
Introducing GitHub Enterprise - remi
https://github.com/blog/978-introducing-github-enterprise
======
jerfelix
Someone joked that they'd sell a lot more at $4995.

I second that! People, don't under-estimate the issue of signature limits! My
old signing limit at one job was $5000, meaning that I needed to get my boss
to approve something like this, whereas if it were a dollar cheaper, I could
approve it myself.

So it's no joke.

~~~
aidenn0
Also $4995 (or even $4990) is better than $4999 as several large companies
audit purchases that are very near the limit.

------
tolmasky
As I am not "enterprise", these questions are more out of curiosity than
anything else:

1\. How often do you get updates? One of the things I love about GitHub is the
constant stream of new features. Do these make it into github:enterprise
fairly soon after?

2\. What happens after your "subscription" runs out? That is to say, if I pay
for a year, then don't pay next year, do I simply not get any more
updates/support? Or is there some kill switch and I lose my content too? I'm
sure the answer to this is similar to all enterprise products, but again, I've
never experienced anything in the enterprise.

~~~
kneath
1\. Very frequently. The reason this launch took so long was in large part due
to reconfiguring how we merge the differences between .com and the installable
(FI/Enterprise). Previously, it was painful and slow and lagged embarrassingly
behind. But now it should be no more than a week or a month at most behind
.com so long as you upgrade your instance.

2\. The instance will lock you out (no web interface, cannot push to repos)
but you own all your data so you will never lose your content.

~~~
hillad
How are the updates delivered? New OVF?

~~~
kneath
The OVF will be updated infrequently — there is a software package you upload
in a management interface that installs the new software and configures your
instance with the updates. It's pretty seamless — download a file, upload it,
wait a few minutes for install and you've got an updated version of GitHub
Enterprise.

------
joshaidan
I love felixge's comment on a bug he found with the price estimator:

[https://github.com/blog/978-introducing-github-
enterprise#co...](https://github.com/blog/978-introducing-github-
enterprise#comment-15008)

------
andymoe
I like Github and use it every day but as a longtime advocate of Fog Creek's
software I'm a little sad to see Github continuing to move in on Fogbugz/Kiln
territory (not to mention competition from the Australians) with not much
response from Fog Creek to compete on the lower end of the market. Github
enterprise Pricing/features are about on par with the Fog Creek offering. Git
vs. Mercurial but it's still DVCS and though I would consider Fogbugz/Kiln a
bit more advanced as far feature implementation all the major types of
features are in both products.

<http://www.fogcreek.com/kiln/for-your-server.html>

What I would REALLY love to see is Fog Creek compete a bit more in Githubs
space with their hosted service. I think there is room in the market for a
Fogbugz/Kiln lite product and the competition would do everyone, especially
the users, a lot of good. I think Joel even wrote an article on pricing and
market segmentation [1] unfortunately they may have already figured out the
sweet spot with their current price points putting the prices in the range of
me being able to get the bank I used to work for to use their product but not
the little bootstrapped company where I currently work.

[1]
[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckie...](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/CamelsandRubberDuckies.html)

~~~
pnathan
Fogbugz/Kiln financially scales way better after 40 users.

E.g., if you have a 200-user company, that's still a flat rate of 15K initial
& 5K/year for Fog Creek's stuff (plus maintenance).

But for github, that's 50K/year.

Github is a high-quality product, no question about it. But the price is steep
compared to Kiln/Fogbugz, IMO.

~~~
benatkin
> Fogbugz/Kiln financially scales way better after 40 users.

I don't agree with how you're using the word _scales_. It actually scales
fine, as a percent of their budget per employee. It's flat.

With GitHub Enterprise it's approximately 250 * (n + n % 20) dollars per year.
For companies they're targeting, $250/yr is less than a percent of their total
budget per employee (including salary, benefits, workspace, etc). If it saves
each employee fifteen minutes a week it's worth it.

~~~
pnathan
Disagree. Fogbugz gives a greater and greater savings per employee as your
employee count goes up.

Here's a Perl script I wrote to visualize the idea. Feed the output into
gnuplot and you'll see what I mean.

    
    
       use warnings;
       use strict;
       use 5.010;
       use POSIX qw(ceil floor);
    
       # Let's start at 100 employees and walk up by 25.
       for(my $count = 100; $count < 1000; $count+=25)
       {
           # Flat rate for fogbugz/kiln.
           my $fb = 15000 / $count;
           # ceil(number of users / 20) * blocks of 20-seats to buy.
    
           my $gh = (ceil($count / 20) * 5000) / $count;
           say "$count $fb $gh";
       }
    
    

This asymptotically trends towards about $20/employee for Fogbugz; GitHub
hangs around $250 per. At no point in these calculations is GitHub cheaper per
than FogBugz.

Now, in the < 100 employee range where the different FogCreek pricings apply,
I am not sure who wins, I'd guess it trades off back and forth depending on
the # of employees.

edit: awkward formatting. Also, if I've biffed my formulas, let me know and
I'll update it!

edit2: forgot to comparatively do analysis

~~~
benatkin
Nice graph, but why does it need to be so much cheaper per seat as the
business gets larger? Many items in the budget don't get much cheaper per seat
as the business grows. A company that buys 1000 MacBook Pros doesn't pay half
as much per MacBook Pro as a company that buys 10.

~~~
pnathan
Well, if you _want_ to not be fiscally efficient...

------
matthewsnyder
For those concerned about the total costs: Don't worry. Looks like there's a
bit of a discount at the higher levels. <http://i.imgur.com/8A9Dx.png>

------
ludwigvan
How do they ensure that their code is not stolen? Any insights on that?

