing it out more.

You never know.

ryanwaggoner• 16 years ago

You never know.

Exactly, so I might as well be committing to signing up for a paid plan.

EDIT: Not trying to be snarky, I'm a ridiculously happy micro subscriber, just don't see the real appeal of this...

timcraft• 16 years ago

The obvious guess would be coupon codes (?).

Looks like there's a CSS bug on /account/billing - the coupon rows probably shouldn't change background colour on hover.

DanielRibeiro• 16 years ago

Agreed. Bitbucket offers unlimited private (and pubilc as well) repos for up to 5 committers. Github is great for public repos though. It would be great if github offered one free private repo (up to x committers) as well.

jackowayed• 16 years ago

Weird, somehow there are two thread about this, even though the submitted URLs appear identical. Didn't think that was supposed to be possible.

Anyway, cross-posting from the other thread:

> This is brilliant. Get tons of people who current just use GitHub for public repos to put up some private ones, then in a month send them an email saying "start paying, or we'll take away your private repos". People are lazy, so a lot of people once they've already put the repos up won't want to move them.

Inertia was working against them; this gets it working for them.

flexd4• 16 years ago

Considering i could keep my private repo from the beta until i accidentally deleted it (empty repo) this is a good deal for us that do not use github enough to warrant paying monthly but does appreciate it. I just made my self 5 private empty repoes named private1-5. I can just rename them and put them to use when i need them and most likely they will persist (or just become public?) when the free month runs out. Not that i wouldn't want to pay GitHub for their awesome service but when you're a unemployed student with bills to pay i'd rather have food on my table one more day than private repos.

Should probably add that i would pay for a plan if i needed private repos, but this is nice since i get stuff i don't need and don't have to pay for. Freebies are awesome :-)

xiongchiamiov2• 16 years ago

Check out gitosis. It's a little bit of a pain to get set up correctly, but once you've done that, adding new repositories is a breeze.

School projects tend to be proliferous and need to be private, which doesn't mesh well with GitHub. I'm mostly just paying them for a micro plan because I think the service is cool.

nuclear_eclipse• 16 years ago

gitolite is a much-improved fork of gitosis, "backed" by Fedora for use in their repos, and IMO is much easier and nicer to setup to configure.

flexd4• 16 years ago

Ah cool, combining that with those free one year EC2 instances would get you free and secure git hosting for a year. Don't you just love free offers?

Dobbs• 16 years ago

In the comments on the blog they noted that they will lock the repositories when the trial expires.

flexd4• 16 years ago

Aha, so much for my plan then eh? Was just counting on what i experienced having a account from whenever the beta started. :-) Clever move by them.

wildmXranat2• 16 years ago

Github, you can do better ! It feels like we're being offered to test drive a free trial deal which ought to exist anyway.

mattculbreth• 16 years ago

Really? We're going to complain about something that's free? Oh yeah, it's the Internet.

wildmXranat2• 16 years ago

I don't remember pressing an 'Add Complaint' button. It's my opinion and we can agree to disagree.

noodle• 16 years ago

its more of a commentary on the account plans that github has. compare it to pretty much every other github competitor, and they almost unilaterally provide at least one free private repo.

pwim• 16 years ago

Given that github is already completely free for public repositories, I think they already have a suitable test drive offering.

corey• 16 years ago

I'm new to DVCS, and I recently setup a Bitbucket account which offers free unlimited space and repositories. Github does seem to be far more popular, though. What makes Github better and worth paying for?

mnutt• 16 years ago

I haven't used bitbucket much, but things like the Compare view make Github really nice:

https://github.com/rails/rails/compare/v3.0.2...3-0-stable

Github Pages are really useful. Maintaining a project site is really easy when you can just create a gh-pages branch and push to it to update your site.

Also, network effects are undeniably part of the appeal. I'm much more likely to hack on a project or library if I can fork it on Github. It makes for a nice workflow.

storborg3• 16 years ago

It's more a matter of git vs. mercurial than Github vs. Bitbucket.

kneath2• 16 years ago

Hm, I guess I disagree — http://hg-git.github.com We have a ton of mercurial users on GitHub using hg every day.

steveklabnik• 16 years ago

I don't know anything about the guys behind Bitbucket. I have used a ton of software (not to mention config files!) that GitHub puts out as open source. So I support them.

Oh, and the interface is gorgeous, BitBucket's feels really tacky. There aren't many outages, and an outage has yet to actually affect me.

Just really happy with GitHub in general.

jrockway2• 16 years ago

GitHub is popular for the free open-source hosting, which offers limitless free repositories. The only catch is that anyone can view them.

When you pay GitHub money, then you get non-public repositories.

Legion• 16 years ago

I really wish Github charged by users and disk space only, and quit with the private repo count limit added on top of that.

We wanted to use Github at the (small) company I work for, but we have tons of tiny, low-traffic repos. Since Github limits repo count, regardless of how low-resource they are, we flat out cannot use them, period.

Bitbucket has the right idea - number of repos is completely meaningless. Make it unlimited and charge only by meaningful metrics, like user count. Unfortunately, their shift to that plan came too late for us, as we put in the effort of self-hosting. Still, there's that special something Github has that Bitbucket lacks, and we would still consider migrating to Github if only they dropped the arbitrary repo count limit.

abrudtkuhl• 16 years ago

Just had that conversation... Everybody charges per repo and that's pointless. Charge for disk space and let us have unlimited repos. I would sign up for monthly plan then.

storborg3• 16 years ago

Github wants to price discriminate between serious users who can afford to pay more, and casual users. Projects with a high development budget (e.g. complex software projects) don't necessarily use more disk space than someone's personal website, so disk space isn't a good way of price discriminating.

On the other hand, organizations with a high dev tool budget are probably more likely, on average, to have more private repos. So it's in Github's best interest to charge by repo count, until they figure out a better way of discriminating between customers.

pbiggar• 16 years ago

I asked Tom from github about this when I met him. Apparently they hear it a lot. He had two responses. The first was that they didn't want to commoditize their service, which they thought competing on disk space would do. The second is that they limiting private repos made people upgrade, and provided most of their revenue.

I really don't like the response. git encourages a repo-per project, but github discourages it with their plans. This impedance mismatch means I don't use github for private hosting, only for open source projects, where there is no such mismatch.

dabeeeenster• 16 years ago

"Black Friday. Cyber Monday. But have you heard of Octocat Wednesday? Probably not because I just made that up. Lucky for you we're also making up the prices around here for the next week."

Their copy-writing is first rate.

sohooo• 16 years ago

If you need a git server for your company, why not set up Gitorious?

The initial setup can be quite challenging, but I found this guide to be quite useful: http://cjohansen.no/en/ruby/setting_up_gitorious_on_your_own...

Github: Free micro plan for a month

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