GitHub is now free for teams

https://github.blog/2020-04-14-github-is-now-free-for-teams/

by ig0r0 • 6 years ago

2589 574 6 years ago

github.blog

LifeIsBio• 6 years ago

This is pretty cool. Anyone have thoughts as to _why_ they’re making this move?

faitswulff• 6 years ago

My guess is that they're a Big Company that can land Big Contracts now and that subsidizes small teams.

aroch2• 6 years ago

The cynical thought would be drive usage of Github specific features/integrations to increase lock-in

q3k3• 6 years ago

Probably to lure in early startups away from GitLab, which has this pricing model (free private repos, pay for required reviews and SSO) for a while now.

cpascal2• 6 years ago

I suspect Microsoft wants to capture as much developer mindshare as possible and then cross-sell Azure. Reducing/eliminating entry costs for commercial grade features helps to do that.

7777fps2• 6 years ago

GitHub has significant vendor lock-in, so it makes sense to make it free to capture the market before a competitor gets traction.

[Speculation:]

Perhaps they've run the numbers and can figure out that they make enough money from enterprise clients and will make enough more money from the 'marketplace' being a channel for selling github integrations and addons to cover this cost of not trying to monetize through supporting teams.

It also moves a large base from 'customer' with needed support to free users which don't need the same level of support.

fileeditview• 6 years ago

What exactly is the lock-in mechanism?

E.g. I have git repos where I use multiple remotes (1 Github, 2 Gitlab..). So git is the same as everwhere.. I never felt locked in. It's not too hard to transfer your repos to another provider.

dehrmann• 6 years ago

GitHub has significant vendor lock-in

Do they? Unless you're on GitHub Enterprise, migrating is just moving your repos over the weekend, setting up new webhooks, emailing everyone a command to switch their upstream URL, and hoping the new workflow works for you. For teams of <100, this it one of the easier transitions to make.

johannes1234321• 6 years ago

For one they have a good budget from Microsoft, secondly GitLab is good competition and thirdly I would assume they see their revenues in project.amangment and CI/CD features (tie in build workers with Azure etc.) and there is more money to make than restricting users (which can be bypassed realticely easily, while more contributors means more build hosts, means larger azure bills)

bdcravens2• 6 years ago

The fact that they're mirroring Gitlab's offering probably suggests that Gitlab is capturing market share from them. It's probably happening more now, as companies are taking very serious looks at their expenses.

Ayesh5• 6 years ago

I'm sure GitHub lands a lot more Enterprise customers compared to Gitlab, but for individual users who use organizations to have a separation in repos, and smaller teams, this price change is very convincing to move to GitHub even for teams, now that private repos are free.

jbergstroem3• 6 years ago

I'll bite: They are shifting profits to CI and service landscape. I paid for 8 seats (previous: $64, now: $32) which gave me 10 000 included CI minutes (now: 3 000). I was just at that limit. Its surprisingly hard to find what the cost per minute is after that, but I guess I can check back in a month and see what my spending ends up at.

I'm sure they have enough info about onboarding and unit economics to see how it will pay off mid to long term.

I'll happily pay for use though, it makes sense and it makes the value addition of github core vs extra more clear.

cf_• 6 years ago

I think it depends on OS (Linux is $0.008/Minute, but macOS is a lot more - like $0.08): https://github.com/features/actions (scroll to the bottom)

Grue3• 6 years ago

Extinguishing the competition. It's not even the first time. Remember Internet Explorer?

klinskyc• 6 years ago

Seems like Github is feeling heat from GitLab/BitBucket.

I guess the calculation here is that the enterprise contracts are where all the money is, and keeping smaller customers on GitHub is worth the price cut?

JamesCoyne2• 6 years ago

Personally, I have been favoring Gitlab over Github because Gitlab allows private repos on the free tier.

StavrosK• 6 years ago

I have been favoring Gitlab over Github because their CI is the best CI I've ever used. It just works, whereas every other CI found a way to make things hard for me.

You can even spin up postgres and redis instances for tests by just specifying that you want them. It's amazing.

SOLAR_FIELDS• 6 years ago

As of early last year Github has offered this as well:

https://github.blog/2019-01-07-new-year-new-github/

jlgosse• 6 years ago

Github has had free private repos for years now

333c• 6 years ago

Yep, GitLab has had this for ages, and GitHub has gone from no private repos on free plans to private repos with only a few collaborators to this.

toyg4• 6 years ago

Gitlab, yes. I don't see Bitbucket as much of a player (unless you're in the Atlassian ecosystem and you like it, which seems... rare).

whalesalad• 6 years ago

I guarantee that this move had absolutely nothing to do with competitors and everything to do with Microsofts new rise to dominance. Coding is going to be the next blue-collar job, they are positioning themselves to do well when we reach that inflection point.

colinrand• 6 years ago

They are commoditizing their complement. So what's their core business?

DylanDmitri• 6 years ago

Core business is Azure. Actions, hosting, pushing the C# stack.

smaili• 6 years ago

For those wondering "what makes it worth paying now?", GitHub briefly addresses that:

Teams who need advanced features (like code owners), enterprise features (like SAML), or personalized support can upgrade to one of our paid plans.

98codes• 6 years ago

Along with the expected limit bumps on Action execution time and package storage.

q3k3• 6 years ago

And, unfortunately, 'required reviews' (which IMO are a critical feature).

frou_dh• 6 years ago

There's more, including most sections in a private repo's "Insights" tab still being greyed out. Full feature lists here: https://help.github.com/en/github/getting-started-with-githu...

yingw7872• 6 years ago

Well, this is amazing! I never would have thought the Microsoft acquisition would have these kinds of results! Congrats to Nat and the GitHub team (and by extension Microsoft) for making this possible!

I wonder whether this is a result of market conditions, or whether GitHub sees this is a first-to-market play of some sort, or whether it's something else. I hate to be a cynic given how much good Microsoft + GitHub have been doing lately, but what prevents this change from being rolled back?

Congrats again! I love using GitHub and look forward to many happy years shipping code on the platform.

markdog12• 6 years ago

whether GitHub sees this is a first-to-market play of some sort

Could be a response to GitLab, which had a similar offering for years, including unlimited free private repos.

yingw7872• 6 years ago

Maybe, but this move looks to flatten GitHub pricing down to two tiers: enterprise and free, while GitLab has four pricing tiers and the enterprise feature offering doesn't seem to be there (Gold doesn't look too enterprise-y at first glance).

sneak7• 6 years ago

I feel like anyone who lived through the 90s could have expected "these kinds of results".

Git is open source and widely supported, which doesn't benefit Microsoft. By causing GitHub-specific features to be an essential part of a "modern" or "industry standard" git workflow, they can capture more marketshare/attention, and cause alternatives to be sidelined. This requires removing all friction to entering the proprietary ecosystem, including purchasing. This, along with the acquisition of NPM, is the "embrace" part.

The next will be an expansion of GitHub and NPM's featuresets in ways that are only accessible via branded, first party tools (i.e. not git/ssh/yarn). GitHub has already made some inroads there prior to the Microsoft acquisition with of course the ubiquitous PRs as well as GitHub Issues and Actions. I imagine the ability to check out GitHub wikis as git repos will probably eventually go away to further this.

The last part ("extinguish") is turning off support for non-firstparty tools like git-via-ssh, .patch URL support, issue collaboration via email, yarn, et c. By the time they do this, few people will notice, having acclimated to the entirely-proprietary ecosystem they've been incrementally subjected to.

The goal, as always: a Microsoft editor (VS Code or Atom), editing code in a Microsoft language (TypeScript/.NET/whatever), signed off via Microsoft review software (GitHub mobile), publishing to a Microsoft website (GitHub/npm), running CI on a Microsoft VM (GitHub Actions), pushing code to a Microsoft datacenter (Azure).

It's simply a moat to prevent open, unfettered competition in any intersection of the vertical. Any weak spots (such as GitHub signup friction) are to be subsidized as they will yield benefits when later used as a cohesive whole in an anticompetitive fashion.

hirako20002• 6 years ago

Thank you, it summarises it pretty well. MS is back pretty strong.

It's also to note they attacking on two fronts, the open source and startup folks (VS code, github, typescrip, azure) , and the enterprise with communication, productivity tools and cloud infra (Teams, Office 365, Azure)

Owned.

binarytox1n• 6 years ago

I might buy the conspiracy theory except for the fact that Azure DevOps exists and provides all the features of GitHub already with none of the restrictions you've mentioned except that you pay for the service.

ghshephard2• 6 years ago

Speaking as someone who worked at Netscape during the 90s, your comparison is missing on a lot of fronts.