~~~
holman
Firewall Install used JRuby to precompile our models and controllers; GitHub
Enterprise uses code obfuscation with MRI.

~~~
ryeguy
Why didn't you choose to go the JRuby route again?

~~~
holman
A lot of reasons, but the largest was that part of the big push for Enterprise
was to mimic our github.com environment as much as possible. Every difference
between the two is a real cost to support. A different Ruby interpreter
definitely falls into the "big difference" category. :)

~~~
famousactress
Curious then.. Do you run the obfuscator in production as well?

~~~
holman
Nope, just in Enterprise.

------
kellysutton
What we're not really talking about is how good github is as a product. As far
as I'm concerned, it's a 10x improvement over other ticketing and SCM systems.

I don't think they're charging enough. Congrats guys!

------
briancary
This news comes just hours after I finished installing Gitorious on my
company's own server. I'm glad I went through that trouble because $5k is
crazy for a startup to pay for a self-hosted git web interface.

Heck, I'll install your own Gitorious on Rackspace Cloud Server for $99 for
anyone who requests. Host your own code.

~~~
RandallBrown
This isn't for startups. It's for companies that want to use GitHub but can't,
because people are afraid of letting the code outside their walls.

~~~
Game_Ender
Or they are legally required to by their clients and or government regulation.

------
intranation
I hope they're going to offer pro rata on seat volumes between multiples of
20. If I have just 25 users it's $10,000 (assuming their pricing widget is
completely accurate).

~~~
jvehent
If you have 25 devs, you're going to spend a minimum of 1.5/2 millions a years
on salaries. Does a $5,000 difference really matters at that point ?

~~~
redthrowaway
If two of those devs decided to throw their workstations off the roof once a
year, would the $5000 make a difference?

Spending money you don't have to is always a bad idea, so while the unused
license space may not make a huge dent on the bottom line, a company that pays
attention to those things will likely outperform one that doesn't.

------
taylorbuley
Interesting to see they are forwarding links from the Firewall Install page
(fi.github.com) to this.

Edit: _We first launched the precursor to GitHub Enterprise, GitHub Firewall
Install, over two years ago._

Same pricing, but better branding. I wonder what else has changed?

~~~
kneath
Notably:

\- Enterprise is delivered in an OVF, which means it's a fully contained VM.
This simplifies deployments astronomically from the previous FI architecture.

\- We've spent a lot of time on the runtime and packaging of Enterprise in
relation to how it runs the code. It's now _much_ faster.

\- We've changed how we merge the two codebases (.com and FI/Enterprise).
Effectively, they are the same now. This means new features that come to .com
will come to Enterprise quickly/immediately. Previously we had to do hard,
manual merges which meant new features got to FI very late (3, 6, 8 months
later).

~~~
dpritchett
I'm a huge fan of apps released as VM images. I've seen this used extensively
in testing and development, but not for production applications. Do you know
of other companies who follow the same "our default install is an OVF"
strategy?

I first heard the idea from Jeff Atwood in 2006 [1], neat to see the idea
taking root with a high-profile product.

[1] [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/01/our-virtual-
machine...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/01/our-virtual-machine-
future.html)

~~~
damncabbage
Squiz switched to distributing a free VM for the trial and production versions
of their CMS: <http://squiz.com.au/products/squiz-cms>

(Previous versions were a tarball of PHP code and a lot of brittle install
scripts.)

------
ayanb
>> "GitHub Enterprise is priced at $5,000 per 20 users"

How does this fare against other enterprise hosted scm/version control
products?

~~~
xbryanx
Not exactly analogous, but FishEye from Atlassian is less money/user and LOTS
less money for teams less than 10.
<http://www.atlassian.com/software/fisheye/pricing>

Obviously, the feature set is pretty different, but I think it still falls
into the Enterprise SCM category.

~~~
Argorak
Fisheye is $800 for 10 users, $1200 for 20, plus the required JIRA install,
which is $1200. Add a Wiki component (Confluence) and you can add another
$800. The proper code reviewing tool (Crucible) is $800/$1200. Thats (roughly)
the feature set of Github, without the source hosting/ssh-key-management
stuff.

So summed up: 10 Users: $3600 20 Users: $4400

So, they are definitely cheaper, but I'd say that $5000 for 20 users is a
competitive price for such a huge infrastructure.

