Why GitHub’s pricing model stinks (for us)

http://lostechies.com/jimmybogard/2012/11/07/why-githubs-pricing-model-stinks-for-us/

by tiziano88 • 13 years ago

58 84 13 years ago

diziet2• 13 years ago

Github does have per seat pricing (for their enterprise product, which is meant to be hosted locally): https://enterprise.github.com/pricing - it costs $21/seat/month. With their per repo pricing I'd imagine they are more likely to earn more revenue per user, since so many developers will end up having many old pet projects in private repos sitting there.

mcintyre19945• 13 years ago

BitBucket's pricing is at $1/seat/month in the worst case though (assuming you match one of their intervals there). But yep I agree, Github is surely significantly more profitable than BitBucket.

RyanZAG• 13 years ago

Definitely agreed - I use BitBucket to store some private projects, which also means I don't pay them anything (yet). Seems not terribly profitable - I keep a backup elsewhere assuming Bitbucket will go down eventually from lack of funds!

crooy• 13 years ago

The Github enterprise version is unrealistically expensive.

We (a dutch 'embedded' software company of about 300 developers) currently use SVN for our version control. We use some tool, of which I forgot the name, to simplify managing repositories and permissions. This costs us a couple of hours per year in maintenance and support, and the tool cost somewhere around 1500 euro. Hours go for around 80 euro's here, so lets say 3.000 euro TCO per year.

For us having code in the cloud (read within reach of the US government) is not an option, our customers will not allow it. I believe our insurance will not even allow that. Also we need to have Ldap/Active Directory integration; Ldap is the only way we can effectively manage authorisation between a large amount of services.

Looking at all the alternatives, Atlassian Stash, Gitstack, etc. Github is by far the most expensive(75.000 per year). Right now, we have decided that setting up a Gitblit server ourselves, will be the most cost effective.

There is no way I can convince my boss that using Github will save us 60.000 euro per year.

craftman• 13 years ago

Fully agree with you. I use a private git repo on my own cloud server (west europe based).

Github make full sense for open source projects, with easy forking and pull requests. However, I dont see any advantage to take a private repo, even worst at the price they propose, and hosted in a complex legal context.

notimetorelax3• 13 years ago

When I learned about GitHub Enterprise I was very happy thinking that we can finally switch to Git (currently we use SVN) only to be saddened by their pricing. We have around 5000 employees, GitHub price for 500 seats is 125,000$, this is incredibly expensive. Judging by their pricing they don't want big companies to be their clients as simple as that. Atlassian for example had a lot of grief with us simply because their products didn't scale that well past 5000 users.

diziet2• 13 years ago

I'd imagine that with 300 developers, a good fraction of them already use git and github for their own projects, and so they would be comfortable with using the interface. Not that SVN is a bad choice -- depending on your company's workflow, familiarity with git and the need for more localized version tracking there are tradeoffs in either solution.

However, even if you're counting 60.000 euro per year, it's not really such a large number when you consider that you have 300 developers. Saving on average 7~ hours per developer per year in work efficiency would more than make up for the fees, but the costs of switching over and perhaps picking up a new version control is also something to consider.

TamDenholm• 13 years ago

I think the reason its priced like that is its far more profitable than any other way. Developers like loads of repo's for their many side projects etc.

Just a note though, if you're a consulting company and cant afford $200 a month for the 125 repo's, you should be charging more.

cdavid• 13 years ago

200 $ / month is indeed nothing. The problem is when you need more. Arguably, github enterprise follows exactly the model of price per collaborator.

LordIllidan2• 13 years ago

Why should we pay 200$ a month though when there's a competitor with a far better plan?

kondro4• 13 years ago

Because the competitor has inferior features.

easytiger3• 13 years ago

I really do not get the big deal.

Just set up ssh on your own server and voilà... free unlimited repos.

sure you miss out on some tools. But what's more important... repo storage/usage/access/privacy or a pretty graph of your commits? Perhaps catting a ssh key to the end of a text file is a bit too much complexity for a company who claim to be selling themselves as expert software solutions developers.