First, Microsoft was evil back then because they didn't just rely on excellent pricing and features (both of which they had) - but also because they leveraged their monopoly in one market (desktop operating systems) to prevent competition in adjacent markets (browsers).

I think it's difficult for people to believe that Microsoft has evolved, and grown more responsible (Hell, I can run linux directly with windows - with kernels available on the Microsoft store) - but you need to follow the evidence.

Also, leadership: Satya Nadella != Steve Ballmer.

dflock2• 6 years ago

Microsoft have already stopped development of Atom, sadly.

amiantos• 6 years ago

Luckily history has shown that competitors still exist in a world where Microsoft tried hard to “extinguish”. macOS and Linux still exist, Chrome is the most popular browser (not IE), and most people who use Windows are fairly happy with it. You can try to point to Microsoft’s past behavior as proof that the future of GitHub is dystopic, but I don’t think their past behavior was particularly effective at snuffing out all competition and forcing people into their ecosystem. I suppose this is a matter of opinion, but I think being scared of GitHub sliding into terribleness does seem to be in the realm of paranoid conspiracy theories. Even if it does happen, git will always exist and there will always be alternatives.

anderspitman3• 6 years ago

I think it's worth pointing out that GH was always on this path, to the point where it's actually kind of hard to explain the difference between git and GitHub to fairly technical people.

It's also worth pointing out that it doesn't have to come from malicious intentions.

sneak7• 6 years ago

Other things I assume will fall in the future: accessing GitHub Issues via API (for anyone other than paying enterprise customers), support for third-party GitHub API clients (use our first-party app with built-in spyware only, please), et c.

One need only look at what they've done with Windows and Office and Xbox to see how Microsoft approaches client software.

Here's hoping I'm wrong about all of this.

gigatexal2• 6 years ago

Microsoft could run all of Github free and still make money by integrating with Github and Azure so tightly that it is so easy to run code in Azure if you use Github

But it’s probably just completion in the space

zedpm• 6 years ago

The pricing change appears to fall right in line with Gitlab's pricing (Free, $4/user/month, ~$20/user/month, and super expensive). I haven't managed to compare their feature matrices to see if the tiers are closely aligned, but from a glance they look similar.

thereyougo• 6 years ago

Very few companies can make me feel like part of their journey like Github (Cloudflare also)

They understand their target audience more than most of the companies out there. When they are making moves such as this, they explain what was behind it. I find it authentic.

snazz• 6 years ago

Me too! Microsoft has done a really great job of managing the acquisition without ruining GitHub. GitHub already had a great understanding of their audience and a pulse on the community prior to being bought, so I'm really glad that they haven't lost that now that they're a Microsoft subsidiary.

lucb1e3• 6 years ago

a really great job of managing the acquisition

I mean, if they hadn't done a thing it would have been a great job, too. Pumping in cash to fund previously paid features for free sure goes a long way, too, but the changes they've made so far I'd hardly call managing and more not touching it aside from making paid things free.

hinkley2• 6 years ago

Speaking of, I just had a momentary panic because Backblaze’s hard disk report timeline is missing a link to the last update (from February) and I thought maybe they’d stopped doing them...

Who else is good at this? I’m somewhat fond of Digital Ocean’s docs.

Ayesh5• 6 years ago

Not for the technical aspects, but I'm fond of TransferWise an Signal. Even within Microsoft, their WSL, and new terminal are well-received in open source communities.

dubcanada• 6 years ago

One thing to note is I had 3 members, it did not automatically downgrade my seats from 5. So in order to get it down to $12 a month I had to go downgrade my seats from 5 to 3.

roland35• 6 years ago

This is great news! I've always had my repositories spread across GitHub, gitlab, and bitbucket depending on what size group or features I needed but this helps centralize everything to GitHub. That is probably their goal!

rvz3• 6 years ago

this helps centralize everything to GitHub.

Oh dear. That doesn't really sound like a good idea in the long term.

So once you place all your projects/repositories on a third party git service like Github and it goes down, what can you do to push that critical change? Might be no big deal for personal projects but unacceptable for big business and open source orgs.

You might as well call the CEO of GitHub for support. A better way is to self-host...

alecbenzer5• 6 years ago

A better way is to self-host...

Even ignoring the higher cost to set up, are you sure your self-hosted solution will have better uptime? Are you sure you'll be able to get things up and running faster when it does go down than GitHub will when GitHub goes down?

natfriedman6• 6 years ago

Hi HN, I'm the CEO of GitHub. Everyone at GitHub is really excited about this announcement, and I'm happy to answer any questions.

We've wanted to make this change for the last 18 months, but needed our Enterprise business to be big enough to enable the free use of GitHub by the rest of the world. I'm happy to say that it's grown dramatically in the last year, and so we're able to make GitHub free for teams that don't need Enterprise features.

We also retained our Team pricing plan for people who need email support (and a couple of other features like code owners).

In general we think that every developer on earth should be able to use GitHub for their work, and so it is great to remove price as a barrier.

tekknolagi2• 6 years ago

Hi Nat. Big fan. I've been on GitHub for a long time now. There's a fair bit of friction in issue/PR management for people who have primarily CLI-centered workflows. I know that `hub` and friends exist, but will there be official, supported clients in the future?

Also: are there plans to open source more of GitHub? Post Microsoft acquisition, I have been increasingly concerned about vendor lock-in, EEE, and so forth.

natfriedman6• 6 years ago

Yes, we are working on an official CLI here: https://github.com/cli/cli

I think open sourcing GitHub is an interesting idea.

thramp2• 6 years ago

This is a great change! One request: I wish that SAML was not an enterprise feature. SAML ought be a basic security feature like 2FA—it's especially valuable for open source teams who might use a mixture of services, and an easily accessible and cheap SSO solution would go a long way in raising the security bar for all teams, not just open source teams.

vermorel• 6 years ago

Agreed. SAML even makes sense for solo dev.

JMTQp8lwXL6• 6 years ago

Stuff like SAML is kind of the only leverage freemium SaaS has for rationalizing charging enterprise customers.

vptr• 6 years ago

Agree. I sell simple sass product myself and offer SAML to everyone. I view security as a basic right, not something to be used to extract more money for. Charging for additional features is ok, charging for keeping your account more secure is just plain wrong.

alberth• 6 years ago

Even the ability to just “login with gmail” for non-enterprise accounts would be huge

Saaster8• 6 years ago

SAML (and 2FA to a lesser extent) comes with some serious support burdens on the companies offering it. There's a long tail of more or less broken SAML implementations on both the service and identity provider sides, provisioning issues, configuration issues, "Sally can't login on Tuesdays" issues, duplicated slightly-inconsistent data in IdP and Service side records issues...

If you as a SaaS provider outsource your SAML integration to a third party provider like Okta or Auth0, the auth provider pricing is immediately on a "call us" tier, with a per-federation pricing in the low four figures for each company connecting via SAML. Let me just state that again, to have company X connect to my SaaS via SAML, I as the SaaS provider have to pay my auth provider $X,000 per year for the privilege, not counting the base enterprise tier pricing for the auth.

tobinfricke• 6 years ago

I'd never heard of SAML before. Is it like a more complicated version of OAuth?

tptacek13• 6 years ago

Since they just said they were waiting for Enterprise revenue to reach a level where they could free the core product, and since SAML is an important driver of Enterprise upgrades (I've seen it happen), I wouldn't hold your breath.

Now that the core Pro features are free, I wonder if Rob will update sso.tax to set Github to :inf:.

cpascal2• 6 years ago

This is completely unrelated to the announcement, but when will Enterprise Server ship support for GitHub Actions?

natfriedman6• 6 years ago

We'll have a beta next month, and should ship this summer.

atonse2• 6 years ago

I would request similar to the sibling post, that at least OpenID Connect or some such SSO could be a feature for us smaller companies that still want to practice good security by doing SSO.

etherio• 6 years ago

I'd like to thank you for this change but also in general all the amazing things Github is doing. I haven't finished high school yet but your Github Education pack is SO useful for me and I know I will never have time to use half of the stuff on it.

Thanks to everyone at Github making stuff like this possible and creating such a great epicenter for open source in general. Keep on being awesome!

Also I was wondering, Github is offering so many features for free, but does the company sustain itself through entreprise payments or some other stream? I was just curious. :)

natfriedman6• 6 years ago

Glad you like the Student Developer Pack. All credit goes to the 100+ partners who provide something like $200k in tools and services to each student who qualifies for the pack. It's kind of mind-boggling, actually.

