GitHub:FI publishes pricing

http://fi.github.com/pricing.html

by notmyname • 17 years ago

32 29 17 years ago

fi.github.com

evdawg• 17 years ago

I know the github guys are on HN, so I'd love to hear how they arrived on those prices. They seem very reasonable if not cheap to me, and I'm very interested in the inside scoop.

aditya2• 17 years ago

I bet they got drunk, and threw darts.

Also explains why they haven't replied yet, they're probably hungover. ;)

pjhyett• 17 years ago

We debated for a very long time whether we actually wanted to build this product, we like GitHub's SaaS model and the revenue is solid.

In the end we decided the only way we were going to do it is by pricing it high enough that the enterprise world took us seriously, but keeping in mind that smaller teams want to use it as well.

I think the only way to do that is by charging less than Perforce, but far more than other solutions like CollabNet EE.

ErrantX2• 17 years ago

Im not sure a comparison with Perforce is fair: they have a lot more in terms of tools to deploy per user.

In Enterprise nowadays expensive solutions != better. It's the credit crunch :) managers are under the thumb to deliver working solutions for low cost.

halogen64• 17 years ago

Am I missing something? Just install gitosis and save yourself the $600/user/year

timmorgan2• 17 years ago

What's gitosis? I was thinking of installing Gitorious, but from the sounds of it, it's quite complicated. Yes, it's a Rails app, but there are lots of background queued activities, cron jobs, daemons, whatever to setup alongside it for things to function right. If GitHub:FI is really as easy to install as they say it is, then it might be worth the cost for a whole lot of people (something they're counting on no doubt).

Edit: Here's the blog post I was using to judge the install complexity of Gitorious: http://erikonrails.wordpress.com/2008/05/11/how-to-get-gitor... And after all that, several things still aren't finished:

  What’s left to do:
    * I haven’t configured ultrasphinx, so search doesn’t work.
    * I haven’t set up script/graph_generator, so there are no graphs.
    * I have no idea what script/fixup_hooks does. It might be important.

pilif2• 17 years ago

gitosis != gitorious.

gitosis is a really simple collection of scripts that basically allows you to do the same thing with git that you were able to do with SVN by hosting a repository on some server and provide SSH access to it.

Merge requests, merge notifications, easy cloning but also peripheral stuff like bug tracking, wiki and whatnot will all have to come from other places.

Gitorious on the other hand is much closer to github but it is, als you pointed out, a real pain in the butt to install and also has some really nasty assumptions about URLs and SSL in the code that make it even more painful than what it is anyways.

Combine that with no real release schedule, no integration what so ever into any eventually existing authentication infrastructure and very lacking documentation and you'll notice that Gitorious just isn't at a point where it's worth investing time into just yet.

I do think though, that the prices for GitHub:FI as they are revealed now are not really reasonable: You are paying much more than what the most expensive hosted plan costs even if you don't use their support, but you are left with the maintenance of the machine and its backups.

So you are paying more and are left with more work.

And all this because you cannot or do not want to upload your intellectual property onto a third party server (which, in my case, is even located in a foreign country with legislation not properly known to me).

So you are paying more for more work.

When you see this, you will just have to ask yourself, whether the benefits of github will justify the cost.

Installing gitorious is (at least right now) out of the question, but I had really good success with gitosis and redmine.

It's still lacking some web-based way to request (and apply) merges and stuff, but at least it's easy to set up, works and doesn't cost ~$4500/y (that about the price I would pay GitHub:FI for my 6 developers - and this one is way higher than what it cost me to install and even customize gitosis and redmine - and I had to do that once)

mikedouglas• 17 years ago

Opportunity cost. If a developer has to stop his work and spend the next week wrestling to get a sub-standard system up and running, then deal with maintenance and security fixes, $600/user/year starts to look cheap.

carbon8• 17 years ago

With gitosis you just get repos + auth, with this you get github.

teej• 17 years ago

Because developer time costs between $1k - $2k a week. This isn't targeted at companies getting to ramen profitability.

dmix• 17 years ago

You have a lot to learn about enterprise software.

ghshephard• 17 years ago

Pricing looks to be comparable to what you spend on Perforce.

ErrantX2• 17 years ago

nah, too expensive.

I was interested and was waiting to see because this would be something we might consider (50+ developers in 7 teams). But it's not worth it: my man hours to configure Trac + Git (well actually Mercurial here but we could have migrated with ease) costs thousands less. Indeed we would probably need around 80 licenses all told for the occasional contractors, offsite workers and third party contributors. That's about $50,000 a year - and there is no way it could save us that much a year.

Yes you get a neat clean interface and some fancy graphs etc. but, seriously, they arent all that useful day-to-day. We actually use Bitbucket at the moment (and trac internally for super secret projects) and we do not miss the few fancy features from Github.

License it at $200/user and volume license it at $150 (maybe $100) per user over 10 users and $250 per 10 users standard support. Then we'll talk.

Where I work we shell out serious cash per year for software licenses and so on - so it's not a case of us being scrooges: it's just not worth it.

That said: they will sell a bomb load :)

pmorici3• 17 years ago

Of course now they can cut the price by 50% in 6 months still make a bundle and make it look super cheap by comparison. Always better to revise down then up.

tptacek2• 17 years ago

This is significantly cheaper than I expected it to be. Less than half what the Macbook costs. A few billable hours per developer. It's not a bad deal.

pmorici3• 17 years ago

Except you don't buy a brand new MacBook for every employee every year. So if you figure the cost of a MacBook is likely amortized over 4 to 5 years this is much more expensive then what you spend on a MacBook.

tptacek2• 17 years ago

If you think anyone here has a 4 year old Apple laptop you're out of your mind.

justin_vanw2• 17 years ago

Version control does not require graphs. Git takes 30 seconds to set up. There are many free web front ends, and gui's, and of course the good old command line. If you have non-capable people who you need to provide some kind of system to see pretty graphs and talk about schedules, there is no reason for it to be in the VCS.

grandalf• 17 years ago

github fi looks great...

if you think it's too expensive, retrospectiva now supports git and has some of the cool features of github and is free as in git.

asb• 17 years ago

I'd somehow never heard of retrospectiva. It looks great. Can anyone with experience of both compare it to redmine?

datums• 17 years ago

For 600/year you get the following and it's hosted.

    * 50 Private Repositories help
    * 25 Private Collaborators help
    * 6 GB Disk Space help
    * Unlimited Public Repos/Collaborators
    * SSL Protection help

There are some obvious advantage of hosting your own.

justin_vanw2• 17 years ago

600 per year PER user. 10 users? That is 6k.

jgrahamc• 17 years ago

I'm the CTO of a startup in London.

If I went with this it would be the most expensive software I've bought. We currently use tools such as Trac, git, svn, Eclipse, Hudson, ... all are free and work well. Non-free tools tend to be editors that certain people want to buy and one copy of the full Adobe suite (which is pricey, but I only need one copy).

On the desktop and servers we use Mac OS X (which is pretty cheap).

$600/user/year is a lot of money for something that I'm essentially getting for free with Trac and git integration. As nice as GitHub is that would mean spending $9,000 a year.

This compares badly with say FogBugz at $199 per user for an outright purchase. The only thing it compares with is Perforce which runs around $750/user/year, but... GitHub doesn't give you the source control bit, that's free with git.

At that price you are getting into compiler licensing territory where there's serious value demonstrated. What value is GitHub demonstrating?

GitHub:FI publishes pricing

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