And if you do want all that, it does exist and is available to install on your own host.

All for £20 a month. Not even hard to set up multisite replication etc.

kaolinite2• 13 years ago

Because it's more work to do. Instead of setting that up, you could be working on your product. The company I work for does the same - code is all hosted locally, emails were (until recently) hosted locally, document sharing too. It was cheap but every so often there'd be a problem and it'd go down for 15-30 minutes, which would cost a few £1000 in lost productivity.

easytiger3• 13 years ago

If you are of a significant size you will want to have a release or build engineer anyway who will normall be the person who takes ownership of these things. If not then it will be your office unix guy.

I'm also not a fan of quantifying productivity lost in ££. When someone has a bowl movement do you chart that against company productivity?

jonknee• 13 years ago

Or use BitBucket. Just as easy as GitHub, but with unlimited private repos for free.

sytse4• 13 years ago

Disclosure: I'm a co-founder of GitLab.com

I agree that a per seat pricing model is better because it is more predictable and relates to the value a company gets. We plan to use such a model on GitLab.com http://blog.gitlab.com/pricing/

Also, if you self-install GitLab it is completely free (MIT license).

mcintyre19945• 13 years ago

Out of interest, how would you say you compare to BitBucket? Your given plan structures seem to suggest that their pricing structure per user is superior.

"A startup with 30 repos and a team of two is completely free." Same with them.

"A professional plan with 60 repos and 5 collaborators is $9 per month." 5 collaborators is free with them.

"A business plan 150 repos and 10 collaborators is $72 per month." BitBucket supports teams on all plans. That plan would be $10, although I will admit I haven't used their teams feature so you may have superior functionality there.

Self-hosted sounds great though, that's a really cool move.

sytse4• 13 years ago

Thank you for the question.

We want to make sure that the pricing only increases in small steps. If you add one more user you should never go from $25 to $50.

We also have a free issue tracker, you don't have to pay for it. Jira prices are 4 times more expensive than BitBucket prices.

And of course there is the option to go self hosted easily in the future.

What do you think we can improve in the pricing of GitLab.com?

rschmitty• 13 years ago

Github really only makes sense for open source projects.

If you are small shop with private repos, bitbucket does everything github does for free

If you are small-med+ shop you can pay per user and you should really be considering a more enterprise level of project management other than "issues and wiki docs"

First you'll have the money to pay Atlassian for all their tools, and second you will discover you can't live with out them once you have them and will rarely, if ever, visit the bitbucket page for a project (which is a "Good Thing" imo)

molf• 13 years ago

Agreed, Github does not make sense for small consulting companies. We have hundreds of repositories (way more than the Github top plan) and only 10 employees. We have been hosting our own git server (previously Gitorious and now Gitlab) and haven't looked back. Way more economic than Github enterprise. I guess these days Bitbucket or hosted Gitlab would also be a reasonable alternative.

Argorak3• 13 years ago

We solved that by having the client decide on the code hosting. If the client decides for Github, he is expected to create an Organization and pay for the private repos he uses.

gm2• 13 years ago

What kind of clients do you have? If I asked my clients what code repo to use and then asked them to set up a github org, they laugh me out of their building, probably making some sort of comment that I turned my problem into their problem.

Maybe you have tech-savvy clients who care about source control. Mine only care that I do what I said I'd do when I said I'd do it.

mcdee• 13 years ago

Sorry, just to confirm: GitHub's cost model aligns with your revenue model (as opposed to your cost model), and this is a bad thing?

Argorak3• 13 years ago

For this use case, a one time payment model like the new Basecamp plan would make sense.

nicholassmith2• 13 years ago

It might stink for you, but if you put it down in rational terms it's not actually much. If you start with a Micro it's costing you $5 a month, which (without knowing how much you charge per contract) is probably about 10 minutes work on one contract. 10 minutes of work for all the GitHub goodies.

