
If Dropbox Used GitHub’s Pricing Plan - joshuacc
http://usersinhell.com/dropbox-github-pricing/
======
patio11
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_.

~~~
watty
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.

~~~
tptacek
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.)_

~~~
MostAwesomeDude
If you are able to do this kind of infrastructure work, there are literally
multiple git managers which are free (libre and gratis!) and just as powerful
for developers. My employer, OSUOSL, deploys an internal gitolite and we do
just fine.

~~~
bostonvaulter2
Gitolite only does a tiny fraction of what github offers. The two really
aren't directly comparable. Gitolite is purely a code hosting system, github
allows you to collaborate, view code with an awesome viewer, make comments and
much more.

------
pjhyett
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
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.

------
programminggeek
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?

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

~~~
slig
RepositoryHosting.com, $6/month, unlimited repos, 2GB and $1 extra per GB

~~~
rs
xp-dev.com $5/month 2GB

~~~
edtechdev
Try $15 a YEAR and 10-15 gigs disk space if you can set up your own git
repository and web front end. See some low cost VPS hosting providers at
<http://www.lowendbox.com/>

~~~
rs
And no backups :) Just saying, having a low end VPS is not exactly the perfect
solution

~~~
tomjen3
Well you have backups of the repositories on the local machine.

So really in this case it shouldn't matter.

------
grandalf
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.

~~~
allwein
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!

------
davidedicillo
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.

~~~
masklinn
Have you considered suggesting it to github?

~~~
nirvdrum
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.

~~~
danieldk
Codebase(HQ) allows archived projects (until your diskspace runs out).
However, putting your open repositories there does not have the same network
effect as putting them on Github.

------
masnick
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.

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

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

------
watty
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.

------
nzoschke
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.

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

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

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

~~~
canistr
The GH edu account bumps you to a micro account. While it's nice to finally
get the private repos, that still doesn't really beat BB.

~~~
bphogan
I was just responding to the perceived lack of support for students.

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

~~~
khill
Sharing doesn't necessarily mean someone cloning or contributing to your
project. I find github useful because it lets me read other people's code both
for evaluating potential co-workers and getting better at my craft.

I've learned a lot from reading other people's code and I still think it's one
of the best ways to learn new languages and techniques.

------
frankus
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
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
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.

------
DannoHung
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
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.

------
eLobato
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.

------
jedbrown
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.

~~~
bostonvaulter2
Have you looked at github's academic pricing?

<https://github.com/edu>

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

------
marcf
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.

------
chow
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.

------
JoelMcCracken
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.

------
dools
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
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.

------
Revisor
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.

------
nivertech
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.

------
bphogan
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.

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

------
rmc
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!"

~~~
programminggeek
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.

------
mcantor
Yeah! What a bunch of dickbags.

What if Western Digital used Dropbox's pricing plan?

------
Duff
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.

------
necenzurat
<http://www.syncany.org/> will kill you all

------
a3_nm
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
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_nm
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.

------
roel_v
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.