As for how we sustain ourselves -- lots of big enterprise customers!

CreepGin• 6 years ago

Thanks for doing this. Is this effective immediately now? I tried to downgrade to free just now but it's giving me a giant list of features I'd lose if I continue. Also any change to Data pack pricing for LFS Data?

Due to the on-going Pandemic, I've been trying to cut business costs left and right. Github Team was one of those I wanted to cut but it's also so important that I couldn't decide easily. So thanks again for the change. Much appreciated!

ebrescia3• 6 years ago

It is effective immediately. There is a full FAQ here: https://help.github.com/en/github/getting-started-with-githu... Essentially, "Pro" = Team - the only difference is whether it is an individual account or an organizational account. We'll work to clarify this on the site.

No, there has not been any change to the data pack pricing for LFS data.

Glad this will help you continue building on GitHub!

amsully2• 6 years ago

Hi! Any perspective of extending SOC2 Report access to the Teams level? Small companies in regulated environments aren't able to jump to enterprise ($$$) so need to look elsewhere to get a SOC2 compliant version control system at a decent price. Love the Github product so it was tough when we had to make the decision to move off of it.

grinich3• 6 years ago

I don't work at GitHub, but I believe if you reach out to GitHub Support and sign an NDA they can provide you the SOC-2 report. (Most vendors will do this.)

grinich3• 6 years ago

Just want to say that I am _so_ happy and continue to be impressed but what you've done since joining GitHub. Feels like a big shift from even a couple years ago.

On behalf of our tiny team at WorkOS, thanks! :)

jka• 6 years ago

Hi Nat - this is a really bold move, and shows how competitive the market for developer tooling is.

Does GitHub anticipate that this pricing change will affect the proportion of code that's provided under free / open source licensing on your platform, and if so can you share any information regarding the direction GitHub would like to lead the community in?

pixelmonkey• 6 years ago

Hey Nat -- quick Q, with this change, is there any need for individual developers to pay for "Pro" accounts? Or did the benefits of a "Pro" account just get covered by the "Free" plan?

angrygoat• 6 years ago

It looks like pro accounts have vanished? I can't find them anywhere; I assume we just won't be charged from here on out?

pubby2• 6 years ago

Hey Nat glad to see you here. A few days ago one of the biggest team collaborative games (Space Station 13) got banned on GitHub without a public explanation from GitHub staff, but some suspect it was because the code contained bad words and slurs. Do you know if this is why the project was banned, and will these new private team repos be subject to the same terms/rules?

Operyl• 6 years ago

SS13 got banned? Damn, I loved reading that old DM codebase every once in a while. Where have you guys migrated to, GitLab?

natfriedman6• 6 years ago

Private repos are not subject to our Community Guidelines on public content, so no, we don't enforce the same rules there: https://help.github.com/en/github/site-policy/github-communi...

I wasn't aware of SS13, and will look into what happened there. Content moderation at GitHub scale is hard and sometimes mistakes are made.

AlphaWeaver• 6 years ago

Whoa, wanted to jump in here! SS13 is, in my opinion, one of the best games of all time when it runs well. Not very many people know about it.

I worry about the community dying and losing my favorite game, but have taken solace in the fact that the source will always be publicly available. If it was banned from GitHub, that's a major problem.

compscistd• 6 years ago

If it was the bad words/slurs, could that have been resolved by hiding them behind some basic string manipulation (ex. a caesar cipher)? I can see how GitHub wouldn't want a public repo to have objectionable words, but can't imagine the harm from obfuscating stored copy.

JMTQp8lwXL6• 6 years ago

I'd like to share feedback on GitHub Actions. Tried it out, and the learning curve was too much. I want to use stuff I already know -- e.g., write a Dockerfile, and then GH could run it on PR builds. The "workflow" concept didn't land for me, and I hope you consider a more generalized, open-source approach to running arbitrary scripts in response to PRs being opened, merges to master, etc.

edaemon• 6 years ago

Have you tried other CI/CD platforms? Different providers use different language but the workflow concept underpins all CI/CD pipelines.

jeremy_k• 6 years ago

They opened sourced the runner[0] if you're interested in learning how it works. Understanding the internals of it may or may not help the syntax and concepts of Actions land though.

My guess is that it is unlikely to see your request for a more generalized script or Dockerfile runner realized because that (Dockerfiles) was the original implementation of Actions during the beta; they pivoted away from that to the current form.

[0] https://github.com/actions/runner

armadsen• 6 years ago

Counterpoint: I've never used Docker at all (I'm a Mac/iOS dev), and was able to get GitHub actions set up and doing what I needed it to in ~30 minutes. Its general similarity to other CI/CD solutions, TravisCI being the one I'm most familiar with, helped a lot.

tracker16• 6 years ago

I don't think it was particularly difficult to use... the multi-os targets are probably about the most confusing.

I tend to stick with bare scripts and npm scripts as much as possible though, so the environment doesn't matter as much.

Ayesh5• 6 years ago

Coming from Travis CI and GitLab CI, GitHub Actions was very intuitive and I had it running in the very first take.

The concept of actions is new, but it is brilliant compared to traditional approach of doing everything inside the CI jobs, or bring your own docker images.

sstephenson• 6 years ago

When will GitHub terminate its contract with ICE?

anonymoushn• 6 years ago

Hi Nat, will GitHub ever support git diff algorithms other than the default?

KenoFischer3• 6 years ago

While we have your here, any plans for more fine-grained IAM for GitHub Apps? It's already a lot better than legacy apps, but it's still pretty broad. Ideally every API call/resource could be specified individually in an IAM policy, so we can only request the minimum permissions possible in our GitHub Apps.

oxalorg2• 6 years ago

Hey Nat, thank you so much for this! We're a small team from India and we love Github but were always conflicted due to the pricing.

The new flat price of $4/user seems perfect for us. I've already moved one private repo to our org account.

Thanks again ^_^

captn3m0• 6 years ago

Just curious what motivates you to pick the $4 plan over free? None of the features there are really deal-breaking for most orgs.

- Required reviewers

- 3,000 Actions minutes/month (Free for public repositories)

- 2GB of GitHub Packages storage (Free for public repositories)

- Code owners

oefrha3• 6 years ago

First of all, thank you, this is great news.

That said, the news made me wonder what exactly I’m still paying for with my personal Pro account. I went to the pricing page https://github.com/pricing and it seems Pro isn’t even listed anymore? And the Billings page https://github.com/settings/billing says “Pages, Wikis, protected branches and more for Pro developers” without any further explanation or link to docs explaining the differences. I can only assume that Pro has the same set of features as the $4/user/mo Team plan, but the messaging is certainly pretty confusing, don’t you think?

(I sure hope this isn’t a sign of neglect for individual developers, who are still the backbone of open source activities.)

pkamb2• 6 years ago

I went to go downgrade to the free plan and noticed that GitHub Pages static sites served from Private repos still require payment. That will keep me on $4/month for now.

masklinn2• 6 years ago

I still get a Pro option when going to https://github.com/account/upgrade from a free account, and it seems to match Teams, here's the blurb:

Required reviewers in private repos
Protected branches in private repos
Repository insights in private repos
Wikis in private repos
Pages in private repos
Code owners in private repos
3,000 minutes for GitHub Actions
2GB of storage for packages

KenoFischer3• 6 years ago

Hmm, looks like GitHub pages are a paid feature? One of our private repos hosts our (public) website. Even with the price cut, the Team plan is still almost $100/month more expensive than the grandfathered in legacy plan we currently have that includes GitHub pages.

Tepix• 6 years ago

Github pages are free for public repos, aren't they? Perhaps switching to a public repo is an option.

polskibus• 6 years ago

Any plans for free on prem version, like Gitlab?

tracker16• 6 years ago

Considering Github Enterprise (which offers on-prem) is their main feature, and main source of revenue (paying for the free stuff) it's really unlikely.

Why not just use Gitlab if you really need on-prem for cheap/free?

tomphoolery• 6 years ago

This is amazing for us folks towing the line between open-source and proprietary, enabling an open core while allowing access to our closed-source products without having to leave GitHub. Right now, we mirror our GitHub repos to a private Bitbucket server so that our clients can make PRs and such, but now we can just add their GitHub accounts to our team!