We all want things to be cheaper, but sometimes you need to rationalise things off and realise whilst they emotionally look expensive, they're actually really not when you work out what the cost is to you in terms of work to cover it.

Put it this way, if you go to BitBucket (they're great as well! Highly recommended!) you'll save money, but lose the headline features of GH. For you this may or may not be a big problem. If you go down the self-hosted route (super valid!) then you've got a specific amount of admin time that needs to be put in per month by either a dev or sysadmin and that's more than likely to either cost the as much or more than GHs pricing.

Pricing is hard, but GitHub is pricing where GitHub needs it's prices to be.

d0m• 13 years ago

Or the client can pay for it. I.e. add x$/mo to the maintenance cost for "code hosting" or whatever.

nicholassmith2• 13 years ago

Or that, it is technically a per project expense.

sgentle• 13 years ago

I agree and I wish I'd written this article myself. One of the great things about git compared to the version control systems of yesteryear is that it's lightweight enough and (with Github) discoverable enough to make many small repos a viable development pattern. I never liked the old giant-repo-for-all-the-code system, although I understand it's still popular at Google and many other large shops.

I think what really rankles is that it fires up my developer edge-case sense. Wait, so you mean I can have one repository of 100MB, but if I have two of 50MB that costs more? Bits are bits, so why are you punishing one particular factoring of my data vs another? That's like charging for S3 per top-level directory, or for iTunes by album. I feel like charging per repository makes you feel bad about making more repositories, which can often lead to feeling bad about good decisions.

Also, realistically, a cost per developer is so miniscule compared to the overall cost of that developer. The proportional cost per project is much higher, particularly if it's some skunkworks side-project and you're the one trying to explain why you should double how much you're paying github so that you can have a live coffee consumption dashboard for the break room.

It might be irrational, but it's the truth - we associate costs together in buckets, and Github is associating itself with the wrong bucket.

StavrosK• 13 years ago

Bits might be bits, but you aren't paying for storage. If you are, just get a 1TB hard disk for $50 and have more space than you'll ever need for repos.

You're paying for Github, and it's not priced by bits stored.

derefr2• 13 years ago

I think the idea is that all the stuff Github gives you scales pretty much linearly with the number of bits you're storing. Bigger repo = longer commit history; more commits = more issues tracked, more features, bigger wiki, more forks, etc.

When you split a project into two subprojects that are fairly equal in scope, each one will likely get just about half of the number of tickets/wiki articles/forks made that the original would have. So making a new repo isn't adding overhead for Github in any marginal way; the overhead would be there either way, as long as that original repo was being used to do the work of two sub-projects.

mqzaidi2• 13 years ago

This is precisely the reason why we switched from github to unfuddle. Why should my developers start rationing for repos and start putting everything in one large repository, just so that we don't hit the limit with github. For example, we use node.js heavily, and I would like create npm modules that can be shared across repos, and put them in a repo of their own (so npm can install them). Github's pricing forces me not to do this, and discourages code reuse.

analog3• 13 years ago

Is there a reason you wouldn't use public github repos for your npm modules?

tomfakes• 13 years ago

I used to be a big fan of Unfuddle, and I still have an account there, but the reality is that all of the integrations I use (CI is the most recent one) work great with Github and not at all, or are much harder to configure, with Unfuddle.

Github is creating value with their ecosystem, which is great for them, and, since the code is all in Git, not a complete lock-in if you choose to move.

ricardobeat2• 13 years ago

Lots of assumptions there. The largest cost of operating GitHub is certainly not storage, but the whole server infrastructure and employees. That's what you're paying for.

