If Dropbox Used GitHub’s Pricing Plan

http://usersinhell.com/dropbox-github-pricing/

by joshuacc • 15 years ago

295 133 15 years ago

zavulon2• 15 years ago

And that's reason #1 we don't use Github. Assembla lets us host all of our git, SVN and Mercurial repos for free.. currently we have 32 and counting, no issues ever, without paying a single penny.

thirsteh• 15 years ago

Maybe, but GitHub's pricing model encourages sharing, and that's a good thing. Think of how many repositories might've been private and not benefited thousands of people.

Granted, the prices might be steep/strange, but I see no problem in charging for things that people don't want to share on a social code sharing site.

Maro• 15 years ago

How much sharing actually goes on? (And just because somebody impulse clones a repo doesn't actually mean there's meaningful sharing going on.)

Dove2• 15 years ago

Well, anyone GitHub's pricing model has driven over to Assembla isn't sharing.

zavulon2• 15 years ago

While I agree in some cases it's a good thing, but for projects that you do for clients, privacy is paramount

mnutt2• 15 years ago

Isn't there some value in paying for a service that you use and value?

Dove2• 15 years ago

I just made the same tradeoff yesterday.

I'd love to use Github and all, Github's cool. But I can't justify paying that much for private repositories. Even with all of the annoying junk on the site, Assembla's free plan won hands down.

mst• 15 years ago

The crucial difference is that in the case of github, their business is github.

In the case of Assembla, their business is consulting and the site is a loss leader for that division.

This quite effectively explains both the pricing and feature set differences.

kenneth_reitz• 15 years ago

You get what you pay for.

canistr2• 15 years ago

This is why BitBucket's price plan makes more sense.

chaselee• 15 years ago

Totally agree and they also have free unlimited plans for academia and students :)

bphogan3• 15 years ago

http://github.com/edu has information about educational plans, including small free ones for students.

patio112• 15 years ago

Dropbox is targeting a B2C market and started with poor twenty-somethings.

Github, and virtually every other thing that costs more than $20 a month, targets primarily a B2B market. It might be popular with some local poor 20-somethings, but honestly, you're just an infection vector to get your day job on board.

The pricing is designed to extract maximum value out of business customers. If they have 125 simultaneous projects, they officially have More Money Than God. "The price of a residential Internet connection" is not a pricing anchor to them. (Should they need one, they're probably going to be persuaded by "We have 500 man-years of labor in our projects, one man-month costs us $15k, lemme break out Excel for a minute, oh it seems all my options cost pigeon poop.")

I strongly, strongly encourage you to listen to the Mixergy video about Wufoo or talk to anyone who runs a SaaS business if you do not understand where most of the money is likely getting made. That topmost plan which costs $$$$$ prints money, primarily from people who don't need all that it offers and couldn't care less because it costs less than pigeon poop on their scales.

If you don't use Github for your projects because $100 is a lot of money for you that's perfectly fine for Github because it does not make them meaningfully worse off.

Sapient3• 15 years ago

I assume that what the poor twenty-somethings actually want is the interface since alternatives like Gitosis and Gitolite are cheap and cheery, but unpopular amongst that crowd. If that is the case however, then I am surprised noone has made a FOSS clone duplicating the interface ideas.

However your argument doesn't explain why there is not even a single private repo free tier. That wouldn't canibalize their B2B tiers at all, while keeping a lot of very small developers happy.

patio112• 15 years ago

It's very easy to message "Free for OSS, paid for other folks", and it prevents you from having a failure to convert moment when a) you start using Github internally at a job/startup/etc and b) you need to add the second repo. If you then have to go get authorization for a purchase, you might do something stupid like a) migrate or b) cheat, rather than go through the authorization process, because you've got work to do today.

