
Introducing unlimited private repositories - fuzionmonkey
https://github.com/blog/2164-introducing-unlimited-private-repositories
======
hunvreus
1\. Take a gazillion dollars in funding on an over-hyped valuation,

2\. Go through significant organizational changes that end up with the
departure of a co-founder (and more suits in the building).

3\. Notice that a significant segment of your growth (VC-funded startups) are
running out of money.

4\. Switch to a user-based pricing to generate more revenue for investors, but
spin it as a freebie "Hey! Look at the cool unlimited shit! No, no! Don't pay
attention to the fact you're gonna be charged 3 times as much as before for
the same service".

The bottom line is that GitHub is free to do whatever the heck they want; if
they believe that charging per user is going to make more (financial) sense to
them, then they can go ahead and do it.

But I'd appreciate if their PR department didn't expect us to swallow this as
a positive change. Most coders understand basic maths.

~~~
cstejerean
Per user pricing makes a lot more sense than per repo pricing. This way larger
organizations pay more money than smaller ones regardless of how they
structure their code.

This is a good deal for small organizations that like to have many small
repositories (for internal libraries, utilities, micro services, modules,
etc).

Sure, it screws up a few models that rely on external collaborators to get
access to private repos, but those can stick with the old model for a while
(at least 12 months). And in the meantime GitHub may adjust their model to
accommodate those situations too.

Lastly, this is a huge freebie for individual accounts that now get unlimited
repos for $7/month. That will benefit a lot of people.

So I don't see this as PR spinning, but rather as an overdue move on github's
part to a model that makes a lot more sense and benefits small organizations
and individuals.

~~~
fps
I work for a non-profit open source organization that collaborates on github
([https://github.com/edx/](https://github.com/edx/)) We have lots of people
who aren't employees, but have signed a contributor agreement with our
organization and contribute changes to our software. Our bill will go up from
$200/month to over $2000/month with this new pricing. We can afford it (it's
still a small fraction of our AWS bill) but it will force us to look at other
alternatives. Github's code review tools are already pretty mediocre compared
to other tools like gerrit, and we've long since moved off of github issue
tracking due to lack of features compared to JIRA.

~~~
sequoia
> We have lots of people who aren't employees, but have signed a contributor
> agreement with our organization and contribute changes to our software.

So you have volunteers, working on your proprietary, private software for
free. The labor is free & now you're complaining that you'll have to pay a
per-free-laborer fee for the infrastructure to manage all these free-laborers?
I hope I'm missing something here...

~~~
fps
the software is AGPLv3'd, and run by hundreds of educational organizations
around the world. Those organizations typically contribute changes back via
Github. Non-employees don't contribute to our private repositories. We gain
quite a bit from maintaining a large open source community, but it's not "free
labor."

~~~
mjlee
From the announcement:

"These users do not fill a seat:

 _Outside collaborators with access to only public repositories_ "

~~~
fps
Ah, I didn't see that part of the announcement at all. That makes the new
pricing much closer to what we were paying before. Thanks for pointing it out!

------
arnvald
A small comparison:

Team | Cost Before | Cost Now

1 repo, 5 users | $25 | $25

1 repo, 10 users | $25 | $70

11 repos, 5 users | $50 | $25

11 repos, 10 users | $50 | $70

5 repos, 50 users | $25 | $430

50 repos, 5 users | $100 | $25

50 repos, 50 users | $100 | $430

I'm not sure how common are organizations with few users and large number of
repose - I guess software houses that keep old projects (for maintenance and
future requests from clients) fall into this category, but who else?

The other case where it becomes cheaper is personal accounts.

In all the other cases - it just looks like a raise of prices.

~~~
giovannibajo1
Even for software houses, it's VERY problematic as we add customers to
projects as external collaborators and we're going to get billed for that
forever, even if most customers have very light usage, and even for non active
projects.

I was thrilled by this news but it's going to be completely unaffordable for
us. We have 29 users and 51 external collaborators. We have recently upgraded
to the Platinum plan ($2460/yr), but switching to the new user plan would
raise the bill beyond affordable for us ($8k+ per year).

I think it is a big mistake to bill for external collaborators, it completely
screws software houses that need this model to use GitHub.

~~~
taspeotis
I keep my eye on Microsoft's Visual Studio Team Services. It has a bit of a
clunky name and aimed more at enterprises but I think at some point they will
position it as a competitor to GitHub. It's free for the first five
developers, and no charge for "stakeholder" user accounts.

[https://www.visualstudio.com/pricing/visual-studio-team-
serv...](https://www.visualstudio.com/pricing/visual-studio-team-services-
pricing-vs)

So 29 users would be $182/m (check my maths) and you'd pay nothing for the
external collaborators (assuming they fit the "stakeholder" role ... no need
access to the code).

~~~
bad_user
If you no longer want/need the social aspects of GitHub, you can just move to
GitLab. Much more affordable and you can self host it yourself. We have an on
premise GitLab installation. Besides the rare upgrade, it's pretty hands off.
And it's costing us $0 in licensing fees for over 60 users ;-)

~~~
taspeotis
I looked at GitLab, it seems to come off second best in terms of features [1].

[1] [https://www.visualstudio.com/get-started/overview-of-get-
sta...](https://www.visualstudio.com/get-started/overview-of-get-started-
tasks-vs)

Hard to argue with free though, if that's what you're looking for.

~~~
bad_user
I've always found VSTS to be at the same time expensive, bloated and missing
essential functionality. I think the mentality of .NET / Microsoft developers
is strange. By following Microsoft's lead, wherever that may take you, you're
missing out and you don't even know what :-P

~~~
vtbassmatt
I'm a PM on VSTS. If you're willing to share what we're missing and what's
bloated, I'd love to hear it. mattc@xbox.com or a reply here would be much
appreciated. Thanks!

------
beberlei
The incentive changes for this are so massive, nice "experiment" from an
economics perspective.

1\. penalizes OpenSource organizations that need a few private repos for
password, server configuration or other things. Was 25$ before, now for
example Doctrine with 48 collaborators it would be 394$. Even if just the
admins have access to that repository.

2\. penalizes collaboration, inviting every non-technical person in the
company? 2-5 employees of the customer? not really. Will lead organizations to
create a single "non-technical" user that everyone can use to comment on
stuff. not to mention bots, especially since you need users for servers in
more complex deployment scenarios.

3\. rewards having many repos, small throw away stuff and generally will lead
to "messy" repositories lying around everywhere that are committed on once or
twice and never touched again. "Not having to think about another private
repository", imho will produce technical debt for organizations.

4\. users in many private orgs will need to pay or get paid for every
organization each. I myself will be worth 45$ now for Github, being in private
repositories of five different companies.

All in all, this just shows that Github does not care as much about open
source anymore as it cares about Enterprise.

Btw: Mentioning the price jumps in repository usage of the old pricing is not
really helpful. Consider a pricing that would be per repository (1$ for
personal, 2$ for organizations) and doesnt have jumps and compare that to the
new per using pricing. The new pricing only feels better for some, because you
pay marginal costs for every single user instead of the old pricing where
every 50 repositories you have to suddenly pay 100$ extra.

Edit: Forgot about bots, and deployment machine users (which even Github
recommends for many scenarios)

~~~
sdm
Yup, #2 would hits us very hard. We have just over 40 people split between two
organizations; everyone has access to Github and all have been trained to use
it. Only about half are developers; are a lot of rules in a simple DSL that
business analysts maintain and designer need to be able to update art and
that's not even counting the bots. We have about as many Github users as repos
-- we archive anything that's out of date to long term storage. If we are
forced to switch to the new pricing model Github will likely lose us as a
customer. The new model is just insanely expensive. The main reason we choose
Github was the ability to have everyone use it. Feels like an outright cash
grab honestly, especially with #4.

------
gelatocar
What about companies like Epic Games that have few repos but many users?

With their 2 private UnrealEngine and UnrealTournament repos they would have
been paying $25 a month and under the new pricing structure will have to pay
$815,913 per month...

edit: That's based on what I can see as a UE4 subscriber, 2 private repos and
90657 users.