Otherwise, just put your repos in any online storage service, it's much cheaper, but then you don't get Github :)

edit: downvotes? care to explain?

gm2• 13 years ago

Your comment's good, it's the children of HN not liking what you said. Nothing to do but move on.

jimrandomh• 13 years ago

Agreed, but even worse than that, it makes GitHub's pricing O(n^2) with time. If a project involves creating a repository and then leaving it up when the project's finished or in maintenance, that costs money forever; and if a person creates such projects at a fixed rate, then that gets unreasonably expensive.

_pmf_• 13 years ago

Using the number of repositories for pricing is a ridiculous metric in many ways and for many reasons. What is the rationale behind it? Transparency?

stuartmemo• 13 years ago

How so? What would you use instead?

derefr2• 13 years ago

I use both: I stick my private repos up on Bitbucket (where I don't need to show them to anyone, and thus pay nothing), and my public repos on Github (where I don't need to hide them from anyone, and thus pay nothing.)

And I don't miss Github's collaborative features in my private repos because I'm not collaborating in those :) Bitbucket is literally just "a place to push my repo where it'll be safe" for me[1]; Github is "a place where I can collaborate with others."

And you know what? You can even use both for a single project. Push your public branches to Github, accept patches, then base a private product on the result [just some extra non-pushed-to-public branches] and work on that in Bitbucket. For example, you could have, say, the Chromium codebase on Github, and then Chrome on Bitbucket.

[1] Well, okay, Bitbucket is also pretty good for doing deploys from: you can CNAME git.yourcompany.com to them, set up some Deploy Keys and Deploy Hooks, and it'll feel just like you had your own internal repo server for your deploy server to talk to.

why-el• 13 years ago

Yep, this is exactly what I do. Though I will start collaborating on a private project beginning June and I am not sure how Bitbucket fares in that regard? Any experience with that?

Hates_• 13 years ago

I'm collaborating on some projects on Bitbucket and it has pretty much everything you need. It doesn't have some of the nice little touches that Github has like autocomplete emoji etc, but nothing that wouldn't make me miss Github if I had to move over to it 100% for private repos.

patio112• 13 years ago

So from one consultant to another consultant, what do you say when a potential client starts to say "Actually, we don't think we can do this engagement, because $X is too much" where $X is some number in three digits?

orangethirty• 13 years ago

Exactly. They can just create a new account for each new client for peanuts. No client is going to bark for an extra $20 for the github account.

RobAley2• 13 years ago

I don't think he's saying that its too much, its that there is a cheaper option with better financial predictability, and that is why he's not using github. Its more of a heads up to github, paraphrasing : "if you want our business, this is the kind of plan that we like to buy, it solves our pain points, which for us is stability of pricing" or similar.

imsofuture• 13 years ago

That's a bit of an abstract point though.

I don't know how many private repos I will be using in a year, so I pay for what I'm currently using. It may go up or down, and my plan will be adjusted accordingly.

If the problem isn't the on-my-credit-card-statement cost for the service that you'd use, and is instead a philosophical disagreement with how the cost is calculated... that's just a little bonkers.

lifeisstillgood2• 13 years ago

I have to agree with this - yes, the limitations are frustrating (talking to a guy with 25 repos.) but I am not in the business of finding cheap ways to deal with a pretty core piece of useful functionality when its barely the cost of my home internet.

molukk• 13 years ago

We've also been discussing this recently where I work. Our problem is that the small wordpress projects quickly eat up the repo quota.

The price isn't a problem, but their largest plan only gives 125 repos, which we'll reach relatively quick at this rate. Enterprise is not an option, as we're not really interested in hosting and maintaining it ourselves.

They do however say "If you need a plan larger than Platinum, contact us for details about our larger business plans." Does anyone have any details about what their larger business plans consist of?

Most likely we'll eventually migrate to Bitbucket.

kondro4• 13 years ago

Just contact them. They aren't going to bite you or bill you because you enquire about a bigger plan?

alexyoung• 13 years ago

I'm in a similar position. I'm a freelancer, and I have quite a few clients for various Ruby/iOS/Node projects. I need more private repositories, but the jump to Gold is too much for my business.