It is much easier to say "Look, you know Github, you like Github. You want to use Github for work? Get them to fork out for it. No, not fork(1). fork($)"

Hypothetically suppose a particular company's advantage is UI/UX. If this is true, that company is in less than zero danger of getting FOSSed.

tresta2• 15 years ago

gitorious is a pretty good FOSS alternative to github. It doesn't support private repositories at all, but you can host your own server and make it not public (which is what I'm doing for my projects).

rmc2• 15 years ago

I assume that what the poor twenty-somethings actually want is the interface since alternatives like Gitosis and Gitolite are cheap and cheery, but unpopular amongst that crowd

Don't forget the network effects. With github it's very easy to contribute code to another project using github.

It's like Facebook vs. $UNPOPULAR_SOCIAL_NETWORK. Sure, you might not like facebook's page layout and $OTHER_NETWORK has a nicer layout, but you can only take to you mum on facebook, so it doesn't matter.

randoom• 15 years ago

Not to disregard what you wrote, I just wanted to add that I don't think this post wanted to objectively compare the github and dropbox pricing models.

IMO he just wanted to show how ridiculous (in his opinion) the github model is by applying it to dropbox.

AndrewWarner• 15 years ago

Thanks. I get a lot of crap from people who think I should push back on guests based on their pricing or other decisions. But I prefer to study why people make the decisions they make and how the results turn out.

watty3• 15 years ago

It's not uncommon for small businesses and contractors to have 30+ repositories, each of which are very small. It doesn't mean they have more money than god, they're being screwed by the pricing model.

We switched to a different host that allows 10 "active" repositories and unlimited archived. In other words, Github is worse off because they are losing business by failing to create a viable plan for all audiences.

Edit: Of course we could purchase their most expensive plan and live happily (but broke). My point was that their pricing model works well for most companies but not for contractors or small businesses with many small projects.

tptacek3• 15 years ago

You can literally install a fully private instance of Github on your own network for less than the cost of a laptop per person†. That is the absolute most expensive option Github offers, we took it, and we don't feel remotely "screwed". This whole thread is a perfect illustration of why HN is a terrible place to get pricing advice.

Salary is the gating cost factor for software companies. For things that actually work and actually improve the working day, it is simply not worth dickering over things that cost tiny fractions of what fully loaded headcount costs.

Now, it's absolutely true that not everything that costs $Enterprise/yr really works or improves lives, and you can't go shouldering these costs willy-nilly. But some things clearly are worth it. For a lot of companies, Github is one of those things.

If it's not worth that much for you, Github isn't screwing you. They simply aren't selling to you. Go somewhere else. But think about not hurling epithets at them, just because they aren't catering to people who derive less value from them than their core customers.

† (Depending on how often you refresh laptops; we do it a lot.)

mnutt2• 15 years ago

Now that I think of it, it would actually be pretty easy to write a github-archive tool that would clone a repo, compress it, push to s3, then delete from github using the API. It could even do the reverse, as well.

apsurd2• 15 years ago

At first glance it would seem like github is "leaving money on the table". But if Patrick is right then their time is better spent strategizing maximum value from the high end rather than devote time to getting your $10 dollars.

30+ repos in your case would be the Gold plan @ $100.00 a month. How much do you think is fair? If you have 30 client repos per month please tell me you are charging more per client than the $40 dollars it's going to take to host the project in github for a year.

And if you aren't making money hand over fist with these hundreds of apps people are apparently creating and hosting on github .... make them public. I have 13 repos in github, all public. Most of them are all attempts at commercial products. Nobody gives two peanuts about my code.

ZachPruckowski• 15 years ago

Obviously I can't speak to your financial situation, but a year's worth of GitHub Gold is about a man-week of overhead from an entry level person, so if it makes one person 2% faster (or two people 1% faster) then it's worth it.

shaggyfrog• 15 years ago

Do you mean one of these videos?

http://mixergy.com/wufoo-kevin-hale/

http://mixergy.com/wufoo-sold-for-35-mil-heres-the-story-beh...

tzs• 15 years ago

> The pricing is designed to extract maximum value out of business customers. If they have 125 simultaneous projects, they officially have More Money Than God.