~~~
bkeepers
We are reaching out to customers that are in unique situations such as the one
you're mentioning here. If you have questions about how the pricing changes
affect you, please don’t hesitate to contact support@github.com.

~~~
Sephr
If you need to give Epic Games special treatment just because they have a huge
amount of outside collaborators, then your pricing model is broken.

It would be more fair to charge _$9 /mo per organization member + $1/mo per
active outside collaborator_ (somewhat similar to AWS CodeCommit) than to
charge for every single active and inactive member and collaborator equally.
Maybe throw in a 50% bulk discount for active outside collaborators over 1000.

This is not a "unique situation", it's how many organizations use GitHub (just
on a smaller scale than Epic Games). As giovannibajo1 puts it[1], this change
is very unfair to software houses. Giving Epic Games special treatment is only
avoiding the issue.

If 5% of Epic Game's 90664 collaborators are active for a given month, then
with my proposed pricing model it would now cost them ($9/organization member
+ ~$2766)/mo, instead of >$800k/mo. No special deals needed, and everyone
(presumably) is happy.

This proposed pricing model also scales well for software houses that have
have many active outside collaborators. For example, a company with 20
employees and 50% of 100 outside collaborators active in any given month would
be charged $230/mo. With 50 employees and 50% of 500 outside collaborators
active, it would be $700/mo.

This should also work well for large companies. 200 employees + 30% of 4000
outside contributors active = $2900/mo.

[1]:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11673352](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11673352)

~~~
lucasnemeth
Business are free to close deals with clients in their own terms whenever is
lucrative for them. Almost every single company will have "unfair" treatment
for big corporations... That way they can get big paying clients. clients that
could possibly host their own solutions... It might be that Epic Games in the
old business model, with so many users, was not profitable for github, but
they are open to negotiate a middle term. It's just business. It is fair.

I think github is on their own right and if you have a case where you think
you would be able to negotiate with them, you can send them an email as
well... If not, go search another company that have a better cost/benefit for
your use case.

------
biztos
I find it interesting that so many people here are unhappy with the change.
Sure, prices will go up for a lot of organizations, but is $9/worker/month
really a lot to pay for all the stuff GitHub offers? At Bay Area prices isn't
that about 5 minutes of developer pay per month?

For independent use it seems like a very positive change, in fact I'm guessing
it's a direct challenge to GitLab. I was considering moving my stuff to GitLab
simply because I'm tired of bundling experiments/prototypes into umbrella
repos just to stay under the 10 repo limit at GitHub. For people like me this
will be awesome, and I take it as a good sign that they're responding to the
competition.

One thing I don't get however: how do they count shared access to private
repos?

If I have a private repo and you have a private repo, and we each grant access
to the other's repo so we can collaborate, do we now have two or four billing
units?

They say "you can even invite a few collaborators" \-- but how are you billed
if it's more than a "few?"

I don't mind if they try to close the loophole of making up an "organization"
out of a lot of "individual developers" but it seems a little vague.

~~~
krstck
> At Bay Area prices isn't that about 5 minutes of developer pay per month?

I work for an academic nonprofit. Asking to spend any money is like pulling
teeth, and any purchase I make has to go through many layers of bureaucracy
who don't understand or care what I do and have no incentive to make my life
easier. I don't want to leave Github, but now I _have_ to, because I just
won't get the approval to spend hundreds a year. But I know that's nothing to
Bay Area companies, so the rest of us will just go kick rocks or something.

~~~
WillAbides
> I don't want to leave Github, but now I have to, because I just won't get
> the approval to spend ~100's a month.

No you don't have to leave GitHub now. GitHub isn't forcing existing customers
onto the new pricing, and it says in the post that if that changes at least 12
months notice will be given.

~~~
StevePerkins
What announcement are you reading? It states very clearly that this is the new
pricing model, period.

Yes, existing customers have a 12-month grace period before they're impacted
by a price change... but that clock just started ticking. There isn't an
indefinite opt-out for this model change.

~~~
WillAbides
I'm looking at this one [0]. Specifically this item in the FAQ:

> Will GitHub force me to move to per-user pricing after 12 months?

> No. At this time we are not enforcing a timeline to move and if in the
> future we do decide to set a timeline we are committing to giving you at
> least 12 months.

[0] [https://github.com/blog/2164-introducing-unlimited-
private-r...](https://github.com/blog/2164-introducing-unlimited-private-
repositories)

------
grawlinson
That's cool but seeing as Bitbucket has unlimited private repos for everyone,
I'll be sticking with Bitbucket for private trash and Github for public trash.

~~~
k__
Same here. That's the cool thing about Git. Everyone uses the same "protocol"
so you can simply move your stuff around.

~~~
rplnt
But does bitbucket/etc have emoticons in commit messages?

~~~
zxcvcxz
This is why github is going the way of alta-vista. They should be focusing
their energy elsewhere.

------
sudhirj
What's with all the negativity? This is really good pricing - all individuals
now pay much less (a flat rate of $7), all small shops pay almost the same
thing ($30 to $90 for 3 to 10 people). Both groups no longer need to think
twice about creating repos, which has always been a huge pain that I've seen.
I've even thought twice about microservices because the repo cost would be a
pain.

This will affect enterprises - but then they're either already on Github
Enterprise or are used to per user pricing anyway. Google Apps, Slack etc all
have (quantitavely similar) per user pricing. Google doesn't charge you based
on the number of emails you send, nor does Slack charge based on the number of
private rooms there are - that would be dumb.

The band of companies between small shops and enterprises are likely to be
affected, but then this is really employee lunch money.

~~~
pilif
> This will affect enterprises - but then they're either already on Github
> Enterprise or are used to per user pricing anyway

my organization currently contains 15 github users. 2 of which are used by
error reporting tools to open bugs (Sentry, Crashlytics), one of which is used
by Jenkins, 3 of which are outside contractor for which github now will get
the money multiple times as companies move to the same billing method.

We had 9 repos on github (and about 20 smaller ones with less collaboration on
a self-hoste gitolite installation), so we paid $300 per year.

Now I have unlimited repos of which I still only use 9, but now I pay $1300
per year, whereby 3 of these accounts I'm paying for aren't actually real
people and another 3 of these accounts I'm paying for even though multiple
other companies are also paying for them.

Aside of the nearly 5x increase in price, I think it's also unfair having to
pay for practically unused bug-reporting-only accounts and having to pay for
accounts that are already paid for by a multitude of other companies.

I don't think this is good pricing for me.

Also as this isn't just a moderate increase, but a whopping 5x increase, I
also strongly consider moving back away to a self-hosted solution because
increasing the price by 5x is breaking the trust put into github as a third-
party provider.

Increasing the price a bit is fine. But 5x is excessive.

~~~
skywritergr
It sounds like it would be a big help if github offered unlimited read-
only/bot accounts. Not sure how technically feasible is that but it doesn't
sound impossible.

~~~
tomschlick
Or as someone mentioned above, if they went the Slack route of not charging
for users who don't push/pull code in a 30/60 day period. That way you could
still have collaborator users (issues, PRs, etc) and only pay for the users
who actually code.

------
rspeer
This is, of course, a positive way to spin the fact that they're raising
prices significantly for many organizations.

I'm glad there's at least a year that we can keep using the old plans.

~~~
0xmohit
s/many/most

------
bsnape
This has almost quadrupled our monthly cost ($850 vs $2914). We have ~300
users which will have to be reduced massively to save costs - perhaps with
non-engineers sharing accounts or having no access at all. I'm not sure if
charging per user is really in the spirit of open collaboration that GitHub
champions.

I slo wonder if charging per user rather than per repo will also discourage
the creation of open-source repos from orgs? There's no longer a (reduced)
cost benefit after all, even if that was a minor influence compared with the
other benefits of open-sourcing your code.

~~~
odonnellryan
You have 300 employees and an extra $6/mo/em is going to break you? How much
do you spend on toilet paper? :)

~~~
smackfu
Doesn't say they are employees.