The issue is largely down to older clients that I only occasionally do maintenance work for. I've got about 15 of these, and they cut into my private repo count. Of course, it's easy to dump repositories on a server, which I have done in some cases, but I find my clients often like GitHub's interface. I've also put a few onto Bitbucket to give myself a bit of breathing room, this works well when projects are effectively 'archived' and have little client involvement but are still running.

I'm thinking about using GitLab, but I'm wondering about the amount of effort it'd take to maintain it. Cost for GitHub/Bitbucket vs. time to maintain another web application? Hmm...

Cthulhu_• 13 years ago

> Cost for GitHub/Bitbucket vs. time to maintain another web application? Hmm...

Both Github's and Bitbucket's prices max out at $200 a month; if you're a freelancer, that's worth about 2 - 4 hours of your time per month. That amount is easily spent on hosting/managing your own repositories. If you can avoid spending 2 - 4 hours a month on repositories, go for those.

$200 is nothing if you're running a business.

guan3• 13 years ago

If you bill 160 hours per week and work maybe 200 hours, that’s still 1.5 to 2 percent of your time. I would call that non-trivial and worth at least looking into.

pjmlp• 13 years ago

What happened to just have a server rack in place?

We never use such public hosts.

ericb• 13 years ago

The only reason I have a bitbucket account is because github's pricing model is so bad. I even wanted to pay for a small account, but 5 or even 10 repos is nothing compared to my number of repos.

In business cases like this, a bad tradeoff is being made. There may be some amount of money that their repo based pricing might make them over a per-user model. If they leave that money on the table though, they'd shrink what is left for their competitors and make themselves harder to disrupt. They would also get a greater pool of accounts that may grow to paid-status.

oellegaard• 13 years ago

I think the GitHub pricing model is excellent - and super cheap. I have multiple accounts and I happily pay for all of them - the value of not having to use a bad interface like bitbucket is far larger than the price for GitHub.

With a cost of 200$ for 125 repos, it is less than 2$ per client - if thats a problem, I think you should rethink your business plan. Keep in mind, nothing prevents you from removing clients you didn't work on for e.g. 6 months and put them on a NAS (although I would not do that myself)

gtaylor2• 13 years ago

> With a cost of 200$ for 125 repos, it is less than 2$ per client

Something that I keep seeing go un-mentioned is that all GitHub users are not software consultants in the traditional sense. For those that have an actual product and own their code, this breaks down very quickly.

For example, at Pathwright, we have a growing number of private repositories that are various components of our platform, marketing sites, one-off static sites we do to for various things, and etc. We have butted up against our limit several times now, though only a few of our many repositories see regular activity. GitHub is making excellent profit from us, given that we are under ten employees, and the vast majority of our activity is in 2-3 repos at most.

The point of the article is that their model doesn't make complete sense for everyone. I think this is a very valid point. He also [correctly] concedes that the BitBucket model doesn't work for everyone.

In other words, this is a subjective piece that is billing itself as subjective. It is meant to provoke thought about pricing models without declaring one way the "best" way.

largesse• 13 years ago

You're a consultant and variable overhead of $20 to $100 a month is unmanageable??

ricardobeat2• 13 years ago

Here you go:

http://beanstalkapp.com/

https://codeplane.com/

http://www.codebasehq.com/

http://projectlocker.com/

https://unfuddle.com/

https://www.assembla.com/

http://gitorious.org/

http://gitlab.org/

good luck :)

analog3• 13 years ago

Github costs just over $1 per repo per month. If the projects you're consulting on generate less revenue than this you've got bigger problems than Github's pricing.

eloisant• 13 years ago

It's very clear that their pricing model stinks. I told it to Scott Chacon once, his answer was something like "yeah, we have to make money too, whatever".

So I give my money to BitBucket.

steeve• 13 years ago

Or you can just email them and I'm sure you could work something out.

Why GitHub’s pricing model stinks (for us)

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