

Ask HN: How can a site like GitHub make money when it pours data? - hoodoof

Gargantuan quantities of data must be stored and pour out of a site like Github.<p>How can they have done this economically whilst bootstrapping?<p>I find it hard to see how companies can make money when they have to pay for data traffic and storage.
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akhatri_aus
They have paid plans which are quite pricey compared to the cost of data.

A repository isn't likely to cross the 1 gb threshold easily. They also email
you if it does.

According to A16Z's podcast or something somewhere they have been profitable
since inception so it was not much of a problem.

Keep in mind traffic and storage are cheap, and cheaper still in bulker
quantities. 1 TB of data is about $30 a month on S3. If each repository
averaged 50 mb one user's $7 a month subscription could support nearly 5,000
repos. 50mb is also quite large for a repository btw.

If each was about 5mb that's nearly 50,000 repositories that could be
supported cost wise with their cheapest $7 micro plan.

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brudgers
Which points out that when your use case for Github is as offsite backup
and/or a central repository, self hosting on Amazon is a potentially cost
effective alternative.

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dangrossman
GitHub Enterprise + $100M from VCs goes a long way.

[https://enterprise.github.com/home](https://enterprise.github.com/home)

[https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/github/funding-
round...](https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/github/funding-rounds)

~~~
hoodoof
But they started with no external funding.

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carlosdp
When Github first started, it became immediately profitable because they had
paid plans from the get go and they weren't dealing with that much data at
first. They didn't have pull requests or issues or anything like that at the
start, it was just a push/pull remote server with a web viewer.

After that, they grew enough to keep up with growth in the company and
features until they got the Andreseen investment and threw growth into
overdrive.

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tantalor
[https://github.com/pricing](https://github.com/pricing)

~~~
steve1011
yep i have a micro plan currently.

I can almost guarantee that I am using less than 5Mb throughout my Github, so
I don't doubt they are making money.

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sytelus
Github data is not "gargantuan". They have 9 million users. They put limit to
repository size to 1GB. My estimate would be that most repo don't even get to
10% of this. Plus this is mostly source code and text files that compresses
very nicely. Given this information, I would estimate that Github data can fit
in under ~5000 2TB hard drives. Cost of hosting data would be around $5
million per year. I bet their employee cost is much larger than this (my
estimate is $50M).

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jhildings
But they mostly store text, compared to video streaming or imgur that is quite
small amount of data per user I guess

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milapasta
If you can do some minor work, then you can make money on the internet with
sismo money boom. Do a Quick Google search if you haven’t heard about it yet.