~~~
odonnellryan
So it's an open source project?

I guess it can be a NFP that has closed-source repos. But why?

~~~
Xylakant
Doesn't have to be OS. It could be a commercial product that grants access to
the source.

~~~
odonnellryan
It's possible, but that's a weird requirement (weird you'd want all your
clients on the same repo, anyway) and you'd be able to circumvent this and
come out pretty swell on the other side if that money is really worth it to
you.

~~~
Xylakant
Why would they not use the same repo? It can easily be a standard product -
look at the example further downthread of the unreal engine: All clients get
access to the code. 2 private repos and 90657 users.

That's an extreme example, but we also have a single repo that a lot of
collaborators get access to.

~~~
odonnellryan
That's a good point. It still seems like an odd use-case!

------
0xmohit
With this change, BitBucket pricing [0] gets to appear pretty attractive.

(If you were an organization with few private repositories and large number of
users, Github was earlier more affordable.)

[0] [https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing?tab=cloud-
pricing](https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing?tab=cloud-pricing)

~~~
0x0
It was already pretty attractive: Personal accounts get free unlimited repos
(so inf% cheaper than github), and for organizations with few numbers of users
but a huge number of repositories, github's largest plan was too small. :)

~~~
lucaspiller
> Personal accounts get free unlimited repos

And teams of up to 5 people.

------
kapv89
Nothing beats [https://bitbucket.org/](https://bitbucket.org/) when it comes
to free, unlimited, private repositories. It has seen the first hosted
repositories of far more startups than github ever will. Which is special
achievement in itself.

~~~
therealmarv
You should check out gitlab.com

~~~
dreamsofdragons
I have, I'll continue to use bitbucket.

~~~
Kratisto
Any reason why? Just wondering.

~~~
msbarnett
GitLab's UI is pretty terrible, even compared to the not-so-great-either
BitBucket UI.

GitLab's UI/UX is regressive to the point that when you visit a repo, you have
to click another link just to see the damn sourcecode. It's as though they
ignored every advance in source-code UX post-Sourceforge.

The stacked global and per-repo sidebars are confusing in a way that baffled
me for several minutes, as well. They need a serious rethink of their UI/UX.

~~~
andromeduck
IDK, you have the option of whether to show files vs readme on landing but I
actually actually prefer landing on readme first as it gives me an idea of
what it is I'm looking at before deciding to dig into the code or not.

The main issue with GitLab right now IMO is that it's so fucking slow at times
-- ike seconds per page slow...

~~~
sytse
Sorry that GitLab.com is slow. We're working on it in the appropriately
numbered issue [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
com/operations/issues/42](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42)

BTW on-premises GitLab installations should be fast already

------
bufordsharkley
Have been using Github for a community radio station, have been encouraging
all staffers to use github accounts to file issues against our private repos,
etc. The friendly policies for many collaborators have made this attractive,
even though most users have rarely interacted with the repos, if at all.

Now each user for the private repo has a significant cost (pretty significant
for a non-profit community radio station); looks like we'll have to rethink
this whole Github thing.

~~~
moby
Certainly appreciate your question around pricing for non-profits here - have
you applied for non-profit status through GitHub?

We do have discounts to support eligible non-profit organizations, and you can
request the discount at
[https://github.com/nonprofit](https://github.com/nonprofit). Feel free to
reach out to Support ([https://github.com/c](https://github.com/c)) if you
have any further questions around this!

~~~
wbillingsley
Out of interest, why do you require charities to have no religious affiliation
at all? Perhaps there's some US tax or legal aspect to it?

At at first glance from overseas, it seems oddly churlish and monoculturalist
(dare I say "fearful of the prayerful") to disallow community groups and
charities where actually yes their beliefs did prompt them to step out in
service, and they are not ashamed of that.

I can't imagine it's a big part of your revenue base, and I wonder if there's
more people like me who casually read it and quietly think "ooh, that's a bit
inward-looking and snarky -- and goodness they put it on the page twice to
make sure" than groups who are actually affected by it.

Suddenly those cheery octocats under "We love people who are changing the
world" seem just that bit more limited and exclusionary. If I was in a
satirical and provocative mood, I might ask, are they holding hands in
togetherness, or to keep the undesirables out?

~~~
nosefrog
Excluding religious groups from special nonprofit deals is pretty normal in
the US. For example, my employer does donation matching for non-religious
nonprofits. You're reading a lot more into it than you probably should.

------
romanovcode
I see absolutely no reason why one would pay GitHub for private repositories
when there is Bitbucket, or much better alternative to GitHub altogether -
GitLab.

~~~
Singletoned
Yeah, this makes internally hosted GitLab VERY attractive for us now. Even the
Enterprise edition is going to be significantly cheaper than GitHub.

~~~
sytse
Glad to hear you're considering GitLab, our on-premises pricing can be found
on [https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/](https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/)

------
therealmarv
It seems most users here don't have gitlab.com in their radar and only
mentioning Bitbucket as competitor. I've recently switched all my private
personal repos to gitlab.com which also allows unlimited private repositories
because gitlab.com seems to have better UI and more features than Bitbucket
(when not buying any additional Atlassian Jira etc. products).

~~~
zxcvcxz
Same here I love gitlab and especially their UI. I've seen some gitlab devs on
here before too and they were really friendly. Only draw back is that the
sites kind of slow for me, but so was github.

------
patcon
This is absolutely fucking atrocious news for any company who wants to run an
agile operation.

I always framed the "Github vs Bitbucket" as an "agile vs enterprise"
mentality -- BitBucket made you think hard about adding new people, and air on
the side of limiting access -- ie. conceal by default. That's perfect for
enterprise, but the worst fucking incentive ever for an org that wants to make
as many projects as possible accessible to all company members. GitHub (in
times past), removed this cognitive burden of thinking "does this person
/really/ need access....?" \-- ie. transparent by default.

But now they've fucked up.

I was always in favour of avoiding self-hosting when there was a great hosted
service like GitHub available. But I would now never advise any company that I
cared about to use GitHub. It will contort and twist the openness you wish to
imbue in your growing company

------
rdancer
This is an awful pricing model.

⇒ One-size-fits-all never fits all. Getting rid of tiers is naïve and
misguided. Even if just for anchoring and the illusion of choice in face of
terrible choices, tiers are a necessity. Sales will suffer, customer
satisfaction will suffer.

⇒ I don't care if existing private customers pay the same or less. The price
points should have been retained, and customers let to switch to a lower tier
if they wished. Capturing consumer surplus leads to increased revenue. Github
needs that money; the more money they throw away foolishly, the closer they
are to bankruptcy.

⇒ "Starting today"?! At least current developer plans have been grandfathered
in, with a 12-month notice period. Still, if an org has been in the process of
planning a move to Github, they will have to re-evaluate.

Github has been such a great platform. A major stumble like this, I'm worried
they may not be with us for much longer.

------
t3nary
Does anyone know if this will effect student plans as well? So far it included
a free micro plan with the usual 5 private repos. Would be pretty awesome, I
just had to host a repo somewhere else a few days ago because I ran out of
private repos.

Other than that it sounds like a great improvement, it'll make it a lot more
likely that I'll pay for GitHub when I'm not a student anymore.

/edit: [https://github.com/pricing](https://github.com/pricing) makes it sound
like this is for free student plans as well

~~~
bkeepers
Good question! Students get free private repositories for 2 years. You can
request the student discount at
[https://education.github.com/](https://education.github.com/)

~~~
t3nary
Awesome, thanks for the confirmation :)

------
ThePhysicist
It would be interesting to know how many users and repositories a typical
organization has on Github.

To me, it looks like they're just "optimizing" their pricing, as I would guess
that most large organizations using Github have significantly more users than
repositories, especially with the recent trend towards "mono-repositories".

That said, SaaS pricing is really hard to get right from the beginning. I run
a code analysis company
([https://www.quantifiedcode.com](https://www.quantifiedcode.com)) and we
thought a lot about which kind of pricing would be the best for us and our
users (we decided to use per-repo pricing). In the end, your pricing needs to
support your business model, so it's normal to change it especially if you
have a lot of data on how your users use your product.

