

GitHub:FI publishes pricing - notmyname
http://fi.github.com/pricing.html

======
ErrantX
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 :)

~~~
pmorici
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.

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evdawg
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.

~~~
pjhyett
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.

~~~
ErrantX
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.

------
jgrahamc
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?

------
tptacek
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.

~~~
pmorici
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.

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

~~~
pmorici
Well, going from personal experience, mine is 3 going on 4 and I'm just
thinking about getting a new one. But even more convincing is, if you watched
the Apple key note they said that the average life of a laptop is 5 years.

------
justin_vanw
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.

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

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

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

------
halogen64
Am I missing something? Just install gitosis and save yourself the
$600/user/year

~~~
timmorgan
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...](http://erikonrails.wordpress.com/2008/05/11/how-to-get-gitorious-
running-on-your-own-server/) 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.

~~~
pilif
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)

~~~
timmorgan
OK, I feel dumb. I hadn't heard of gitosis and just assumed (bad idea) that
halogen64 was talking about gitorious. But really, gitosis doesn't seem like
any real comparison to GitHub or Gitorious as far as features, am I right?
Hosting Git repos is already pretty easy with SSH in my experience, but I'm
sure I'm missing something or just making more bad assumptions. It's the
online visualization and collaboration that GitHub brings that might be worth
the cost.

~~~
pilif
You are right - it's no real comparison.

But still, using gitosis to host the repositories has some advantages over
plain ssh:

    
    
        * you only need to create one git user
        * people don't need shell access to the machine
        * you have fine-grained control over who has push access and who doesn't.
    

As it's really easy to set up, it's always worth to go the gitosis route if
you just need SSH repository access.

But yeah, the visualization and collaboration you don't get. For that you need
to decide between Gitorious (doesn't look as nice, real pain to install, but
open source and no associated cost aside of your own resources) and GitHub
(really good-looking, (probably) easy to install, proprietary and quite
expensive).

Judging from Gitorious' current state, I'd say GitHub is, for a non-ruby/rails
programmer, less expensive to install and use than Gitorious, but it's still
too expensive for what it provides, especially when you compare it to the
hosted plans which are cheaper while not leaving you with backup and machine
maintenance.