We do have a paid plan, right now. Is there any way to continue having that paid plan on the team (paying per user for the extra features) while also adding users who don't share the extra features? We'd like to open up our org to all of our clients who use our private repos, but we don't want them to e.g. have access to all the private k8s cluster configs.

est31• 6 years ago

Hi, any reason to still have a restriction on number of free bot accounts one may have (currently one)? There are limitations in products built on GitHub that require you to create multiple accounts if you don't want to share tokens between repositories (bad idea security wise): https://github.com/rust-lang/crates.io/issues/849#issuecomme...

GordonS5• 6 years ago

Hi Nat, with Microsoft now owning Github, I'm really curious to know what the future holds for both Azure DevOps and Github?

I'm a user of both - Github for OSS, and Azure DevOps for private work. IMO, these areas are where they are best suited - pipelines in particular are really powerful in Azure DevOps, and user/permission management, AAD integration and integration with build agents are all excellent.

I really like Azure DevOps, but all this has me worried about it's future - do you know if it's going to continue to exist and be developed in tandem with Github?

lukevp• 6 years ago

Same question here. We use the hosted version of Azure DevOps for work, but I use github for open source contributions. They both have their place, and DevOps feels more suited to enterprise use than GitHub right now.

diminish• 6 years ago

Do you plan to make github enterprise available for free on their own premises for teams?

natfriedman6• 6 years ago

Both products have a bright future and millions of users, and so we're continuing to invest in both for the foreseeable future. We're also finding ways to improve integration between them, so people can use them together if they want to. GitHub Actions reuses a bunch of code from Pipelines under the hood, for example.

flyingswift• 6 years ago

As a former member of Azure DevOps, I've heard from my colleagues that the Work Items and Agile features are totally in maintenance mode

harikb• 6 years ago

Slightly off topic, but I would like to request that you open Github for Education [1] for pandemic-related home-schoolers. Currently it requires verification as an accredited school & credentials. Any help is appreciated.

[1] https://education.github.com/schools

jedieaston2• 6 years ago

When I signed up for the Student Dev Pack originally in HS, the school district's evil IT department blocked mail from outside domains for whatever reason, so I sent GitHub a picture of my schedule (which had the name of the school and my name on it), and they accepted it. If you have evidence of being a home schooler (I believe there's some paperwork you have to file with the government?), they'll probably take it too.

And for the classroom system, it's open-source (https://classroom.github.com/) and you can run it on a box at home. That'd work given you probably only have a couple users at any one time.

DagAgren• 6 years ago

Are you still providing services to people who put children in cages?

gigatexal2• 6 years ago

Biz question for you: do you think given enough of a run way i.e time you could have gotten to that enterprise run rate without Microsoft or have customers come to you now that you have Microsoft's backing -- i.e has that made sales easier?

wikibob• 6 years ago

Hi Nat, What's the plans for integrating Microsoft's VFS for Git into GitHub?

https://github.com/microsoft/VFSForGit

freyfogle2• 6 years ago

I currently pay for a Github Silver plan annually ($600). When I try to downgrade to Free I get a message (in red) "You will no longer be able to access your private repositories or create new private repositories."

How do I downgrade without losing all my private repos.

Thank you!

floatingatoll• 6 years ago

When you emailed this question to GitHub Support, how did they respond?

martinwoodward• 6 years ago

Martin from GitHub here. Sorry about that message - team are rolling out an update to change the text and should be fixed soon. In the meantime if you ignore that message and downgrade from a legacy plan to Free then you will retain access to your private repositories.

itamarst• 6 years ago

Why do you still have a contract with ICE?

thinkingemote• 6 years ago

every developer on earth

This now includes Iran, Syria, and Crimea. Bravo

carapace2• 6 years ago

Existing customers will have their bills automatically reduced going forward.

That is a class act right there.

Now, if you would open source github...

I kid. I have zero hope that that will ever happen.

It has always been bizarre (IMO) that arguably the most popular open source dev forge, er, hub, is closed and proprietary. But what can you do?

Remember when all those FOSS devs sent an open letter to github whining about that and begging for attention? https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github (Ironically, they "signed" it by filling out a Google docs spreadsheet! As opposed to, say, patching a file.)

Utterly bizarre.

And now they have done it again, apparently because GitHub serves ICE: https://github.com/drop-ice/dear-github-2.0

They "call upon GitHub to: Immediately cancel your contract with ICE ; Commit yourself to a higher ethical standard with all of your business dealings ..." [in writing]. But they stop short of threatening to leave if GitHub doesn't comply with their demands.

Leaving aside the politics of ICE, and the strangeness of talking to "GitHub" like it's a single person, it seems to me that without taking some action (like moving to e.g. Srht or self-hosting a DVCS hub) that this is just posturing.

Anyway, congratulations on sucking more air out of the room of FOSS development. In the words of the aforementioned, undersigned, concerned peasants, excuse me! users, of GitHub:

We still believe in GitHub as a platform, as a place to help the open source community make the world a genuinely better place. Please, step up and join us.

znpy• 6 years ago

Will there ever be an OSS version of GitHub, a la Gitlab?

aschatten• 6 years ago

This great news, I appreciate the free stuff, but on the other hand free stuff can be tricky as the company must make money. So I hope that your enterprise model will work.

mato• 6 years ago

Hi Nat. Just to clarify, do these pricing changes imply that users without a paid plan will no longer receive any e-mail support from GitHub?

Speaking as a long-time user, over the last 10(?) years I've only ever needed to reach out to support@ twice or so, both times with fairly obscure issues that were promptly dealt with -- thank you.

It'd be a shame if the implied change to "community support only" for free accounts means that free users no longer have any direct way to contact support.

Lucasoato• 6 years ago

Hi Nat, first of all thanks from every developer in the world. I think this is going to be a great step forward for people who don't need enterprise features (yet). One question: is this service going to be available in countries that are currently hit by US sanctions? (eg. Iran) Thanks again

jpomykala• 6 years ago

Hey how about introducing a function to create a branches from issues

vertis• 6 years ago

Hi nat, I came here prepared to ask about how this would play out for annual billing customers since I only just set it up in March. On searching, I can't actually find where you charged me, so I suspect you might have pre-empted this.

So instead of a question, this is more thank you. I'm a tiny bootstrapped startup and was only using 3 of the 5 previously minimum seats. I'm a prime beneficiary of this change, and look forward (fingers crossed) to being one of the enterprise customers that pays for everyone else :D

For others, can you elaborate on how this will work for current annual billing customers, I found some vague references but no detail.

Thank you

pookeh• 6 years ago

Came here to ask the same thing. I literally set up Teams @ $25/month for 2 seats only and paid in full for annual...

How does this price change affect me?

Also, has the number of minutes for Actions gone down from 10k to 2k monthly?

ss30004• 6 years ago

Can you explain what happened to Atom development?

I've seen numerous posts noting the sharp decline in contribution soon after the acquisition was announced.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22601451

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21142934

Without an official explanation, given the timing, it'd be reasonable to assume you pulled development resources away from it, the exact thing you actually went on Reddit to claim you wouldn't do:

https://www.reddit.com/r/AMA/comments/8pc8mf/im_nat_friedman...

P.S. I've observed that these kinds of posts tend to turn into a place where people shit on Atom in favor of _insert preferred other editor here_. Feel free to do that here too, but just note that I'm not going to be obliged to engage since it's completely orthogonal to the topic at hand. I think any remaining Atom users at this point are likely already painfully aware that Atom has long since lost the war in developer mindshare, but don't let that stop you from pouring salt on the wound.

spiderfarmer• 6 years ago

I gave up on Atom this month because of the lack of development. Too bad really.

meritt• 6 years ago

Microsoft owns Github. Microsoft owns VS Code. VS Code is superior to Atom. Do you need an official comment? It seems abundantly obvious to me.

Nat is the CEO of GitHub, not Microsoft, and despite any promises made on a Reddit AMA a year ago, why would they devote resources to two competing editors?

mnsc• 6 years ago

You have the explanation laid out pretty well by chipotle_coyote in the comments of one of your linked posts.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22601557

Specifically:

But the words of the linked Reddit comment from Nat Friedman were "we will continue to develop and support both Atom and VS Code going forward"; that's a true statement today. Atom is currently being developed and supported. That's a case of adhering to the letter of the statement rather than the spirit, I know. But that circles around to the problem of VSCode's rapid ascent in mindshare -- if your company ends up owning two very similar editors and they both have roughly equal downloads and community interest, you might try to support both equally. But if one of them has orders of magnitude more downloads and community interest than the other, you're going to focus your efforts on the popular one.

sequoia3• 6 years ago

This is the second time I've seen a comment from you complaining about Atom development when an unrelated Github article is posted. What's the purpose of these posts? Do you expect Github to start funding active development of Atom again?