Have you used Git? Perhaps the most natural way to use it is to have each thing that is independently deployed have its own repository. So, where I work, in my one-man department, I have 40 repositories, and that is so low because there are some things that are in one big repository that should logically be separate repositories.

For instance, our internal reporting system is one repository now. Many of the reports in it should be separate repositories. If those were all split out in the way that best fits the way the code is actually related, developed, and deployed, I'd have about 40 more repositories.

I also have a bunch of tools and scripts that are not under source code control, but should be. If I got that stuff organized into logically related projects, I'd have maybe another 40 repositories.

And all of this only needs maybe 300 megabytes of storage. I'm not using Github for work not because we cannot afford $200/month (we could, although we are about as far from "More Money Than God" as you can get), but because no way am I spending $200/month for 300 megabytes of storage.

adriand2• 15 years ago

> So, where I work, in my one-man department, I have 40 repositories, and that is so low because there are some things that are in one big repository that should logically be separate repositories.

In my small (12-person) design agency we have 244 repositories and we have a custom plan with Github just to pay for it. Other than rent and hosting, it's the most expensive thing that we pay for on a monthly basis.

I'd like to just stop using Github for older projects but it's not worth the headache on the off-chance that an old client pops up and needs a five-minute change that we can't then just cap deploy.

I understand the business side of this, of course. We're paying the money, so it must be a good idea for Github. However, we do have the time and inclination to find a cheaper way of doing it, and once we do, will Github's pricing be in their best interest? I guess time will tell.

ToastOpt• 15 years ago

Anyone considered the possibility that github doesn't have the tooling to charge by disk usage? That would practically require them to add quotas, and tracing information so you could determine (read: audit) where space is used in your repositories.

ghshephard• 15 years ago

Strangely enough - as one who works in a midsized enterprise company, I think, sometimes, the approach is almost the opposite. When evaluating these services, a conversation like the following takes place:

  IT Manager: "I'd like to start hosting our repositories on GitHub"
  IT Director: "What's our CapEx/OpEx exposure, our 2011 non-headcount 
               Budget is getting capped at $12 million."
  IT Manager:" Well, the Platinum Plan is $200/month."
  IT Director: Stares for a second at the manager.  "Why are you wasting my time.  
               Just put it on your P-Card and move on."

Seriously - I'm guessing many of of you don't have exposure to how much money all these thousands and thousands of companies pay for incredibly crappy software that does very little, but is the "Safe" Enterprise choice. If GitHub can win those accounts, great - but I'm dubious that at $200/month there is any cost review at all - they could increase their charges by 10x and _still_ not lose more than a couple of enterprise business deals on cost.

I sometimes wonder if Atlassian hurts itself by charging less than $100K for its products, and whether they would be able to pick up the large enterprise deals if they could figure out how to put together $800K RFPs. Their competition certainly does for software that is significantly inferior.

rapind• 15 years ago

IT Director: "Does it have an SLA?"

IT Manager: "Huh? Never saw one, let me check.... nope. SLA is soo Web 1.0. Look at all these features, and it's cheap!"

IT Director: "Then we can't use it."

IT Manager: "Grumble"

ovi256• 15 years ago

Re: Atlassian: putting together and pushing $800k RFPs through the sales cycle requires hiring sales people and is a distinctly different flavor of business from "monthly billing CC# of pseudo-anonymous customers we never met and at most talked with through email". The second is a favourite of engineer-founded modern startups. No messy customer relations to deal with outside of support contact, selling through data-driven conversion pipelines. Not one of the old-school golf-playing suit wearing dudes around. Basically a "by engineers for engineers" company. Note that I'm not deriding it, I'm just trying to capture its flavor.

I'm not sure about Atlassian, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're like that, given that they behave like one.

skrebbel• 15 years ago

It's called "Software as a Service" for a reason. Hint: it's not "Data storage as a Service".

rmc2• 15 years ago

Not really a fair comparison. GitHub is aimed at open source development, and is doing quite well at that. So for github you want your data to be visible to everyone in the world.