I wonder though if this will drive organizations to other solutions like
Gitlab or Bitbucket, as those are significantly cheaper and pretty easy to set
up these days (and you get the extra benefit of a self-hosted solution that
can be hosted in your own, secure infrastructure)

------
m4tthumphrey
I find it quite hard to comprehend why people use Github for private
repositories. There are many free alternatives. BitBucket seems to be the
famous one, but Gitlab has grown into an amazing product with 3 different
offerings; On premise community edition, on premise enterprise and hosted
(like Github).

We have used the on premise community edition for about 3 years now. I first
installed it when you had to run about a billion commands manually and it was
great even then. Now you can install it with an apt-get and a few lines.

Lets not forget about the obvious negatives of Github (ignoring pricing).

1) Its hosted which means it can go down 2) It is closed source 3) Feature
based is quite small (compared to Gitlab)

Gitlab is a regular release cycle, once a month which always comes with new
features.

I personally think it is a no brainer.

~~~
xillion
If every organization went to free alternatives, not only would those free
alternatives need a source of revenue to support the new business, I think
you'd find they too will change their pricing structure to better fit the
people that use their product.

One thing I also have to mention is a majority of for profit organizations
have no problem paying for services they use. HN is a special snowflake on the
internet, it's not a reliable source of market research by any means.

I can guarantee you none of the competitors are in it to provide a charity.
They all want and NEED to make money somehow, I think you'll be surprised how
long free solutions tend to last.

~~~
seanclayton
On Gitlab.com's homepage[0] there is a giant product listing showing you
exactly what you are saying they need to have: A source of revenue (GitLab
Enterprise Edition).

[0]: [https://about.gitlab.com/](https://about.gitlab.com/)

~~~
xillion
I understand their Enterprise offering offsets the costs of hosting the open
source version for you. But should another product be the dependency of
determining if the open source version is free? What if the Enterprise
offering stops making money? Wouldn't you rather pay for the service you use
so it supports future development? It's like Apple depending on product A to
give away B for free, that doesn't seem like it'd scale a whole lot. Product B
will just reach into the resources needed to build and manage product A.

Just my 2c anyways, happy to hear feedback on why I'm wrong :)

------
kuon
Now I have to pay for external collaborators? Are you kidding me? We are a
small team of 5, but making softwares for other, I'll have to move away from
github with the new pricing, we have nearly ten people per repository that
might just be exec who never accessed the repo but must have access to it.

~~~
lucasnemeth
git is distributed. You can give access to a mirror of your git repo for execs
that don't access the repo or contribute to it. They don't need to be github
users, they just need git access to an url. If github is still convenient for
you, there is a solution to avoid paying for this users. It only really makes
sense to have developers added as github users (of course, it used to be
convenient to just ask them to be github users, but it never really made
sense)

~~~
kuon
I know git is distributed, that's not the point. Github as a platform is
convenient and understood even by non technical people. They can browse files,
even edit on the web.

~~~
lucasnemeth
I hope they create a stakeholder account for that. But it is wrong to put all
your eggs in one basket. Github is nice to show to non technical people but it
is definitely an over kill.

------
pilif
The linked page is telling us that eventually, only the new plans will be
available. For my case (15 users in the organization, using the bronze plan
with a lot of not-so-important repos on our own server), this will be a price
increase from $300/y to $1380/y - nearly 5x more expensive.

I really hope the old plans stay around as long as possible.

Also, consider external collaborators that are part of multiple organizations:
Github will now receive the $9/month per external collaborator and
organization they are in. That's one hell of a deal for github.

~~~
heartbreak
I'll assume that none of your 15 users are software developers and that none
of your users live in a first world country. I'll assume you pay a user
$15,000 USD per year in salary. $225,000 for all 15 total. Cost of Github:
$1,380. New operating costs: $226,380. I see that they have gone up by %0.6.
Crushing.

~~~
pilif
Some of these users are used for various error-reporting tools to report
issues as. I'm not paying these any salary, nor are they actual, you know,
people.

Some of these users also aren't developers but just need access to the bug
tracker. Some of them are outside contractors for whom multiple companies are
now paying the github tax.

But sure. $1.3K isn't much, but it's 5x more than what we had to pay
previously and it's being sold as an _improvement_.

It also means that I have to be much more mindful what other bot-accounts I'm
going to add to the organisation. Plus now that github has increased the
prices by 5x, who's to say they don't do it again at a late time?

I don't have a problem with moderate price increases. But 5x is too much.

~~~
heartbreak
$1,380 is so small an amount that when I worked at BigCorp I could expense
that and more each month without approval. No one cares about a thousand
bucks.

~~~
Xylakant
That amount may be change for $BigCorp, but I do care about 1380 USD. If you
have them and want to get rid of them, care to send them to me? I'll use them
for a good purpose.

------
lox
Pretty angry that Github have made this change with no mechanism for adding
machine users without paying a per month charge. It seems like a key feature,
which is currently horribly painful to manage and now expensive.

How does everyone else create credentials that CI can use to checkout code?

~~~
giovannibajo1
Both Travis and Circle automatically install a deploy key into the project. It
doesn't require additional machine users.

~~~
lox
That's fine if you have a single repo, but CI normally needs to access lots of
different repos. GitHub's documentation describes why you need machine users
for anything but the most trivial deployment.

[https://developer.github.com/guides/managing-deploy-
keys/](https://developer.github.com/guides/managing-deploy-keys/)

It's also what GitHub does internally.

~~~
teraflop
If I understand that page correctly, the only real difference is that Github
arbitrarily prevents you from using the same deploy key for multiple
repositories. If they lifted that restriction, this problem would go away.

------
tyingq
If you happen to be a group that will be affected negatively by this move
because you have a need for read-only users...

Gogs has mirror functionality where you could self-host access for those users
in a fairly painless way. Screenshot of import screen:
[http://i.imgur.com/J4vWCIB.png](http://i.imgur.com/J4vWCIB.png)

More on gogs here:
[https://github.com/gogits/gogs](https://github.com/gogits/gogs)

(no association with gogs, just thought it might be helpful)

------
caseymarquis
The number of very small teams or individuals this encourages to start using
github probably allows every organization who can't afford this to leave and
github to still increase the money they're making. It seems like a good move
based on my imagined profile of their user base. 1 million teens and young
20-somethings just decided they'll give 7$ a month to github.

For bigger organizations, this is practically no money compared to other
software they're using. So they'll just take the hit.

Sounds like the only customers being lost were those using github for no-
commit users. Is that really a huge segment? If so they just need a special
account status to fix this.

I think the question is why this took so long.

~~~
matthoffman
> Sounds like the only customers being lost were those using github for no-
> commit users. Is that really a huge segment? If so they just need a special
> account status to fix this.

I would think this is a large segment, or at least Github would like it to be.
Any software company that sells its software directly, and so has a sales
team, a support team, marketing and so on will need to make all of those
people users in Github if they're going to raise GH issues, see the code,
prototype something for a client, help with branding, or anything else. If
you're using Github the way they want you to (issue tracking, wiki, all of the
things Github adds over vanilla Git that are "sticky"/hard to transfer to a
competing service) you don't want to restrict access to just your developers.
You want your whole company to be using it.

In any software company I've worked for, those non-developer users number 3-4x
the actual number of developers. And I've never worked for a company that
would consider restricting which users could raise issues with the product.

I agree that having a non-commit account status that didn't count toward the
per-user pricing would fix this, for that particular (I think common?) case.

------
StevePerkins
TL;DR - GitHub is switching to Bitbucket's pricing model, but with a monthly
charge of $9/user rather than $1/user.

Seems bizarre to me. The "enterprise" market they're chasing are largely
Atlassian customers already, and Bitbucket has a competitive edge there with
its JIRA integration. GitHub's distinguishing characteristic was a different
pricing model, that for some organizations makes more sense than Atlassian's
does.