If not, what's the goal of the complaints? I.e. why do you keep bringing this up if you know this is water under the bridge?

I'm a github user, though I wouldn't call myself a fan exactly, and I don't really know how "teams" works or why it's valuable. I came to this thread to learn more, and I find your comments grousing about Atom again. Hence my question.

tomerbd• 6 years ago

Introducing pomodoro technique into the tasks would be great.

Keats• 6 years ago

Can making Github Actions share code between them be a super high priority? Copy/pasting all the setup for a project on each action is repetitive and any time you need to make a change, you need to make it in 6-7 places in our case.

TheRealPomax• 6 years ago

Forgive the skeptic in me: from the outside, it looks like MS is pushing GH to copy features that people use GitLab for right now - how much of this is "we're going to move into GL's space" vs. "this is our own thing"?

(because I'm sure MS wouldn't mind if GL's IPO went less than swimmingly because GH duplicated a number of their selling points "for free" ("for now"))

wackget• 6 years ago

Are you aware that GitHub users still can't sort their repositories into folders?

Because that's definitely one reason why some developers still don't use GitHub.

Take a look at this request which has been open for years and remains unfulfilled:

https://github.com/dear-github/dear-github/issues/74

Is there a reason that such incredibly basic functionality doesn't exist on GitHub but does on all your competitors' offerings?

pkamb2• 6 years ago

Does “for teams” also apply to paid personal accounts?

rmkrmk• 6 years ago

It seems to, on the upgrade page for a personal account it still says "Pro" but for $4/m

leecb• 6 years ago

If you have a personal paid account ("Pro"), the pricing page now says "Continue with Team". It looks like "Pro" has been renamed to "Team".

shrikant• 6 years ago

Google haven't built up too much of a user base for GCP's Cloud Source Repositories service yet (my speculation), so I wonder if they're viewing Gitlab as an acquisition target.

TBQH, I don't see Gitlab lasting too much longer without an acquisition event of some sort, when facing up against this sort of Microsoft-backed feature funding. And I say this as a bigger user of Gitlab than Github (primarily because of the free private repositories and organisations).

leesalminen2• 6 years ago

I think an acquisition of Gitlab would be the only way for me to migrate back to GH from GL. I've been a happy user of Gitlab for years now and have no yearning desire to return to Github.

toyg4• 6 years ago

Gitlab need only wait before GH starts adding Azure-first and Azure-only features, as they are wont to do. At that point they can just offer "the same but for any other cloud provider". Amazon, Google, or IBM, might even throw them a bone.

droopyEyelids• 6 years ago

It seems like in the medium term, staying independent could be a huge boon to Gitlab- like you said, it'd allow them to make high quality integrations with all cloud provider utilities.

In the long term we'd probably see the cloud providers create their own social revision control projects, and then fuck around with private APIs so the quality of the integration between their cloud service and their source control leads you to stay locked in.

Even in that scenario it could make sense for there to be a 'neutral' party like gitlab, though.

I acknowledge this is my own imagination and I've no claim to know the future! :)

specialist3• 6 years ago

What safe guards are in place to prevent Microsoft from using GitHub to glean competitive intelligence?

Just like Facebook used Onavo.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-onavo-gives-social-me...

jedieaston2• 6 years ago

The same safeguards that are in place on Azure (which is used by 99% of Fortune 500s for either Office 365 or cloud stuff), which is to say, ethics, and the fact that if they tried it once most of those companies would reduce their spend with Microsoft immediately. Not to mention the government contracts.

specialist3• 6 years ago

Isn't that exactly what's already happening? [0]

We got a sales call (seminar) from elastic.co. Despite all the positives, it was a hard value proposition. Why would we switch from Amazon's offering? For us noobs, elastic.co wasn't enough better to entice us to switch.

AWS is clearly scooping up the vast majority of users with their "good enough" offering. (I assume Azure, GCP, do the same.) I'm not saying it's right or wrong. I'm just saying it happens. And now Microsoft has much better forward looking intel.

I've been chewing on this ever since. Feels just like the 90s. I used to write AutoCAD add-ons. We third party developers knew in our bones that eventually Autodesk would steal our lunch money.

FWIW, I closed my personal repos on GitHub, in case any of my wares some day become popular.

[0] Amazon Has Gone From Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor, Say Open Source Developers

Community leaders say AWS increasingly poses an existential threat

https://onezero.medium.com/open-source-betrayed-industry-lea...

specialist3• 6 years ago

Followup:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its...

Surely they wouldn't also spy on their own cloud customers.

zentiggr2• 6 years ago

Does anyone remember the arbitrary actions GitHub has taken in the past few months and all the "maybe it's time to start leaving GitHub if you want to avoid getting your repositories permanently deleted?"

Or is HN just as susceptible to the narrow news horizon?

ketralnis• 6 years ago

Or maybe different people have different needs and HN isn't a single cohesive hive mind

zentiggr2• 6 years ago

Fair enough... Hence also why Google have plenty of Apps users etc even though they have a long track record of dropping even popular products at their whim.

Thanks for reminding me that it really is to each their own, and good luck to you on your path.

rvz3• 6 years ago

Microsoft/GitHub is doing something clever this time. They know where the developers are and know that the new consumers are developers, hence 'devsumers'.

So how does Microsoft make them happy? Give 'em free stuff: Free repositories, student pack, ebooks, courses, cloud credits, etc and they come running back to GitHub. There's Sign in with GitHub which makes it easy to claim all the freebies, unlike the rest of the alternatives.

This is why the majority of developers will stay and some would realise that it will all go down and will leave Github and self-host their own git server instead.

mythz2• 6 years ago

Great news for everyone bar startups competing with them as it looks like Microsoft is turning their multi-billion acquisition of GitHub into a loss leader to get as many devs using their platform as possible, no doubt to flex seamless integrations into Azure which looks like they're executing exceptionally well with their acquisitions & new feature giveaways.

From the side-lines it looks like they're slowly becoming an unstoppable dominant force, what's surprising to me is AWS's / GCP's inaction, they're either asleep at the wheel or they don't see Microsoft's dev mindshare grab as a threat.

jdminhbg• 6 years ago

I'm not sure it's great news for those of us who are smaller users of Github. You would expect Github to concentrate even harder on enterprise users now that we're not paying anymore.

I'm not complaining; MS should point GH at where the money is and there is competition you can switch to. I'm just not excited to save a few bucks a month given what will likely change.

mythz2• 6 years ago

Unlikely, freemium users would make up the overwhelming majority which has been getting more value & less reasons to need a paid subscription with each release since their acquisition of which I've yet to see any signs of neglecting their existing user base.

IMO Microsoft views GitHub's user base as potential Azure leads and Cloud computing as the current & future lucrative computing utilization business model who has been pulling out all stops to grow Azure as fast as possible.

They're fortunately rich & big enough that they don't need every one of their business to maximize their profits and are more than happy to leverage the synergies in their different assets to funnel more business into Azure.

cjdu• 6 years ago

Agreed. I cannot believe that GCP and AWS are so asleep at the wheel either. If I were them I would literally be throwing money at some of the GitHub folks to have them fix AWS or GCP.

And it was should have been rather obvious when GitHub released the beta of Actions a few years ago. Actions remains the most important thing GitHub has done, ever, in my opinion. It might take a few more years for people to fully realize what this could be. Hope GitHub doesn't screw it up!

irrational3• 6 years ago

What is Actions?

manigandham3• 6 years ago

There are dozens of CI/CD offerings and many are better designed than Github actions, including Gitlab's CI runners.

I don't see what paying Github would do for AWS or GCP. They both have their own code repos, build pipelines, container registries, and more. Even Azure has its own DevOps product.

jedberg2• 6 years ago

So far Microsoft isn’t taking customers away from AWS. They’re just expanding the total market.

But I do wonder if AWS will try to buy gitlab.

plange• 6 years ago

Gitlab states it wants to go public this year

https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/being-a-public-company/

oaiey5• 6 years ago

While Amazon tried to go into the private hosting and ci/cd market, they are not a dev tool company. Microsoft was born as one. When Amazon or Google would buy GitLab they would meaningless integrate it, reduce staff by half and then ruin it over time.

Maybe when Microsoft would have opened up some years earlier, Codeplex would not share the fate of Google Cloud.

skoskie• 6 years ago

God, I hope not. I like GitLab. I feel like Amazon would ruin it.

troughway• 6 years ago

Blazor is slow to start but I think long-term will be a game changer.