Imagine if someone thought a blogging software was like a diary in days gone by. "You mean everyone can see what I write in my diary?! How terrible!"

programminggeek4• 15 years ago

Acutally, github is aimed at making money proving awesome code hosting. They host open source stuff because it is a GREAT way to acquire new paid customers. It's the freemium model done really well.

github is still a business and at the end of the day they need to make money.

masnick• 15 years ago

This is why https://codeplane.com/ was created. 2GB worth of private repos for $9/month.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2674417 for the discussion of Codeplane on HN.

slig2• 15 years ago

Are you the owner? How does your product differ from RepositoryHosting.com ?

programminggeek4• 15 years ago

Nerds are so cheap it's ridiculous.

Let's look at the standard plans for smaller teams - it maxes at $22/month for 20 private repos and 10 collaborators. Not bad.

On the business side the max is 125 repos for $200/month.

Even in the midwest a full time dev costs say at least $4,000 a month. Assuming you have a team of 10-20 devs, that is what $40,000 - $80,000 a month.

So, at the high end to keep your team of 10-20 devs happy it costs you an extra $200 a month on top of the $40k+ you are spending in salary and so forth. Drop in the bucket.

And if you're an indie dev and you can't afford $22/month for awesome code hosting for all your projects, you are the kind of cheapskate that you might as well look elsewhere. Also, there are a TON of options out there like bitbucket, assembla, and so on if you want "cheaper" hosting.

Seriously, you could put out a crappy android app that makes you $100 a month in a weekend and that pays for your github hosting.

Why complain?

a3camero3• 15 years ago

This is what the internet does.

I've grown up with a price point of $0.

saturn3• 15 years ago

Well you're just going to have to un-grow out of that delusion because in the real world absolutely nothing is free.

wccrawford3• 15 years ago

The problem is the cost per repo... Some people would rather have a lot of small repos to hold all their random stuff, instead of trying to stuff them into a larger repo to save money.

I have personal projects at home that I've started and don't want to release yet. (Maybe not ever.) I'd love to put them on someone else's machine as a backup. But at those prices, it's not worth it.

Even as a business, there's probably a lot of little utilities that could have their own repos, but they don't get modified much, so they don't really need them. Github isn't an option for that scenario.

As for 'Why complain?'? Because money doesn't really grow on trees. Rich people get rich by spending their money wisely.

TylerE• 15 years ago

So buy a $10/month 256MB VPS with 80g of diskspace and go nuts.

dasil0032• 15 years ago

A small personal project without collaboration does not really get much value out of GitHub anyway. If you want a backup just rsync it somewhere.

scythe• 15 years ago

>I have personal projects at home that I've started and don't want to release yet. (Maybe not ever.)

Who cares if someone sees it? Are you planning on selling it?

jleader• 15 years ago

"As for 'Why complain?'? Because money doesn't really grow on trees. Rich people get rich by spending their money wisely."

Complaining and spending money wisely are independent activities; you can do either one without doing the other.

nirvdrum5• 15 years ago

I've long since given up on this one, but the reason I care is my open source work is on GitHub and my business work is on GitHub. I can't justify the cost for my private, personal projects. git encourages you to create repositories for everything. GitHub effectively penalizes you for having a lot of repositories.

As an example, I have a repo for just about every project in every class I did in grad school. I don't want to make that public because other students shouldn't access it. We can argue whether I need to save it at all, but disk space is cheap, so why not archive it? I easily have 50+ personal, private repositories. Well more than my business account. And as such, they're not on GitHub.

Ideally I'd have a common place for everything. Ideally I'd pay for "active" projects or for disk space. But that's not how it works and it's not likely to ever change. And the pricing just doesn't scale for personal accounts.

programminggeek4• 15 years ago

What I end up doing is putting my "active" projects on github and anything that I'm archiving on like bitbucket or assmbla or just zip it up and put it on S3 or Dropbox.