If they start competing apples-to-apples, but at 9x the cost, why would any
enterprise use GitHub unless they have a hipster CIO/CTO who just thinks it's
a "cooler" brand?

~~~
hrez
Github is betting on stickiness aka lock-in. That might prove to be bad bet.
Short term everybody who saves (small teams) will switch to new price model.
No sane org will opt to multitude of price increase voluntarily. So github
looses revenue short term. If github forces the switch on everybody many big
orgs will jump the ship one way or another. So github looses again.

------
stephenr
Hopefully this opens the eyes of at least _some_ people into realising that
GitHib !== git, and GitHub !== dvcs (similarly, git !== dvcs). There are
several alternatives out there, almost all of which provide _more_ options at
_lower_ cost than GitHub.

I know, I know "everyone is familiar with github". If your developers can't
function without GitHub specifically, you have a bigger problem than the new
GitHub pricing.

------
Ghostium
Hmm, I still will use Gitlab instead of Github. Unlimited public and private
repos for free is nice.

~~~
marcosscriven
Does anyone know how Gitlab plan to sustain that?

~~~
educar
a) They are vc funded

b) They give things free to drive up adoption. For example, I don't think it
will be free anymore if it was as popular as GitHub. Since that would not be
sustainable.

IMO, it's a poor decision by gitlab to give things out for free. Instead of
innovating on features, they try to keep it cheap.

~~~
sytse
Having a free GitLab.com doesn't mean we don't innovate on features. See
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/blob/master/CHANGELO...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/blob/master/CHANGELOG) and [https://about.gitlab.com/2016/03/29/gitlab-
runner-1-1-releas...](https://about.gitlab.com/2016/03/29/gitlab-
runner-1-1-released/) for features we recently added.

~~~
educar
Sorry, I didn't imply GitLab was not innovating. (Apologies for wording my
comment poorly). In fact, quite the opposite. I want to see GitLab build a
product that people willingly pay for.

(I say the same for all companies. Charge money for your product. If people
see value, they will pay.)

------
AndrewGaspar
I'm glad. Occasionally I would delete abandoned projects to make space and now
they can live forever to remind me of my failure!

------
BradRuderman
Its unfortunate that this doesn't promote trying to get business users to look
at the code. In our organization 3 or 4 users are read only and really just go
in at times to check specific errors, or logic for certain SQL queries, they
don't really contribute. We will now have to pay $9 per month for these type
of "read only" users.

~~~
majewsky
Couldn't you just use the same account for all of them, with a shared
password?

~~~
Xylakant
how would you restrict to repositories then? Given a large enough set of
external stakeholders using a single account is not feasible.

------
n9com
This change worked out well for us. Gone from paying $200/month to just
$25/month for our 5 person organisation.

~~~
elmigranto
You could've had it for free this whole time. (And still can!)

[https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing](https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing)

~~~
xillion
Free != better

------
ismyrnow
Github is... adopting the old Visual Studio logo?

[http://static.flickr.com/2768/4307936121_5b5e51a790.jpg](http://static.flickr.com/2768/4307936121_5b5e51a790.jpg)

------
ACow_Adonis
As a solo developer who had currently paid up for monthly access annually, I
feel obligated to feed back that this is pretty good news for me. Go github.

The 5 private repositories was a bit grating and making me considering a move
elsewhere. I was going to have to consider changing how I stored/structured my
projects in order to stay under what seemed to me to a relatively arbitrary
limit, which interfered with some of my automated tools and how I'd set them
up to assume a separate repository for each project.

I realise there are a number of bigger organisations for whom this
realistically means a hike in prices, and I'm winning relative to their
losing, but as someone who wants to keep advantages to the little guys (that's
the genuinely little guys, not a bunch of 50-100 guys bankrolled by several SV
millionaires/billionaires)...well, I feel its my duty to weigh in with
positive feedback against what is probably going to be some negativity from
the bigger guys...

~~~
r3bl
Five private repos were more then enough for me.

When I ran out of them, I noticed that there's at least one that either does
not need to be private anymore or just does not have to be on GitHub since I
ditched that idea. It was a nice way for me to keep my GitHub profile nice and
tidy.

------
nateguchi
I'm sure a lot of people will be moving from Bitbucket to this, Bitbucket's
plans were great for hundreds of repos, but Github's ecosystem is definitely
preferable.

~~~
Cozumel
Why? BitBucket is superior in every respect, plus importantly they give free
private repos for every user. No price gouging like we're seeing with GitHub.

~~~
matthewmacleod
Oh, come on. It's OK to dislike this change, but "BitBucket is superior in
every respect" and "price gouging" are far from objectively obvious.

~~~
Cozumel
Well look at the price changes people posting here are facing, ones from $2k a
year to $8k, that's gouging!

~~~
karim
These people are outliers --- the average developer with a handful of repos is
probably going to save money with the new pricing.

------
jamies888888
Very cleverly worded to sound like a price reduction when it's actually a
price increase.

------
Cozumel
'unlimited private repos' if you pay. BitBucket gives you them free and always
has!

~~~
a_imho
bitbucket used to offer 5 private repos for free

------
xchaotic
So what makes them think that they can get away with it? There's already
decent competitors - GitLab, BitBucket, Azure or you can just host your own
git repos - gitlab will even give you a nice Web UI for it. Why do they think
that people with stick with github, if we're talking $thousands/year then
surely migrating to another git repo provider is worth it?

~~~
stubish
Vendor lockin. Because there is a lot more involved that accessing files in a
.git directory. All those CI systems and workflow plugins and whatnots such as
travis-ci work with github, not git. And all the inflight issues and pull
requests etc. Migrating or giving up the features you use has a cost (not just
in dollars), and if github has done their sums right most customers will
realize they are better off staying where they are.

~~~
a_imho
Travis CI is pretty minor player (google search 10M > hits), and I would say
3rd party service integration is exactly vendor lockin.

Imho this makes sense, because users who cared about pricing already moved on
to cheaper alternatives and/or not used github to begin with. I agree, mass
migration or phasing out github is unlikely because of the associated costs,
however with all the other great services around new users might think twice
where to sign up.

~~~
sytse
Just wanted to mention that on GitLab.com we offer unlimited GitLab CI to run
your tests [https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-
ci/](https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-ci/)
[https://about.gitlab.com/2016/04/19/gitlab-partners-with-
dig...](https://about.gitlab.com/2016/04/19/gitlab-partners-with-digitalocean-
to-make-continuous-integration-faster-safer-and-more-affordable/)

------
voltagex_
Is there a way to get billed annually for a personal account? Makes budgeting
easier and also protects me against AUD/USD changes.

~~~
vinmat
Yes, you can pay for a year upfront for a personal account.

------
red_admiral
For small private projects, gitlab.com has had unlimited private repos for
$0/month for a while now.

~~~
sytse
And on top of that we don't charge for collaborators.

------
mattyohe
All I ask is that Github implement Slack's Fair Billing Policy. Managing who
at the organization can access a service is a silly task.

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear that this follows that model. They're open to
feedback: [https://github.com/contact](https://github.com/contact)

~~~
jackweirdy
I wasn't aware Slack had that model. It's really interesting.

Here's the link for anyone else who wants to read:
[https://get.slack.help/hc/en-
us/articles/218915077-Understan...](https://get.slack.help/hc/en-
us/articles/218915077-Understanding-our-Fair-Billing-policy)

------
partycoder
I am strongly considering moving to gitlab.

~~~
atonse
I have some private repos on gitlab and it is sloooooooow to push and pull. It
routinely takes 10 seconds to push or pull.

That itself makes deploys seem like a chore. And it's enough to make me come
back to github for a mere $7.

~~~
sytse
I'm sorry GitLab.com is slow, we're working to make it faster in
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
com/operations/issues/42](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42)

~~~
atonse
No worries – It's just not a good fit right now but can change back once the
performance improves. My loyalty to github is 95% about the performance, not
really anything else.