Someone12344• 6 years ago

You mean Microsoft's latest attempt at Web Forms/Silverlight, a product that yet again tries to muddy the separation between client and server execution contexts using magic.

Seems like every generation re-invents this idea, and every time it fails for the same fatal flaw: Illusions are just that, and you'll wind up hacking around the illusion if you want to do something not envisioned (or run into a bug in the secret sauce).

And before someone replies "it is nothing like Web Forms!!!" here's a direct quote from Blazor's homepage:

Blazor can run your client logic on the server. Client UI events are sent back to the server using SignalR - a real-time messaging framework. Once execution completes, the required UI changes are sent to the client and merged into the DOM.

That's literally how Web Forms worked.

oaiey5• 6 years ago

As a .NET fanboy: no it will not be a game changer. It is too fat and does not fit the rest of the web development model. Similar to Xamarin it will be a platform to run C# and .NET on. It will not be the native or best experience. It will be productive and enable cross form factor reuse of code. Not more, not less.

anderspitman3• 6 years ago

As a counterpoint, alternative options like Gitlab and Gitea seem to be doing pretty well.

I think the person who solves project discovery across all these services is going to make a killing.

adverbly2• 6 years ago

Great news for everyone

Not true.

The new Team plan will be a downgrade in specs from the old teams plan. For example it only includes 3000 Github Action minutes. The old plan included 10000. The next plan up would be > 2 * old price.

Source: https://github.com/pricing vs http://web.archive.org/web/20200406010552/https://github.com...

danpalmer2• 6 years ago

You can buy extra build minutes. The missing 7k minutes would cost $56, which means teams with 12 or more devs who are using the full 10k minutes will be better off. Smaller teams using more than 10k will be worse off.

It’s probably great news for the vast majority of teams.

tmpz22• 6 years ago

If you're like us and your entire Github usecase now fits within this free tier, it seems like you'll have to manually downgrade for it to take effect.

We’re also reducing the price of our paid Team plan from $9 per user/month to $4 per user/month, effective immediately. Existing customers will have their bills automatically reduced going forward.

I don't mind this - we'll likely stay on the paid plan anyways at that price point. But there you are.

dmw_ng• 6 years ago

This is an awesome change! In case anyone else was wondering, here's what you lose by cancelling:

    You are downgrading to GitHub Free
    After April 15, 2020, ... features and limits will change:

    Protected branches in private repos
    Draft PRs in private repos
    GitHub Pages in private repos (using 1)
    Wikis in private repos
    Code owners in private repos
    Multiple issue assignees in private repos
    Multiple PR assignees in private repos
    Code review automatic assignment in private repos
    Scheduled reminders in private repos
    Standard support
    2,000 minutes for GitHub Actions (currently 3,000)
    500MB of storage for packages (currently 2GB)

markphip2• 6 years ago

Why would protected branches go away?

jswny• 6 years ago

They are still a premium only feature.

tomduncalf• 6 years ago

There's a more detailed table at the bottom of https://github.com/pricing

j88439h84• 6 years ago

I hope GitHub allows protected branches in private repos. They're really important for everyone, not just enterprises.

Ayesh5• 6 years ago

They do, even at $4/mo/user plan.

closeparen3• 6 years ago

It's not clear to me whether this is possible under any configuration, but: can you enforce a two-person rule? I'd like all users to be able to merge accepted PRs, but no one should be able to push directly to master (unless an admin specifically elevates permissions to do that).

The only way I can think of is to have a bot be the only one with commit access, and to interact with the bot to do merging. But that seems pretty roundabout.

RandallBrown• 6 years ago

This sounds like how my previous company had GitHub configured.

We couldn't push to master, but we could merge accepted PRs. Not sure if this was done with GitHub or with Git itself.

judge20203• 6 years ago

Protected branches are the gateway to the multi-PR-review requirement, so you'd need the $4 GH Teams.

unknown_library• 6 years ago

To think that John Mayer predicted this in his song _Daughters_ 17 years ago:

[Individuals] become [small teams] who turn into [big enterprises] / So [GitHub] be good to your [individuals], too

Saaster8• 6 years ago

Hmm, literally the only paid feature left on the Teams plan we're using is Draft PRs. I am worried that as it looks like I won't need to pay for this service, that I, my team and my code will become the product to monetize at some point in the future.

hinkley2• 6 years ago

Elsewhere in the thread they say that their big customers earn them enough to keep the lights on.

I’m much happier with a sliding scale model than ad or spyware based models. The problem there is that my experiences have been that a lot of expensive scaling work that you might otherwise have deferred gets done for your biggest customers, and we don’t often get the revenue right to absorb that hit. More than once our biggest customers have ended up having the lowest margins, if you de-fuzz the math.

samirsd• 6 years ago

what is the font for the text in the upper left that says "The GitHub Blog"? Looks cool.

alecbenzer5• 6 years ago

Looks like it's one of these:

  .alt-mono-font {
      font-family: SFMono-Regular,Consolas,Liberation Mono,Menlo,Courier,monospace;
  }

If you find yourself wondering this a lot, https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/whatfont/jabopobgc... is a fun extnesion.

saagarjha3• 6 years ago

If anyone from GitHub's around in this thread, would you mind putting "ui-monospace" at the front of that list? SFMono-Regular no longer works in Safari because of fingerprinting concerns.

aembleton• 6 years ago

Depends on your system and what fonts you have installed. The font-family is `SFMono-Regular,Consolas,Liberation Mono,Menlo,Courier,monospace;`

In Firefox:

- Right click on the element, select `Inspect Element`

- Click on the Font tab on the right hand side and it will tell you which font is being used.

amyhorowitz• 6 years ago

Amazing - thank you!

microdrum2• 6 years ago

So it will be free until the competition dies, and then it will be expensive?

Like... everything MSFT and GOOG have ever done?

Great.

alecbenzer5• 6 years ago

When has GOOG made something expensive once the competition died?

I guess for that matter... also when has MSFT? I buy they have, but not aware of any examples of the top of my head.

microdrum2• 6 years ago

Um, AdWords.

patrickaljord• 6 years ago

Google Maps, translate etc.

seneca• 6 years ago

I've not been a big fan of GitHub historically, but the pace of innovation since the MS acquisition is really impressive. I wonder how much of that is MS influence vs just MS funding.

lucb1e3• 6 years ago

That's odd, it's the opposite for me. I did like GitHub, but then setup a Gitea and made sure to figure out how to move things over (even if I haven't done it since they haven't really given me a reason) after Microsoft acquired it. Now I watch every move with a weary eye, though truth be told so far it's going fine (mostly by being hands-off, of course).

I do assume a lot of this is their own money, but with the financial security that Microsoft offers you just can't do much wrong. Even without actual money actually moving, it might still be MS funding that makes the difference.

burkestar• 6 years ago

Can you please prioritize stability of your SaaS offering for paying customers? Our dev team and infra gets impacted seemingly every week with github outages, and it especially seems to correlate with delivery of new features. Thanks!

rjvani• 6 years ago

yeet

orliesaurus• 6 years ago

Finally & thank you, I oughta say!

Someone12344• 6 years ago

I think GitHub are doing well, but one cannot deny that GitLab has carved out a fantastic niche (on-prem, private instances, OSS, etc) that GitHub doesn't compete in. So while I agree GitHub are "the" company to beat, I think GitLab is doing a good job of contrasting.

PS - No affiliation with anyone.

muglug• 6 years ago

GitHub absolutely does compete for on-prem installation.

Source: we use an on-prem installation at Vimeo

ascendantlogic• 6 years ago

Not at the $0 price point they don't.

wlll• 6 years ago

Github Enterprise is on-premises:

https://github.com/enterprise

That only really leaves the fact that its OSS that differentiates Gitlab in your list. Not comparing the two, just making sure you're aware.

jjeaff2• 6 years ago

But you can also run Gitlab on prem for free.

taytus• 6 years ago

"PS - No affiliation with anyone."

Sure, that's why the throwaway account.

closeparen3• 6 years ago

Six years old with 33k karma. What's your definition of a throwaway account?

justusthane• 6 years ago

Account created in 2014 with 33.5k karma...hardly seems like a throwaway account.

dang2• 6 years ago

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

sytse2• 6 years ago

Thanks for the kind words!