If I found myself with more than say 5 active projects, I probably need to focus more or charge more.

Homunculiheaded2• 15 years ago

Even if it's not the intention of the github creators, I think this is secretly one of the biggest strength of github. The reason is because it encourages you to publish incomplete or less than perfect code. How many times have you heard "yea I definitely plan to open source that project... I just need to clean up the code a bit" and since programmers are never happy with their code they never release. This coupled with the existence of project pages means that you can easily pick out the 'finished product' code from the 'how the hell do i solve this small problem' code

jamie_ca• 15 years ago

If you're not going to be actively developing it, or sharing it with anyone, why on earth would you want it up on github anyway? Their value-add is collaboration, as a sole developer on a personal project I can't think of anything useful they bring to the table.

"a common place for everything" for me is ~/code, which is included in my automated daily backups.

watty3• 15 years ago

You're missing the small contractors with 20+ repos, any of which may need to be opened and edited at any given time. Why should they pay $100/month when they really only need 2-3 active repositories and consume a fraction of the filespace?

I'm not saying they can't, I'm saying the model doesn't fit this type of user. Of course they can find another provider (we did), but I think Github needs more models to fit the different types of companies.

allwein2• 15 years ago

Do what I do, factor in the cost of Github hosting into the costs for your clients. The marginal cost for an extra repo on Github is $5/month on a business plan or $2 a month for the smaller plans. As part of the contract for each of my projects, I note that there is a $100 maintenance fee per year to keep the project in an active state, and that any project that becomes archived will have a $250 fee to reinstate as active. So every month I send a letter and invoice to all my clients who haven't had work on a specific project done in the past year to bill them for the maintenance fee or give them the option of archiving the project. I actually have a few clients who pay the fee every year even though I haven't done work on a project in several years, because it's worth it to them to have it available immediately if they need something done in the future.

tptacek3• 15 years ago

$48,000/yr isn't a fully loaded developer in the midwest. Mark that number up 30%. And that's not a senior developer salary. Now move to California or NYC. Fully loaded, FTEs can approach 200k.

icebraining2• 15 years ago

Calling people who can't afford $22/month 'cheapskates' is very snobby of you. I can't afford $22/month, and it's not because I spend it on luxuries.

>Seriously, you could put out a crappy android app that makes you $100 a month in a weekend and that pays for your github hosting.

Yes? And should I test it against what, my six year old Nokia phone? Besides, some of us prefer to use lesser code hosts than pushing crap onto people just to make a few cheap bucks.

I agree with you that people shouldn't complain. Personally, I just took on Amazon's offer of a free EC2 microinstance for a year and use it both as a dev platform as well as my git repositories hosting.

Game_Ender2• 15 years ago

What about using something like Bitbucket with the git-hg bridge?

angryasian• 15 years ago

for a self proclaimed person named "programminggeek", you should know that we're not cheap, its just the cost vs effort. I could easily spend half a day installing git on a server backing up to s3 regularly or actually storing git repositories on s3. The cost of gihub has to be cheaper than the effort for me to do the equivalent.

davidedicillo• 15 years ago

I don't mind GitHub pricing, but I wish it had a "Archive" option for the private repo, for those projects that aren't active anymore but still want to keep the repo on GitHub just in case. And of course the archived repos wouldn't count towards your total repo unless they are reactivated.

rubyrescue• 15 years ago

agreed, but I just put 'archived' git repos in, ironically, dropbox, and delete the private repo on github.

masklinn• 15 years ago

Have you considered suggesting it to github?

nirvdrum5• 15 years ago

I suggested that very thing. Several times over the years. I suggested it to the CodaSet guys, too. Apparently there's enough of a market without this to not warrant adding the new pricing option.

