
Github: Free micro plan for a month - bradly
https://github.com/blog/754-octocat-wednesday-—-free-micro-plan-for-a-month
======
Legion
I really wish Github charged by users and disk space only, and quit with the
private repo count limit added on top of that.

We wanted to use Github at the (small) company I work for, but we have tons of
tiny, low-traffic repos. Since Github limits repo count, regardless of how
low-resource they are, we flat out cannot use them, period.

Bitbucket has the right idea - number of repos is completely meaningless. Make
it unlimited and charge only by meaningful metrics, like user count.
Unfortunately, their shift to that plan came too late for us, as we put in the
effort of self-hosting. Still, there's that special something Github has that
Bitbucket lacks, and we would still consider migrating to Github if only they
dropped the arbitrary repo count limit.

~~~
abrudtkuhl
Just had that conversation... Everybody charges per repo and that's pointless.
Charge for disk space and let us have unlimited repos. I would sign up for
monthly plan then.

~~~
storborg
Github wants to price discriminate between serious users who can afford to pay
more, and casual users. Projects with a high development budget (e.g. complex
software projects) don't necessarily use more disk space than someone's
personal website, so disk space isn't a good way of price discriminating.

On the other hand, organizations with a high dev tool budget are probably more
likely, on average, to have more private repos. So it's in Github's best
interest to charge by repo count, until they figure out a better way of
discriminating between customers.

~~~
jules
Charging by users seems like the most obvious discriminator between casual and
large budget, not number of repos.

~~~
wwortiz
I for one would buy a micro plan if its only limit was 1 collaborator, but for
now I will stick to bitbucket (kiln is free for 1 collaborator in case anyone
didn't know through the student and startup edition).

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snprbob86
... so it's a 30 day free trial?

I love GitHub (and am a happy micro plan subscriber), but this deal just
seems... well... kinda _yawn_.

~~~
kneath
Or maybe we're just testing out a new feature we just built that might be a
bit bigger than 30-days free micro before we start pushing it out more.

You never know.

~~~
ryanwaggoner
_You never know._

Exactly, so I might as well be committing to signing up for a paid plan.

EDIT: Not trying to be snarky, I'm a ridiculously happy micro subscriber, just
don't see the real appeal of this...

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wildmXranat
Github, you can do better ! It feels like we're being offered to test drive a
free trial deal which ought to exist anyway.

~~~
mattculbreth
Really? We're going to complain about something that's free? Oh yeah, it's the
Internet.

~~~
wildmXranat
I don't remember pressing an 'Add Complaint' button. It's my opinion and we
can agree to disagree.

~~~
jrockway
I disagree. I guess we can't agree to disagree as to whether or not we can
agree to disagree.

As a neutral observer (who did not downmod you, btw), your post did come
across as oh-so-slightly whiney. I pay for Github. I don't care that they are
offering Micro free.

What would be awesome is if they sent you a subscriber-only shirt after every
12 paid months or something, though. I don't actually use private
repositories; I pay for the micro plan just to show my support :)

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corey
I'm new to DVCS, and I recently setup a Bitbucket account which offers free
unlimited space and repositories. Github does seem to be far more popular,
though. What makes Github better and worth paying for?

~~~
jrockway
GitHub is popular for the free open-source hosting, which offers limitless
free repositories. The only catch is that anyone can view them.

When you pay GitHub money, then you get non-public repositories.

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dabeeeenster
"Black Friday. Cyber Monday. But have you heard of Octocat Wednesday? Probably
not because I just made that up. Lucky for you we're also making up the prices
around here for the next week."

Their copy-writing is first rate.

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flexd
Considering i could keep my private repo from the beta until i accidentally
deleted it (empty repo) this is a good deal for us that do not use github
enough to warrant paying monthly but does appreciate it. I just made my self 5
private empty repoes named private1-5. I can just rename them and put them to
use when i need them and most likely they will persist (or just become
public?) when the free month runs out. Not that i wouldn't want to pay GitHub
for their awesome service but when you're a unemployed student with bills to
pay i'd rather have food on my table one more day than private repos.

Should probably add that i would pay for a plan if i needed private repos, but
this is nice since i get stuff i don't need and don't have to pay for.
Freebies are awesome :-)

~~~
xiongchiamiov
Check out gitosis. It's a little bit of a pain to get set up correctly, but
once you've done that, adding new repositories is a breeze.

School projects tend to be proliferous and need to be private, which doesn't
mesh well with GitHub. I'm mostly just paying them for a micro plan because I
think the service is cool.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
gitolite is a much-improved fork of gitosis, "backed" by Fedora for use in
their repos, and IMO is much easier and nicer to setup to configure.

~~~
xiongchiamiov
Ah, thanks. We just restructured our servers in my house, so I need to move
gitosis over to a different machine anyway. Might as well try out gitolite
instead.

~~~
moogatronic
Gitolite has very easy to follow instructions to get it up and running.
(Hosted at Github!) Also interesting is that VPS account + Gitolite is cheaper
(perhaps more practical for smallish businesses - if you're only interested in
hosting git repos) than a Github account.

~~~
flexd
Hmm that is quite smart yeah. The smallest Linode VPS accounts are actually
quite cheap yeah.. I see they have removed their smallest instance though. But
i guess any other good VPS host will work. Hosting git repoes does not exactly
take a lot of oompfh.

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jackowayed
Weird, somehow there are two thread about this, even though the submitted URLs
appear identical. Didn't think that was supposed to be possible.

Anyway, cross-posting from the other thread:

> _This is brilliant. Get tons of people who current just use GitHub for
> public repos to put up some private ones, then in a month send them an email
> saying "start paying, or we'll take away your private repos". People are
> lazy, so a lot of people once they've already put the repos up won't want to
> move them.

Inertia was working against them; this gets it working for them._

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sohooo
If you need a git server for your company, why not set up Gitorious?

The initial setup can be quite challenging, but I found this guide to be quite
useful:
[http://cjohansen.no/en/ruby/setting_up_gitorious_on_your_own...](http://cjohansen.no/en/ruby/setting_up_gitorious_on_your_own_server)

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yellow
I have been on the fence about getting a private account. I'm now officially
sold.