For developers everywhere competition is great. We recently made 18 new features free and open source https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/03/30/new-features-to-cor... and today Github with an improved free plan and their team plan came down to the exact same price as our most affordable plan. BTW Maybe an idea to rename their lowest tier from team, may we suggest bronze? :)

Since you mentioned contrasting here is a quick take on the features that you lose if you go from a GitHub Pro account to a Free account, I got the list from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867974 :

    Protected branches in private repos => Free on GItLab
    Draft PRs in private repos => Free on GItLab
    GitHub Pages in private repos (using 1) => => Free on GItLab
    Wikis in private repos => Free on GItLab
    Code owners in private repos => Bronze on GItLab
    Multiple issue assignees in private repos => Bronze on GItLab
    Multiple PR assignees in private repos => Bronze on GItLab
    Code review automatic assignment in private repos => ?
    Scheduled reminders in private repos => TODOs are free on GitLab
    Standard support => Bronze on GitLab

For a complete comparison across all the stages (like monitor and defend) please see https://about.gitlab.com/devops-tools/github-vs-gitlab.html

mgw• 6 years ago

One big differentiator that GitHub has vs GitLab is the availability of monthly pricing. This was a deal breaker against GitLab for us.

samanthalee2334• 6 years ago

GitLab community advocate here, wanted to see if you're interested in participating in our #GitChallenge - If you send us your review of GitLab vs GitHub (whether positive/negative/neutral), we'll send you some swag. Here's some more info if you're interested! https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/04/14/github-free-for-tea...

buremba2• 6 years ago

Great to hear that! One last thing that would make Github a better alternative to Gitlab for teams is the self-hosted runners for organizations IMO.

reilly3000• 6 years ago

https://help.github.com/en/actions/hosting-your-own-runners/...

buremba2• 6 years ago

Note: Currently, you can add a self-hosted runner to a single repository. The ability to add and manage self-hosted runners for an entire organization will come in a future release.

Still waiting for it for the last few months. :)

samanthalee2334• 6 years ago

Thanks for sharing this feedback, we're doing a #GitChallenge right now (I'm a community advocate at GitLab) asking community members to send us reviews of GitLab vs GitHub (whether positive/negative/neutral) https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/04/14/github-free-for-tea...

oliwarner2• 6 years ago

Thank in large part to GitLab for pushing the market forward on affordable collaborative development.

We moved across when GH did their pricing changed. Free CI/CD well before "actions". Never looked back.

Ayesh5• 6 years ago

Bitbucket offered free repos before Gitlab, but Gitlab did an amazing job making it affordable and as good as githubs offerings.

It's always pleasantly surprisingly to go to Gitlab and see how much they continue to improve.

oliwarner2• 6 years ago

Bitbucket was certainly more generous than GitHub at the time. I used them too. Their problem was the pricing structure. The break between "free" and "all your money, please" felt pretty harsh. They always appeared to be pushing very industrial companion tooling (eg Jira) which might have suited enterprise customers but wasn't very helpful to a freelancer. That's pretty common in SaaS. Enterprise is easier than volume.

By contrast GitLab's tiers are... Cheap. And it's perfectly feasible to do professional, modern CI flows on their free tier.

It'll be interesting to see what happens next.

jb775• 6 years ago

Sounds like Microsoft is creating a new branch attempting to replicate the Atlassian business model. First get developers hooked on GitHub, then build GitHub integrations into enterprise software, then let developers make the sale to their own employers (primarily because developers like the little green activity boxes).

ChrisMarshallNY• 6 years ago

Thanks. I'm not surprised by this. I know this isn't a "mainstream" opinion, but I was fairly happy when MS brought GitHub. I think that the Nadella MS is much more streamlined than the old "Enemy of the State" version that got our undies in a bunch, back in the last century.

alexbanks• 6 years ago

I just realized I've been paying for Github pro for like a year for absolutely no reason at all.

Old_Thrashbarg3• 6 years ago

Ask for a refund of all the charges, people don't realize that a lot of companies do that these days. You should be upset if they refuse (assuming you genuinely weren't using their premium features).

ciarancour• 6 years ago

My legacy silver org plan (20 private repos) only shows a migration plan to teams at $4/user, is there something I'm missing? The new free tier seems effectively the same or better.

jrochkind1• 6 years ago

We’re happy to announce we’re making private repositories with unlimited collaborators available to all GitHub accounts.

Huh, I thought github made private repos available to free github accounts a while ago?

Looking for historical announcement, aha, it was not with "unlimited collaborators" before.

From Jan 2019:

GitHub Free now includes unlimited private repositories. For the first time, developers can use GitHub for their private projects with up to three collaborators per repository for free.

https://github.blog/2019-01-07-new-year-new-github/

So what's new is dropping the 3-collaborators-per-repo restriction.

I hadn't actually realized this restriction was there, apparently I've never used a private github repo in a free account! And the messaging from a year ago stuck in my head as "private repos are free on github now", I thought they had already done what they did today, oops.

Above natfriedman writes:

We've wanted to make this change for the last 18 months,

So apparently they had wanted to do this even in Jan 2019 when they did something less than this...

vaylian• 6 years ago

I wonder if this will lead to more closed source software being written. I don't mean by MS specifically, but overall.

lucb1e3• 6 years ago

Same. I liked that GitHub really nudged you to be open unless you were willing to pay to keep it closed (well, sure, you can go ahead and setup your own server or find a competitor you like, but in the base form, if you want to be part of the ecosystem, be open) and am wondering just how many student projects are now staying behind locked doors because GitHub wants to catch bigger fish.

Not saying they're a philanthropic organisation that should promote open source to the kids or anything, just agreeing about an almost certain side effect.

DeathArrow• 6 years ago

Many comments are saying that Microsoft is doing this move to help cross-selling Azure. I don't see many users of free tier willing to spend money on Azure.

manigandham3• 6 years ago

Note: the minimum of 5 seats is removed so if you're using less than that then you'll have to manually remove those seats to avoid being billed.

vbezhenar3• 6 years ago

This announce is not clear to me, as to what really changed. Can I have protected branch in my private repository now?

kintalo• 6 years ago

No, it looks like protected branches are not part of the "Free" tier. It's introduced in the Teams pricing and up.

vbezhenar3• 6 years ago

So basically they removed restriction of 3 collaborators from free tier and that's it. Well, pretty useful for a lot of teams, I guess.

adverbly2• 6 years ago

Bit disappointed that this isn't an "Everyone Wins" pricing change.

The new plan is a downgrade from the old one. For example, it will only include 3000 Github Action minutes. The old plan included 10000. The next plan up would be > 2 * old price.

Source: https://github.com/pricing vs http://web.archive.org/web/20200406010552/https://github.com...

Guvante• 6 years ago

It depends how many users you had. https://github.com/features/actions#pricing-details shows that if you have 12 members you can buy the difference in Linux Github Actions and still get ahead. The price on Mac is prohibitive though and yeah you definitely lose out there as I don't think many people on that plan have 120 people.

Wehrdo• 6 years ago

I hope developers still default to making their personal repos public after this change. One of the fringe benefits of GitHub is the ability to search across the entire site for uses of obscure, poorly-documented APIs. Defaulting to most repos becoming private would greatly hinder this.

roryokane• 6 years ago

I agree that’s a potential concern, but you’re worrying about it a year too late. Individual developers have been able to make repos private on the free plan since January 2019: https://github.blog/2019-01-07-new-year-new-github/. This announcement only affects the cost of private repos for teams of collaborators.

hank_z• 6 years ago

I am very thankful to have GitHub on this planet

binarymax• 6 years ago

The way I read the title and heading, it sounded like teams was now free.

This messaging is very confusing. Teams is not being made free, you need to pay $4 per user. A better message would be: "we're reducing your price to $4pp, and giving you access to more features."

vesinisa• 6 years ago

Ugh.. did you notice that they also changed what the Free plan includes? Many of the premium features, including unlimited private repos for an org, are now included in the free plan.

I am actually going through the list and thinking my company might be able to do with the free plan from now on.

dang2• 6 years ago

Normally we'd change the title to be less confusing, but in this case it's a bit tricky, for reasons I've explained here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Ensorceled2• 6 years ago

Ouch. Just paid for a yearly pro license at the end of March.

danpalmer2• 6 years ago

They’re refunding pro-rata.

Ensorceled2• 6 years ago

Nice! Lot's of issues relating to pricing and plans right now so it is not clear that was happening.

veeralpatel979• 6 years ago

Actions, Packages, Sponsors, free unlimited private repos, this...Microsoft's GitHub acquisition has turned out really great so far in my view.

notokay• 6 years ago

Embrace, extend, and extinguish.