DevX101• 15 years ago

Why don't you just call one repo "Archive" and put all your old stuff in there.

eLobato• 15 years ago

To be fair, the markets of Dropbox and Github are dramatically different. In fact I'd say that the Github pricing model is quite better in terms of adjusting the price to the demand. As I've read in some other comment here in HN, if you don't use Github because $100 is a lot of money to spend in your project, then you probably shouldn't be using Github. Still, they offer great and FREE micro accounts for students (I have one) and the support is great.

roel_v• 15 years ago

I expected this to be a post on how Dropbox is too expensive.

Also, putting my grumpy hat on, what's with all the cheapskate whining? "Give me more, I want it FREE!"... bleh.

marcf• 15 years ago

For businesses looking to be cost effective, remember there is www.projectlocker.com

Not as sexy as GitHub but it has Trac (or Agilo Trac) and a choice of GIT/SVN. Unlimited projects, but it has disk space limits and user limits that differentiate the levels (similar to dropbox.) Cost structure is here:

https://projectlocker.com/signup/startup

There is no public visibility on projectlocker.com, thus it is best for teams that don't want their stuff public (which actually most companies.)

Disclaimer: I have used PL as a paying customer for 4 years at the Equity level (<30 users, <30GB of repos) and am a very happy with it. I haven't noticed it go down in all that time.

dools• 15 years ago

I don't actually understand why anyone pays for github when it's so trivial to set up a central git repository on a $10/month VPS and you can have unlimited repositories.

Surely developers aren't that desperate for a nice UI for their git repos?! I assume that there are a bunch of web based repo browsing tools you could install for free if you were that hell bent on looking at your code in a web browser

varikin• 15 years ago

I love the ease of UI. I like a graphical way to look through logs and diffs and Github does this better than anyone else. Beyond that, if I want a nice web based alternative, I would have to maintain it which I hate doing. Really, $7 is not a bad deal for letting them be the sys admins.

All that said, I am a cheap bastard. I have all public projects on a free Github account and a couple nonfree ones on my hosting account. I don't have a pretty front end, just the default gitweb. It is ugly, not as easy to use, but it works for my personal projects. If I ever needed it for a non-personal project, Github is much better since I will need to code, not maintain my own repos.

necenzurat• 15 years ago

http://www.syncany.org/ will kill you all

jedbrown• 15 years ago

Academic research is one more data point. Sometimes you have faculty and students from multiple institutions. It's not so much the cost that's the problem, rather the paperwork to bill it to various grants over the lifetime of a project. In many ways, it's simpler for one of the leaders to just pay for it personally.

I personally prefer doing public development, but this has been cited by a number of colleagues as a reason not to host at github.

bostonvaulter22• 15 years ago

Have you looked at github's academic pricing?

https://github.com/edu

fluidcruft• 15 years ago

So as a post-doc/researcher... Do I click Student, Teacher or Administrator?

DannoHung• 15 years ago

Man, I totally would love it if my company would let us use github for our source control. Unfortunately, we are strictly not allowed to store anything outside of the company servers for security reasons and I'm reasonably sure the local github service cost would necessitate making a successful case that we should transition the entire company to it. Which involves not just proving that github is a better source control management suite, but that the git model is superior to the centrally managed, monolithic perforce model we use.

darklajid• 15 years ago

I started by converting a team to git.

Then, after they settled in and started to get it, I made repositories available from the outside (only ssh, still only selected people).

When more and more people learned that it _is_ possible to work in a train/plane/at a customer site and still use a decent toolset, they wanted in.

I hosted gitorious (with decent backups, a redmine next to it) on an old server.

In the end management gave in to peer pressure - and the price point was - erm - attractive. It's the official toolset now.

nzoschke• 15 years ago

Just make your small projects public, and with a proper copyright. It's incredibly hard to get someone to pay attention to you and your code even if you want them to. Nobody will notice one way or another.

GitHub is the Library of Alexandria, not a safety deposit box.

pjhyett• 15 years ago

We're trying to fundamentally change how people write, collaborate, and discover code and the sooner people stop thinking of us as just a repo depository, the better, because we've never been about that.