I've actually been following that thread and it's been interesting to read and
watch the progress.

~~~
sytse
OK, thanks!

------
drinchev
Wow. Companies definitely suffer. For me ( freelancing dev, working primarily
with startups ) it's a huge win.

GitHub vs BitBucket was always about :

1) 3rd party integrations ( CircleCI - e.g. ) - sadly bitbucket is behind
that.

2) Issue management. Bitbucket's default behavior doesn't support labels or
any other way of managing the issues structure.

Now, honestly CircleCI + GitHub for 7$ is just extremely cheap. ( talking solo
devs / small teams ).

------
nikolay
This is way too expensive! Self-hosted GitLab is cheaper and has better
uptime!

Not to mention, they should have made you pay only for users with commit
rights!

~~~
glusterfuck
Only if you assign no value to your own time, and assume you can do a better
job with availability and durability than a dedicated Operations team and a
multi-million dollar budget.

~~~
hrez
Like Salesforce has?
[http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/11/marc_benioff_publica...](http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/11/marc_benioff_publically_apologizes_over_salesforce_na14_instance_outage/)

------
discodave
For comparison, quoting from the AWS CodeCommit pricing page...

AWS CodeCommit costs:

$1 per active user per month For every active user, your account receives for
that month:

10 GB-month of storage

2,000 Git requests

And the 1 year free tier is:

5 active users 50 GB-month of storage 10,000 Git requests

~~~
voltagex_
It took a bit of searching to find out what a "Git Request" entailed: "A Git
request includes any push or pull that transmits repository objects. The
request does not count towards your Git request allowance if there is no
object transfer due to local and remote branches being up-to-date."

Anyone who's using CodeCommit - have you hit the limits? How much did you go
over by?

~~~
majewsky
I don't use CodeCommit, but I doubt that an average developer would be hitting
the 2000-request boundary (that's 100 requests per day assuming a 5-day work
week). Technical users like a CI might be more problematic.

~~~
vacri
I think it's 2000 requests overall, and if you add in a few buildplans for
each of a few repos, you'll easily hit it. Still, it's not pricey if you do.

------
imron
The main image on that page looks remarkably similar to the 2010 Visual Studio
logo:

[http://blogs.msdn.com/b/samer/archive/2010/01/27/quick-
share...](http://blogs.msdn.com/b/samer/archive/2010/01/27/quick-share-the-
history-of-visual-studio.aspx)

~~~
dawnerd
Also
[https://step-3.app.box.com/s/k77k28sy0bdpo2drg2sqrbjhht25k9a...](https://step-3.app.box.com/s/k77k28sy0bdpo2drg2sqrbjhht25k9af/1/7858651297/64780303461/1)

------
konole
Link to plans: [https://github.com/pricing](https://github.com/pricing)

------
andrewljohnson
How many startups have a non-core-dev-advisor who they will now pay $9/month
to get occasional comments from? Or not?

One downside of this change is if you have a private Github org, you are now
incentivized not to add advisors/randoms to your org/repos. I wonder how much
scurrying Github sees to remove errant users from orgs.

------
alanfranzoni
Do outside collaborators count as paid users?

~~~
vinmat
Hi alanfranzoni,

Outside collaborators on public repositories of an organization are free. Only
the ones invited to collaborate on private repositories are counted as paid
users.

Hope this helps!

~~~
j4mie
So to clarify: if I'm an organisation with 100 private repositories, and I add
an outside collaborator with access to just one of them, I have to pay $9 a
month for them?

I was quite excited about this change (we're an agency with a large number of
repos and a relatively small number of users) until I read your comment.

~~~
giovannibajo1
Yes, they're actively screwing agencies and software houses.

When they introduced the new organization features, I smelled they were
heading here, but I honestly thought that the "outside collaborator" concept
was meant exactly for not billing this kind of rare users. Guess what,
greediness has no limit.

------
imcotton
GitLab gets 1 point without doing anything, oddly.

------
throwaway2016a
This change actually saved me a lot of money per month. We use micro-service
architecture and furthermore do consulting work so we had a Platinum level
plan with only 7 people with access. This greatly improved our billing
situation.

Although I can very much see how it could go the other way.

------
sandGorgon
Thank you - this is very exciting. Bitbucket uses a per-user pricing and it
has been extremely useful for us. People forget how useful it has been to not
worry about the number of scratch repositories we can create as we experiment.
Our main repo is a single monolithic repo. But do you not ask your
consultants/outside resources to work on a company repo ? how do you price
that I wonder.

I am not sure why people would like stuff to be priced per repo. It is a
fairly unintuitive model for me and is a huge problem when you need to go an
explain to the finance team that you need to spend more because you "created
more repos"... say wut? Spending per user is a very clean way of pricing.

------
timvdalen
While unlimited private repositories sounds good, this change means that our
GitHub costs are now 2.3x higher.

If this is going to be enforced, we'll need to decide between cutting away
users from the org or moving to a different platform.

------
tanepiper
There is an element of "double dipping" here that I see as a problem.

I already pay $7 a month for my own personal Github account, and for me
personally it's nice to have no limit.

But if we switch to the new model at work then not only am I paying my $7, but
my company will have to pay an additional $9p/m for me to have access to the
repos I use daily for work.

Even if they removed me from the organisation and added me as a collaborator
this will be an additional cost.

They can spin it how they like but I suspect for a large number of
organisations they are going to see quite an increase in cost from using
Github.

~~~
heartbreak
Does your ISP double dip if they charge your employer for business internet
access and you for home internet access?

------
shrugger
But why should I use Github over Gitlab? I don't care about popularity, Gitlab
already offers the minimal set of features I care about, and has demonstrated
a neutral business model.

Github had leaks coming out about how 'white men' aren't suitable to solve
GH's business problems, why should I want to associate with an organization
that discriminates people based on the color of their skin rather than by the
contents of their code?

I'm glad that they are offering this, I think their customers will put this
offering to good use, but it doesn't convince me.

------
hartror
Finally! While as others point out this can work out more expensive the
improvement is is that it scales as my company scales and doesn't act as a
disincentive to developers spinning up new repos.

------
spriggan3
The pricing is clearly designed to make more revenue from businesses with a
lot of users, which makes sense for Github but not for big teams in /mid sized
shops who will be paying a lot more.

~~~
lucasnemeth
It will attract more small companies and freelance single developers as well.

------
oneeyedpigeon
Misleading headline alert; should say "for paid accounts" I got _way_ too
excited there :-(

------
petetnt
Links not up yet, but you can already switch your plan
[https://github.com/organizations/your_org/settings/billing/p...](https://github.com/organizations/your_org/settings/billing/per_seat)
for unlimited private repositories at $25/month for your first 5 users.
$9/month for each additional user. (Edit: Up now! Personal plans get upgraded
to unlimited too!)

------
CiPHPerCoder
This change was beneficial to me.

Before upgrading, a grand total of 4 users had access to our private
repositories, of which we were only using 7 out of 10. I was nervous about
running out of repositories moreso than the cost of adding people.

(If we grow our team, it's because we have a lot of client work that's outside
my immediate strong suits and we had to hire. If we do that twice, I'll gladly
pay the extra $9/month.)

------
samstave
Well, I will say that this is a good thing, because when we had paid for ~20
repos at a last company, and eng made a new repo - number 21, that was then
made public by default as we were out of private repos. FUCK THAT.

He made a mistake and checked in (yes this is on him) an AWS access and
secret.

Within hours we have 1,500 machines launched in every region doing bitcoin
mining....

Making a repo "public by default" is pure BS.

------
piyush_soni
Still, not even a couple of free private repositories?

------
mark_l_watson
This will help organizations that keep huge monolithic repos on GH - one of my
customers does that. They have one repo that should be dozens of smaller
repos.

I use GH for my open source projects and code examples for my books and I use
Bitbucket (which is also a great service) for my private repos. I have always
felt somewhat guilty with this setup, working both companies for free
services.

------
danpalmer
I think the new pricing structure makes a lot of sense, however is awkwardly
limiting in some respects that GitHub might not have considered.

