
Why GitHub’s pricing model stinks (for us) - tiziano88
http://lostechies.com/jimmybogard/2012/11/07/why-githubs-pricing-model-stinks-for-us/
======
sgentle
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.

~~~
mqzaidi
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.

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

~~~
mqzaidi
because the npm modules are proprietary and can't be open sourced.

~~~
analog
Well that's sort of implicit. Why can they not be open sourced?

------
derefr
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
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_
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.

------
molf
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.

~~~
Argorak
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.

~~~
gm
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.

~~~
Argorak
Large and small companies, most somehow technology-minded, but not fully.

The ploy is easy: if they set up the org, they have full control over it, even
in the case that everything goes downhill and all of us get hit by a bus. Most
people nowadays have seen a tech project going downhill with the freelancer
leaving with the keys for the castle.

No technological argument. At all.

------
patio11
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?

~~~
RobAley
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
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.

~~~
RobAley
Its not an abstract point. My costs may go up, without my income going up, if
I need more repos, which I can't necessarily predict in advance. I then either
have to eat the extra cost or go cap in hand to the client because part way
through the project or starting the next stage we've restructured the way
we're using repos. Maybe we should plan better in advance, but with the other
service he is using he doesn't have to.

------
sytse
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).

~~~
mcintyre1994
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.

~~~
sytse
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?

~~~
petercooper
Not to put you off, but more to provide an interesting case study.. patio11
wrote about the difference between configurable/scalable pricing and fixed
plans recently: <http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/13/doubling-saas-revenue/>

~~~
sytse
Cool, thank you for the tip, great to see some data on the advantages of using
plans.

------
oellegaard
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)

~~~
gtaylor
> 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.

------
easytiger
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.

~~~
kaolinite
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.

~~~
easytiger
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?

~~~
kaolinite
> 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.

We have a sysadmin who looks after the servers. However, bad things can
happen. If he was able to spend all his time working on these problems, they
wouldn't occur, but he has other responsibilities too. Should we hire someone
else? No! It's cheaper and more reliable to outsource these responsibilities
to a team working 100% of the time on it.

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

I don't understand your point. There's a big difference between going to get
coffee, go to the toilet, etc - which is normal, expected and accounted for -
and having large parts of the company unable to work because particular
services are down.

~~~
easytiger
> Should we hire someone else? No! It's cheaper and more reliable to outsource
> these responsibilities to a team working 100% of the time on it.

Well if he did a good job it would be adequately mitigated. This isn't 1997.
It is trivial and cheap to set up reliable redundant systems. Outages happen.
But not very often if you have done your job half right. Hopefully so rarely
that you decay to near zero.

> and having large parts of the company unable to work because particular
> services are down.

If it was real time critical yes. But tis a distributed VC we are talking
about. Just wait 15 minutes to push and spin your build to the customer. It
isnt the end of the world.

~~~
gtaylor
I think you're missing the point: We _could_ spend extra time doing any number
of things ourselves. When it comes down to it, shipping, being productive, and
being reasonably efficient are much more important than "just doing it
yourself". Especially if you are a tiny-small company, you should _not_ be
doing it yourself. You should be battling for success and survival.

Not doing it yourself may mean going with BitBucket for some or all of your
private repos, in this case.

------
ricardobeat
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 :)

------
TamDenholm
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.

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

~~~
kondro
Because the competitor has inferior features.

~~~
LordIllidan
Github's extra features aren't all that useful to us though - certainly not
worth the extra expense.

And yes, I do know that rates should be increased and that even 200$ a month
are a drop in the bucket to some startups - but not to all startups,
especially non US-based ones.

------
ericb
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.

------
diziet
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.

~~~
crooy
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.

~~~
notimetorelax
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.

~~~
kondro
Have you thought about contacting them and asking for a discount for volume?

Their enterprise pricing is probably designed for under a 100 employees.

No one is going to make you commit to a contract or bite your hand off if you
ask them if they can go cheaper.

~~~
notimetorelax
I doubt that they will cut the price to 100,000$. Why 100k$ because that's
more than we pay for ALL Atlassian tools taken together. GitHub just does not
provide that much value to cost that much.

~~~
kondro
You may be surprised and you won't know until you ask.

Where do you think the largest cost in an app like this comes from? Especially
the onsite installed version? It's in support of the users.

Just name your budget to them and see if they meet it or not. Simple as a
couple of emails. Maybe it could be $40k for 500 users… who knows?

~~~
notimetorelax
Fair enough. So far we decided to stick to SVN, I might contact them in a
couple years. Who knows maybe by then it will be cheaper.

> Where do you think the largest cost in an app like this comes from?
> Especially the onsite installed version? It's in support of the users.

Absolutely agree with that, this is the reason why we prefer unlimited
licenses. I work at research facility and every year we have thousands of
newcomers who stay here for several months and then leave, we simply cannot
take on us management of their accounts.

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

~~~
nicholassmith
Or that, it is technically a per project expense.

------
alexyoung
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_
> 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.

~~~
guan
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.

~~~
mcintyre1994
Not sure what point you're trying to make, but there's only 168 hours in a
week.

~~~
guan
And my point is that a cost that’s 1 to 2 percent of your revenue every month
is worth looking into and possibly reducing. Even if you decide to keep it for
the time being, it’s worth revisiting every couple of years or so.

------
mcdee
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?

------
molukk
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.

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

------
rschmitty
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)

------
eloisant
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.

------
_pmf_
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
How so? What would you use instead?

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

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

------
pjmlp
What happened to just have a server rack in place?

We never use such public hosts.

------
analog
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.

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