Ask yourself what kind of markup we'd have to charge on storage space and still be able to grow our business when most of the repos we host are less than 1 MB.

We charge what we do because it makes money. Money that allows us to continue hiring really talented people that are all focused on building an even better service.

Doing things like including private repos with our free plan would eat into our margins and only satisfy the people that are likely to never convert to a paid plan. Frankly, I think being able to use all of the tools we provide for the price of a pint of Guinness every month is a damn good deal.

carbonica• 15 years ago

I laughed at the article, but you have a really good point. If you have 30 projects and only want a place to put your code, you're far better off just using a private server, which you undoubtedly already have. If you have a development culture that is well-modeled by how GitHub approaches collaboration, that's where you'll see a lot of added value over a private server.

I think the tough part is that GitHub's innovations in collaboration are primarily a huge win for open source. GitHub makes discovery of these projects so much easier, connects disparate people across communities (and countries!), and provides a unified technical stack and process "stack" for those people to contribute (same bug trackers, same "send me a pull request" approach, same wiki). That's something that's a pretty big deal for OSS.

Most of those issues aren't as big a deal for a business in my experience - most businesses either don't have such problems (discovery) or have their own solutions (process). But hey - you guys have got customers, you're hiring like crazy, and I love your stack personally; I'm certainly not judging! Just offering my perspective on why some folks might not buy in to the collaboration stuff from a business point of view.

programminggeek4• 15 years ago

I'm a happy GitHub customer and your service is worth every penny. Keep building awesome stuff!

Kudos• 15 years ago

Storage is cheap, I think archival for private projects would appease most people.

aquinn• 15 years ago

More private repos with the paid plans would definitely keep me paying and might convince others to pay.

Legion• 15 years ago

It's just extremely frustrating to not be a Github customer because the pricing model is completely unworkable.

The little company I work at would love to host our repos on Github and pay for a plan appropriate for our level of use. But according to Github pricing, we're "Platinum" solely because of our repo count, even though our level of traffic and space usage is tiny.

It's hard to say that it's "wrong", because clearly things are working well for Github, but those of us who have been intentionally left out don't have to be happy about it.

frankus• 15 years ago

I guess I always saw github as more of a flickr for code than a private repo hosting service for hobbyists.

I'd still like a good way to back up my private solo-project repositories off-site using git, but I suppose DropBox works pretty well for that?

tyler_ball• 15 years ago

Flickr costs 24.95/year for a pro account, giving you unlimited storage, sets, collections, stats and no ads. So I don't think the analogy really works.

g123g• 15 years ago

How about providing a github like interface on top of dropbox? Has anybody done this? The best thing about this will be that 2GB of storage is free from dropbox which is quite sufficient for most of the needs.

watty3• 15 years ago

Many of you are missing the point. It's not as much about the actual cost but about the model of charging per repo rather than data usage (or both options). This model is not cost effective for small businesses and contractors who have many small projects.

For example, my company has two full time devs and a few contractors for small projects. We have accumulated over 30 projects and that number will continue to grow. It's not uncommon for an older project to be re-opened after a period of inactivity for new features or fixes. It's not cost effective to shell out $100/month. We've moved to Springloops which allows 10 active repos and unlimited archived for $15/month.

Duff• 15 years ago

I know this is pretty much a joke, but never underestimate the ability of people to do ridiculous things.

I've personally witnessed individuals with email Inboxes with over 50,000 items in them -- total size 30GB. No use of folders, no meaningful search capability.

a3_nm3• 15 years ago

Actually, "all your files are visible to everyone" isn't a restriction at all if you're using crypto.

Likewise, it's funny to think that you could encrypt your git repositories and use github public hosting for private projects. I wonder if someone already did, but I guess github wouldn't care (if you're doing this, you wouldn't be paying for the service anyway).

wtracy• 15 years ago

I suspect that most of GitHub's features are useless if the files you are uploading are encrypted.