We have essentially 2 classes of GitHub user on our organisation - developers,
and non-developers. While our devs use GitHub all the time (and therefore are
worth the $25 a month for the development team), our other users might edit a
specific few config files, or jobs pages (for example) once a month - paying
$9/month each seems quite overpriced.

We want to be an open company, one that doesn't keep secrets from employees,
one that doesn't create unnecessary barriers to productivity, or have
unnecessary process, so giving GitHub access to everyone in the company who
wants it is important to us - this stops us from reasonably doing this. As a
result, we likely won't be switching to the new pricing structure for as long
as possible, which is a shame, because it would be nice to not have to think
about private repos.

------
dblock
If someone is unsure about this math, our (we're
[https://github.com/artsy](https://github.com/artsy)) bill goes up from 450$
to 1051$ per month.

But it's not about just the money, it's about incentives.

\- We have large amounts of open-source code, so we were encouraged to open-
source more to avoid jumping to the next tier.

\- We're going to probably close access to a bunch of code to a big chunk of
our organization. We have hundreds of humans. Whereas before we would give
them permissions to view as a default and hope they look at our code one day
or at least know that they can, or sometimes would get a link to look at a
change from a discussion, we'll now have to have to see whether it's worth
9x100s of people every month.

I am not complaining, Github provides excellent service. Seems worth it at 5K$
a year and probably 10K$ a year, too. I wish it didn't just double though and
was more gradual.

------
erikrothoff
This is awesome! I'm currently paying 50 USD per month for more repos on my
private account. Definitely the right way to go.

------
joeblau
I just had a discussion with my buddy about repositories yesterday. He wanted
access to some code I had for uploading CSV files to iCloud and it's hosted on
a private repo on GitHub. He was saying "I still use BitBucket's private
repos"; My response was that the GitHub community is a lot stronger. Outside
of community, it was hard for me to convince him that GitHub is worth it.

I've been using GitHub for a few years now to host private and public repos
and paid private repos was always a point of contention. Now that they are
unlimited, I can say that GitHub is definitely going to be the home to all of
my future projects. I really feel like GitHub has been kicking it up a notch
in 2016. Awesome work team and thanks!

------
Rapzid
All those private repos and no way to organize them :( Where are the
namespaces/projects github?

------
shepbook
I think this is a clear win for individual users that have been paying for
GitHub. For organizations, I'm curious how many organizations they have just
bumped above the $300-500/month mark. A lot of companies allow managers
discretionary spending limits that they can spend without requesting approval,
and if makes me wonder if they just made a bunch of managers need to start
asking for approval for their GitHub bill. Another comment mentioned that
having it filter up that the cost of a service just increase several times,
will likely result in people being told to investigate alternatives. If that's
the case, there are a fair number of alternatives to go to, depending on your
specific situation.

------
benguild
This is nice. Now I won't have to keep deleting private repos to make room for
new ones

------
jrgifford
Is there a definition of "a few collaborators" anywhere? How many people, and
is it per repo or per paid account? Really need more information before I
decide if GitHub continues to get my $7/month or not.

------
Twisell
The main drawback of a lot of Cloud based business model I have seen is that
nobody think its fine to pay for leechers.

The per user pricing is pretty reasonable but only when you think of seeders
(publishers/editors/pushers call them as you like).

For instance I would love to subscribe to a BI cloud suite that really fit my
need, but I'm basically the sole query editor and I have potentially 200
private readers + some public OpenData. I simply just can't come to my boss
and ask that we subscribe to this service on a 200 users basis while only one
users will really have the use of the license...

------
Illniyar
Can two individual priced accounts collaborate on the same private repository?

~~~
bkeepers
An individual on the Personal plan can add users to their private repositories
for free.

------
derrekl
There is one case we have where the newer per seat pricing doesn't facilitate
how we're using github. One of our repositories is "docs" with a bunch of
markdown files, pdfs, images, and other documents related to our tech. It's
mostly used in a read only way by a bunch of non-developers while engineers
contribute heavily to the documentation. Paying $9/month per biz person to be
able to view the documentation is too much and will force that use case off to
Confluence or some other wiki/documenting tool.

------
donatj
We have a large number of people in our organization who have GitHub access
who do not code and instead file or manage tickets. $9 a month just to be able
to file a ticket is rather steep.

------
manigandham
It's amazing how cheap people/companies are if they're complaining about these
prices.

$9/user/month for one of the best and easy-to-use platforms to store and
manage your repos and help your software development, which for most companies
is extremely important to their product.

Slack is $8/user/month and yet people have no problem with that pricing. Git
is also extremely portable and easy to move and takes minutes to self-host so
what's the problem here?

------
willcodeforfoo
This is awesome! I have wanted a different pricing structure for personal
accounts for a long time.

And for those who have issues with the organizational changes, did you see?

> I am an existing organization customer and prefer the per-repository plans.
> Can I remain on my current plan?

> Yes, you can choose to continue paying based on the number of repositories
> you use. You can also upgrade or downgrade in the legacy repository
> structure based on the number of repositories you need.

------
Revisor
Why don't more people use Assembla? We've used it for years and it has so many
more features than Github. Tickets, milestones, time tracking, standup, wiki,
unlimited repos with protected-branch merge rights, file sharing,
discussions...

There is no free plan but the pricing is fair in my opinion:
[https://www.assembla.com/plans](https://www.assembla.com/plans)

------
gommm
That makes a lot more sense in term of pricing and if that had existed
earlier, I'd probably not have bothered hosting my own gitlab repository. I
like to have a lot of little repos even keeping some of my private experiments
and so the limit of repositories never really made sense to me.

It might make sense however to not count collaborators with read-only access.

Of course, now that I have gitlab, there's very little reason for me to come
back.

------
chj
self hosted gitlab, for about 10$/month you get unlimited repos, unlimited
users.

------
thomascarney
In the spirit of offering alternatives, we created a quick price calculator to
show you whether you’d be better off moving from GitHub to Planio:
[https://plan.io/github-alternative/](https://plan.io/github-alternative/)

But don’t hate us too much GitHub. We still love you :)

------
keithnz
I like gitthub, I have my open source stuff with github, but when it comes to
private repos, bitbucket just seems better pricing and in someways just a
nicer and cleaner interface
[https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing](https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing)

------
keithnz
I like github, I have my open source stuff with github, but when it comes to
private repos, bitbucket just seems better pricing and in someways just a
nicer and cleaner interface
[https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing](https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing)

------
andreamazz
As much as I would love to switch to GitHub for our private repos, it still is
way more expensive than BitBucket.

------
danvoell
I hope this doesn't lead to less open sourced software. Since it will be
easier to keep your code private.

------
BinaryIdiot
Looks like with our company the price goes from $25 a month to $133 if we move
(or are forced to move) over to the cost-per-user model.

GitLab was already looking good, if we're forced to change well likely move to
GitLab. Github's pricing was already overly expensive for what you get, in my
opinion.

------
meetbryce
Seems like a good move, it's unclear to me what the difference is between
Personal & Organization.

------
wickedlogic
Comments here are mostly from a single org view, due to the many X increase
for that orgs price (large teams only)... but if I work on n_orgs repos, I'm
now worth 9-25*n_orgs to github. That is a big shift from a model where I had
no direct value to them as a unit.

~~~
wickedlogic
Worth noting that for some (many) companies with large teams, this amounts to
a new laptop or two in price change... and while a cost change, it really is
noise (to some extent) for the value provided.

------
Aissen
I know a lot of companies that are too cheap to pay for hosting (or even host
in-house), and therefore use bitbucket with its unlimited private repos. It's
their gateway drug, and once they get used to that, good luck having them move
over to github.

~~~
Scea91
Why use the derogaroty 'too cheap'? Maybe they are just not 'too stupid' to
pay more than they have to.