~~~
azov
Atlassian also has bitbucket, which is a direct competitor to github and
priced at $10/month for 10 developers or $25/month for 25 developers. So, it's
only $240 a year for 20 developers (<https://bitbucket.org/plans>). It may not
have all the features of github, but they provide basic git hosting, wiki, and
issue tracking. Do the extra features of github justify 20x higher price?

They also have a free plan for up to 5 developers.

~~~
X-Istence
Is Bitbucket something I can install on my own hardware behind my corporate
firewall?

------
Corrado
I wonder if this pricing includes things like read-only users (analysts, QA
staff, etc.) and deployment activities in the user count. It would suck to
have to pay for a license to deploy from GHE using Capistrano. :/

~~~
jarito
At least for FI, all users count towards your user cap. I've asked about this
before because it really sucks. For 100 projects we might have 200+ users that
don't really need access, but could use it. Since the prices don't get better
at the higher levels, it creates and incentive to limit access which reduces
the usability of GH in the first place.

------
ethank
I like that it is distributed as an OVF, but is there any thought to doing an
AMI as well? I know it isn't meant for public use, but in my case I don't want
it in the internal datacenter, nor is it easy to bridge subnets in remote
offices. An AMI for EC2 deployment behind a VPN would be really nice.

~~~
philwelch
If you're OK with an externally hosted Github, why can't you use Github
itself?

~~~
ethank
I never said I was. You can run a private EC2 infrastructure and it is
sometimes more handy than having your own hypervisor server.

~~~
bonzoesc
Every "private EC2 infrastructure" I've seen is a bunch of hypervisor servers.

~~~
ethank
Yes, but I'm trying to avoid corporate IT :)

------
Corrado
My first thought is who needs "social" features in an enterprise VCS? I love
GitHub and think it's biggest benefit is the ability to {easily} fork and
watch projects. Does this really translate to the enterprise? I can't imagine
a corporation where its a good think to have two groups disagreeing on a
direction and causing a fork. Management would have a cow!

The bottom line is what does GitHub Enterprise buy my over something like
Redmine or Gitorious? GHE is probably easier to install but I still have to
manage my own hardware & drive space. And with the open source alternatives I
don't have to worry about licensing and can crack it open to add adapters to
other software (#include "standard open source header").

~~~
RowanH
So on a team I manage, we've used github::fi (github enterprise looks to be
the next evolution) for the past year. If you don't have an option to put code
out onto github.com, then it's great to essentially have github.com inhouse -
minus of course all the public repos.

We find it's the developers go-to place, so using the wiki along with where
the source is hosted, is fantastic. As a dev team manager, I love the browsing
the codebase via the web browser, reviewing what's going on in the code base
instead of pulling down code locally.

From a customer, if you've got the funds, and can't go with github.com hosted,
then it's the next best thing. It's been rock solid.

~~~
Corrado
Yea, but my point stands that something like Redmine would fulfill your
requirements _and_ be open source. It has a wiki that is tied into the Git
repo, and a (better) issue tracking system, and browser access to source, etc.

I guess I'm just missing why an Enterprise would spend $$$ when they can get
everything they need without $$$. Then again, I'm not a bean counter and I
guess I just don't understand how budgets work. :/

~~~
RowanH
A big part of it, is everyone is familiar with github.com, it's exactly the
same experience with github::fi. Just business as usual in-house. For
development teams that are open source based, pretty much everyone knows
github, so the 'feel at home' factor is there. VS getting yet another tool in
the mix that you have to get people upto speed on.

------
Jacob4u2
I'm having a hard time finding comparable Team Foundation Licensing costs for
a team of 20. Does anyone have an idea how this compares?

------
renownedmedia
We've been using a demo of this at my day job for a few weeks now. It's been
pretty awesome, we use an internal IRC server (which could never talk to the
outside world) and using the hooks it provides is super useful.

We also have a complex code pushing system, and integrating with github
enterprise will be a bit easier than raw git.

------
goodweeds
This sounds like a support nightmare. I hope GitHub has learned from the
mistakes that SourceForge ran into when they tried packaging their product for
the enterprise.

~~~
chrisaycock
GitHub has been selling "Firewall Install" for a couple years. Any mistakes
they've learned from were on their own.

------
perlpimp
I wonder if it has anything to do with release of <http://gitlabhq.com>

~~~
foobarbazetc
Considering GitHub:FI has been around for a really long time, no.

------
drivebyacct2
Interesting. $20/month/user seems pretty damn cheap.

~~~
oscardelben
And that includes support.

------
sanderson1
I love GitHub and all, but the whole Enterprise label is kind of a joke. You
slap "Enterprise" on a service, make a few nominal features available to the
people who buy into the ploy and then charge them out the nose for it.

~~~
tzm
It's a product distribution strategy that fills a need in the enterprise
marketplace. I wouldn't marginalize OVF as a "nominal feature" or the value of
offering a secure, localized version for clients.

