They are still too expensive by limiting you on the number of private repositories and not on storage or something else (requests, etc).
If you are a small business or a freelancer you have a lot of small projects each into a separate repository. So with each new customer you use up another private repository until you have to upgrade to the next plan.
I won't use GitHub until it's either metered (like Amazon EC2/S3) or until they only charge for "active" repositories -- meaning repositories where I had commits or some other form of activity during the billable month.
If one of your projects becomes dormant, you always have the option to move it off the site. If it becomes active again, it's easy to push the repository back up to github.
That sounds like a lot of overhead that is best avoided. For me, half the point of these types of services is the "upload and stop worrying" mentality.
I don't really use GitHub, but the same issue comes around with BitBucket. The main obstacle to taking projects off BitBucket is their issue tracker (wiki is cloneable). You don't really want to lose issue history every time you take something off the site. I've been looking at distributed bug trackers such as Bugs Everywhere (http://bugseverywhere.org/be/show/HomePage) for this reason.
Yeah, I have several git repos that I don't need to work on now but could want in the future (and can't post publicly) in Dropbox for safe keeping. I deleted them from GitHub so I could stay under my Micro plan's limit.
I agree but charging based on repo count does seem to work for most people. If I'm switching to github for my private repos, I want to be able to put everything in there. Being limited to 10 or even 20 just doesn't cut it for me. I'd have to throw down $200 to get near what I want but my usage might not be greater than someone paying $25 or less.
At that point you might as well use the "personal" accounts. For me, since there's just two of us on something that doesn't require that much disk space, we've been using a micro account for a year now. (I guess Github doesn't have space requirements either now too.)
The true benefit of this Organization feature appears to be for managing large teams, thus their "premium" for infinitely large collaborators. You don't really need those features for five people.
I looked into github for our company a while ago, but since we deal with quite a lot of consultancy work where we offer collaborator access to clients (for their own changes, issue tracking, etc), it was going to be prohibitively expensive to afford a plan which got everyone the necessary account.
In contrast, having unlimited users, even with a fairly small set of repos, is a very valuable offering, and I might reconsider it in favour of our current redmine setup, which doesn't offer nearly as many useful features.
At $25, which is only £16 or so, it's pretty much on-par with the VPS we're hosting our current repos on.
Features which by definition segment your customers into "for profit businesses" and "everybody else" should probably cost more than anybody here can stand charging. People who complain are beautiful snowflakes who are out of scope for the product.
If you are a small business or a freelancer you have a lot of small projects each into a separate repository. So with each new customer you use up another private repository until you have to upgrade to the next plan.
I won't use GitHub until it's either metered (like Amazon EC2/S3) or until they only charge for "active" repositories -- meaning repositories where I had commits or some other form of activity during the billable month.