Microsoft is still a company, that called linux a cancer. No trust at all.

devit2• 6 years ago

Probably not very smart to use this feature, since your so-called "private" repository is an exploit or a leaking employee away from becoming public.

Instead, use a self-hosted Gitlab instance or similar, preferably with an external firewall preventing outbound and non-team inbound connections if feasible.

ectospheno• 6 years ago

Your proposed solution handles neither the rogue employee nor the exploit scenario. It does incur a lot of additional cost in maintenance.

xapata3• 6 years ago

How would that solve the "leaking employee" case?

devit2• 6 years ago

Sorry, I meant "leaking employee of GitHub", not "leaking employee of your organization".

scarface74• 6 years ago

This isn’t really surprising. Microsoft has had a free equivalent for years with Azure Devops (formerly known as Visual Studio Team Service). Azure Devops has hosted build and deployment orchestration with either hosted build servers or local build servers using local agents. It also has private Nuget repositories, project planning, bug tracking etc.

Azure Devops deployment tools are (were? It’s been a couple of years) just as good for deploying to AWS as AWS’s own tools.

kevindong• 6 years ago

By and far the main difference between 'Team' ($4/person/month) and 'Enterprise' ($21/person/month) is SSO/LDAP [0]. The SSO tax is real [1].

[0] https://github.com/pricing

[1] https://sso.tax/

johnmarcus• 6 years ago

Ha! sso.tax, what a great site. As an IT person I always thought this same thing with SSO - even if you have an identity provider, it's often under utilized because nearly everything else needs to go to enterprise pricing for SAML auth. I wouldn't mind paying $1-2 more per user/platform, but as sso.tax tallies, the price jump is often much more.

chacham15• 6 years ago

IMO the biggest difference between the two is self-hosting which makes sense for the price difference.

Even setting that aside, SSO is a feature which is very meaningful to businesses and relatively meaningless to individuals. Because of that its often used to differentiate between the customers. This differentiation results in individuals getting a discount at the expense of the businesses; which to me makes sense.

efrafa• 6 years ago

I get where you are comming from, but from sales perspective, charging extra for SSO makes total sense.

oars• 6 years ago

On sso.tax, it states that "Single sign-on (SSO) is a mechanism for outsourcing the authentication for your website (or other product) to a third party identity provider, such as Google, Facebook, Okta, PingFederate, etc."

Isn't this the definition of Federation, rather than SSO?

adityasaky• 6 years ago

As I understand it, federation enables two separate instances of some particular service to interact. They can still use single sign-on independently for their own authentication needs.

3xblah• 6 years ago

Would it be fair to explain this move as a "user retention" tactic. Perhaps it becomes a more difficult decision for teams to close out their paid accounts, even amidst an economic downturn, when the fees are removed.

One could argue some MSFT acquisitions have been focused on acquiring large swaths of exisiting users moreso than acquiring revenue streams or work product. Github could have been one such acquisition.

colechristensen• 6 years ago

Maybe GitLab is starting to seem like more and more competition so they're having to add more free features to compete for users.

m0zg• 6 years ago

I'd much rather they threw in more LFS storage on my $7 plan. But I suppose they know that already if they're moving towards a more "freemium" model. First hit is free, and then pay through the nose for LFS.

tumidpandora• 6 years ago

What's the catch?

hestefisk• 6 years ago

Good on MS / Github for doing this.

prirun• 6 years ago

437 comments, 6 from Nat Friedman. That seems a little weird for an AMA discussion.

saagarjha3• 6 years ago

I don't think this was really supposed to be an AMA.

randomsearch• 6 years ago

First you win the developers.

Then you get the apps.

Then you win the consumers.

How long to the next Microsoft Phone?

Wouldn’t want to be Google.

Old_Thrashbarg3• 6 years ago

All the places Microsoft has shipped awesome products and won the market didn't have as strong monopoly (or duopoly) effects as in the mobile space. I don't think we'll see a MS phone any time soon unfortunately.

DenisM• 6 years ago

Bitbucket is in trouble now. With no more paying customer for Git and no support for Mercurial what are they going to do?

vorpalhex• 6 years ago

Continue selling Jira plans.

Spivak4• 6 years ago

Yeah, I just see BitBucket as a value-add to sell Jira and Confluence licenses. Some people really like having all that stuff integrated.

Our team doesn't really see the value when it's just fine to have links to PRs or commit hashes but hey, to each their own.

acdha• 6 years ago

They lost that battle a decade ago. I would previously have suggested some kind of enterprise devops offering pairing with their other services but Microsoft will probably get there faster and better.

Old_Thrashbarg3• 6 years ago

That's awesome, I feel like many companies increase prices over time trying to squeeze more revenue, but that usually requires monopoly power.

I remember from economics that in an idealized, efficient, large market, the price of a product should tend towards the marginal cost of production. In the case of SaaS, that's almost $0 (server costs being fairly low), so SaaS products ideally should all get cheaper over time. Good to see theory matching real-world here.

Corrado2• 6 years ago

I'm confused about the "Collaborators for private repositories" feature. The Free plan shows an "unlimited" number of collaborators but each of the paid plans show "Up to org size". What does "Up to org size" mean? Which organization are you talking about? Does this mean that the free plans have more functionality?

tarun_anand• 6 years ago

Hi Nat, finally MS responded to the Gitlab threat. Recently Gitlab has announced that they would be making a bunch of products free.

"We're open sourcing rich functionality across Plan, Create, Verify, Package, Release, Configure, and Defend."

https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/03/30/new-features-to-cor...

It's good to see that MS has joined the party.

Are there any plans to make GitHub itself available for self-hosting? I am not sure but the go-to place for open source software cannot be closed source.

Cheers,

Tarun

alex_young• 6 years ago

Compare this with Microsoft’s other notable purchase of recent years, LinkedIn.

At LinkedIn they are tightening all of the screws and extracting cash from all comers.

What is different about GitHub?

My guess is GitLab.

This is an old strategy for Microsoft. They used to call it Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Kliment• 6 years ago

Linkedin was always a predatory organization, and now they are empowered to do what they actually wanted to do without the risk of going bankrupt if they miscalculate. Github is also empowered to do what they actually wanted to do without the risk of going bankrupt if they miscalculate. This is what you end up. You can't fundamentally change an organization by acquisition without destroying it. For example, Skype was destroyed like that. Github and Linkedin were not, and you are seeing them acting with fewer constraints. Linkedin is using their newfound power for evil, Github much less so.

lerpapoo• 6 years ago

wtf i love microsoft, now.

epigramx• 6 years ago

Nice, now you can share all your secrets with Microsoft, for free.

Rainymood• 6 years ago

Here's a little quiz, which of the three phases are we in now?

a) Embrace

b) Extend

c) Extinguish

craigds• 6 years ago

However, looks like the Actions minutes included in the Team plan have dropped from 10K to 3K, so if you're currently paying for a team plan and using Actions your costs might not decrease, or might increase a bit

cryptos• 6 years ago

What do you think will be the response of GitLab?

ahuang1018• 6 years ago

https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/04/14/github-free-for-tea...

wildpeaks2• 6 years ago

Is it 4$/user on top of the minimum 20$ (which includes 5 users) ? Because my billing still says 20$/month and I have less than 5 users.

gilbertbw• 6 years ago

You have to go in and reduce your seat count on the billing page

wildpeaks2• 6 years ago

Thanks, there is indeed a "Remove Seats" option now (there used to be only "Downgrade to Free"), exactly what I was looking for.

nemacol• 6 years ago

This is great and I will most likely take advantage of this new offering, but I cant help but wonder why.

"everyone deserves GitHub" is marketing, not a corporate strategy.

How does GitHub stand to benefit from this change? How does more non-paying users help the company?

I am not trying to be a tinfoil hat jerk here. Life in the age of information has taught us all that (again) "nothing is free". So what am I paying here?

rampatra• 6 years ago

This is great news. I can now move some of my projects from BitBucket to GitHub.

However, I wish GitHub supported GitHub Pages for private repositories for free as well.

rynop• 6 years ago

Are you grandfathered into the 10,000 free Action minutes for paid Teams? 10k -> 3k drop is pretty substantial.

ainam48948• 6 years ago

Yeah, I just checked my email, and I remember reading this. This is pretty cool.

classified• 6 years ago

Well, hosting "open-source" software on a commercial platform does create something of a cognitive dissonance, doesn't it?

foxknox• 6 years ago

This is really great news. I've been happy paying for GitHub for years and it was already great value but this makes it even better.

GitHub is now free for teams

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