~~~
Aissen
I guess my critic is that you should always know why you use a service, and
not just use it because it's the cheapest solution out there. In particular,
is bitbucket(/github/gitlab…) adapted to your needs ? Will it support your
growth ? Is it ok to have your source code on someone else's (or another
country's) server ? Lots of question to be answered, and a conscious choice to
make, without looking at only pricing. I was talking about companies doing the
latter, not all bitbucket free users (of which I am one myself).

------
arc_of_descent
So I have a normal user account at $7/month. Great, I now have unlimited
private repos.

I also had an organization a/c (only 1 user) at $9/month. I switched to the
$25/month, so yes, its now costing me more.

I understand math. Why not just give me $5/user? :)

------
jdudek
Yay, no more using single repo with orphan branches to save on number of
repositories :-)

------
mikey_p
I think this is great. I'm part of a small 2-person consultancy (my wife and
I) and we've been abusing a user account for our business for sometime on the
'medium' plan since it would give us 20 private repos, although over the last
6 years, we're had to cycle stuff to backups, rotate it around in order to
keep older client work in there.

It's been hard to justify upgrading to an organization for awhile, since our
work is hit or miss and we both have other jobs form time to time. We aren't
much in terms of load on Github, but we'd like to be able to store 40-50
private repos or add more without worrying about our limit. The new
organization pricing makes tons of sense for us since it's very close to the
old 'medium' plan we were using, instead of being 2.5 times as much, which we
never felt we could justify.

------
tedmiston
> Over the next few days, we will automatically move all paid accounts, from
> Micro to Large, to the new plan. If you’re currently paying for one of those
> larger plans, look out for a prorated credit on your account.

Bravo, GitHub.

------
aavotins
Christmas is early this year.

------
emodendroket
So basically they're going to start using the same model as BitBucket?

------
ausjke
bitbucket still sounds like a better deal as far as money goes, though github
somehow catches all the eyeballs. bitbucket has been providing similar service
for less since long time ago.

------
kaffeinecoma
I'm really looking forward to no longer having to figure out which project I
have to axe to keep my "small" plan under the 10 repo maximum. That was always
annoying.

------
napperjabber
Pretty sure this wont end well for Github. They seem to be making a lot of
moves like this recently. It's only a matter of time until a mass migration
begins IMO.

------
benbenolson
This is just another reason to move to something like Gitlab or just self-host
your Git repos. It takes literally seconds to set up your own Git server, so
why not?

------
z3t4
What's the difference between a GIT server and say a HTTP server? To my
understanding, Github are unable to scale GIT, so they have to price
accordingly.

~~~
lox
This is not how pricing works.

~~~
z3t4
You would need a lot of margin to not base the price on the production costs.
If 200 users cost double as much as 100 users, it's hard to not base the price
on number of users.

~~~
lox
Pricing is a function of what people will pay for it, not what it costs to
make. Consider Slack as a fine example.

~~~
z3t4
I read an article not long ago that Github had to spin up three physical
machines, just to handle one customer. Although it was an extreme example.
Compared to slack, who could probably have a million users one a single
machine, making it almost zero marginal cost per new user. While a user for
Github means buying more hardware and a notable marginal cost.

If you for example are a reseller of commodity goods, you can't have a lower
price then the price you buy it for. So you can't have a model of say
unlimited goods for a monthly fee. And the price will most likely be based on
per good.

~~~
jssjr
I think you're referring to the GitHub Engineering blog post [1] about our git
storage tier. We [2] store your code on _at least_ 3 servers, which is an
improvement in many ways from our previous storage architecture. There are a
lot of servers [3] powering things but not the millions it would require to
give every customer three dedicated machines. Developing efficient solutions
to problems is a requirement (and a fun challenge!) for anything at GitHub's
scale.

[1] [http://githubengineering.com/introducing-
dgit/](http://githubengineering.com/introducing-dgit/)

[2] I'm a GitHubber. [https://github.com/jssjr](https://github.com/jssjr)

[3]
[https://twitter.com/GitHubEng/status/730429227896463360](https://twitter.com/GitHubEng/status/730429227896463360)

~~~
z3t4
It was another post about someone using Github to host "packages".

------
wtbob
Definitely cool, but I honestly think that if your organisation needs more
than a handful of repositories then it's very likely doing something wrong.

------
NicoJuicy
I really don't understand why Github sets their prices higher while GitLab (
mostly) is gaining more and more traction...

------
gshulegaard
So...GitLab looks better and better every day.

------
alexchamberlain
This is great for private accounts; it encourages better practice of smaller
repos.

------
edpichler
To me this is a good change, I have lots of private repositories and a small
team.

------
mikeflynn
Sounds like a lot of companies are going to end up with multiple GitHub orgs.

------
kazinator
For less than these price plans, you can have your own domain and server.

------
jonmaim
Sorry it's too late, I already migrated to bitbucket 6 months ago.

------
geostyx
I think I'll stick with my own private Gogs instance anyway.

------
cloudjacker
bitbucket: still unlimited free private repositories

------
gohrt
What's the delta from the old model?

------
bfrog
github, soon to be the next sourceforge

------
softinio
This is fantastic news in my opinion.

------
sqldba
I love the clickbait. It's missing 3 words - "for paid users". Everyone has
clicked it to be disappointed. GitLab++.

------
jtchang
Yay! No more bitbucket for all my private repos. I wonder if this change is
because of competition?

~~~
wfunction
BitBucket allows unlimited private repos for _free_ ; GitHub's seems to be
just for the paid plans?

~~~
opless
Yup no reason to move from bit bucket yet.

------
ArtDev
I will stick with GitLab.

------
mnml_
too expensive

------
jiang101
I'm a member of a Github organisation with 63 members and 20 private
repositories. As far as I can see, this changes our yearly cost from $600 to
$6564.

------
samir16
Its awesm

------
cwmma
and bitbucket's sole reason for existing has gone away

------
Zypho
Everyone who is crying right now would be crying more if Github were to make
the price free for private repos because with that, the amount of open source
libraries they use would be cut in half.

~~~
Zypho
-points but no reasons?

Agreed this will impact some organizations in negative ways such as the non-
for-profit orgs. To that Github offers support in this sense here:
[https://github.com/nonprofit](https://github.com/nonprofit)

Like others, without specific data, I would assume this will impact the
majority of users on Github for the better and that organizations with many
contributors needing access to private repos are the minority. In any pricing
structure change, there is always going to be a minority that is impacted
negatively. I don't think Github would have made this decision without
analytics to back it up.

Another fair point is I think this structure is more appealing to companies
who prefer to look at cost-per-employee for something that is an everyday tool
rather than cost-of-architecture.

------
alchemical
Honestly when I read the title I thought GH switched their business model and
offered _free_ users the ability to start a private repo, but this is not the
case.

If it is the case that I have to pay to have privacy on Github, then it
imposes a privacy-rich versus privacy-poor dichotomy which I am uncomfortable
with. Now I know as far as these things go (GH can be subject to National
Security Letters), that GH is not really absolutely private. (Backdoors into
people's 'secret' GISTS anyone?).

GH had an opportunity here to change their business model so that free users
can avail of private repos, and GH could still manage to bring in revenue. GH
primarily makes the bulk of their income from what I call 'stakeholder
accounts'. That is; those companies who simply couldn't function correctly if
GH didn't exist. It is in these stakeholders that there is a symbiotic
relationship of revenue for GH, and value for the stakeholder(s).

There are very little lone private individuals who have that kind of symbiotic
relationship, and so at least give these low income users the same equal
rights of privacy as behemoth tech organizations. It makes sense.

In terms of how GH gets revenue from these users, there are countless other
ways to do this instead of relying on the monolithic device of a premium
subscription model. Offer paid licenses for their proprietary GH clients. (A
one off payment of $20.00 for the GH Windows client is something I would
actually pay money for)...

~~~
pothibo
It's 7$/month. You sure can be made uncomfortable easily.

If someone wants a private repo but doesn't value his/her private code to the
amount of 7$/month for ALL their private repos, then I guess it shouldn't have
been made private in the first place.

FWIW, a Big Mac combo is around the same price. One is junk, the other is
where you showcase/store all your professionnal knowledge and experience.