Seriously, are diffs of encrypted files going to be meaningful?

a3_nm3• 15 years ago

Actually, what I was saying amounts to using github as an agnostic data store, and doing the actual work on the clients. So, yeah, most of the usefulness of github goes away and you can just use pretty much any file hosting service.

grandalf• 15 years ago

I think people are misinterpreting the frustration with Github's pricing.

It's not that people have a problem paying $22 for 20 repos, it's that the 21st repo costs $23 per month!

Github's pricing structure has friction in this area. Without a controlled experiment it's impossible to determine whether this pricing model is best for Github or not.

Imagine if when you bought toothpaste there were two options, a small travel-size tube for $1 or a crate full of 500 full size tubes for $250. Or imagine if a restaurant served ice cream at $0.25 for a spoonful and then your next option was a full gallon.

The friction occurs b/c people don't like wasting money, and the pricing model Github has chosen feels like unused repos are costing money but not being put to use.

In other words, there is a nonlinear relationship between money spent and usefulness gained per dollar, which makes it difficult for people to maximize utility over. This is friction and it probably has mixed results. I think the most important thing to note is that we don't know whether it helps or hurts Github's business to do things this way. Assertions that it does one vs the other are only speculation.

allwein2• 15 years ago

See, that's the problem in thinking. People go, "Hmm, 10 repos cost $12, so that's $1.20 per repo. But if I have 11 repos, it costs me $22, it costs me $22 so it's $2 per repo, what a ripoff!" Or conversely how you stated it, "$1.20 per repo for the first 10, then $10 for the 11th, and the next 9 are free."

If they restated it that it costs $2 per repo, but if you order in bulk you get a discount, people would be happier. So even if they always paid $22, they'd be thrilled because the "real" prices would be 11 for $2 each all the way down to 20 for $1.10 each!

bphogan3• 15 years ago

I don't get the problems that people have with Github's pricing.

I can have all the private repos I want by creating repositories on my computer. Git is decentralized. Putting it in a central location is centralized. :)

But seriously, I can have as many private repositories as I want - all I need is a server with SSH support.

What I want is the user interface for adding comments and collaboration on my private repos that I get for public repos. If I find that valuable to me, I'll pay it. If it's a "toy" project that I'll never touch, a local repo and a backup of my computer is all I need - I don't need others to have that code.

mcantor• 15 years ago

Yeah! What a bunch of dickbags.

What if Western Digital used Dropbox's pricing plan?

chow• 15 years ago

Funny article, but it misses the fact that GitHub's pricing is less about code separation, and more about access management.

There's nothing stopping a customer from cramming several projects into a single Git repository. You could theoretically take advantage of GitHub's "unlimited" storage for cheap this way. The problem is, you need separate repositories if you want to manage access for different collaborators.

Folders aren't expensive, but access management can be. Github understands this, which is why their Business plans, which are differentiated by having finer-grained access control features, are more expensive.

nivertech• 15 years ago

When using git every library/dependency is a separate repo. So 125 private repos limit for $200 is only enough for 3-4 real life projects, or one really big project.

Revisor• 15 years ago

It's a simple price segmenting. No one says the axis of projects makes financial sense on the expense side. It makes sense in distinguishing the type of customer.

Ironically it's nicely illustrated by the employee/owner of a web agency complaining in the comments. Obviously it worked and Github managed to extract more value from a larger customer.

JoelMcCracken• 15 years ago

Any big reason not to have an archive repo, with tars of your archived projects?

You still have git for your tars, and thus all your versions. It seems like a fine idea, to me.

To archive a project, tar its project directory, copy it in to an archive repo on github, commit and push it, and remove the directory locally.

To unarchive a project, pull and untar the project in its own directory. When done, tar it back up into the archive repo, commit, and push.

overshard• 15 years ago

Would work great for me. I store everything on dropbox in one giant lump truecrypt file...

If Dropbox Used GitHub’s Pricing Plan

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