4 ms·

Yes, charging per repository is nothing short of predatory. It means that every scratch project and every prototype needs to be deleted - or paid for in perpetu

by x1024 11y ago

Yes, charging per repository is nothing short of predatory. It means that every scratch project and every prototype needs to be deleted - or paid for in perpetuity. It's even worse for agencies and contractors, since for them changing projects often is a natural part of business.

ryanjshaw 11y ago
Even as a developer working on my first open source project I find the model a huge turn-off. I want to keep my repo private for now and it appears I have to pay. Instead I'm using Bitbucket which charges by the user -- far more reasonable model IMO.
- jeffwilcox 11y ago
  Yeah, we're sort of in this odd space: GitHub has a lot of us "big tech" happy to be in a space with a lot of people collaborating, but we're having to spend pretty big in order to be productive.
wyldfire 11y ago
Hmm. I had thought GH-Enterprise was monthly per-developer. Per repository sounds odd. So each fork is paid for independently?
- Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
  No, Enterprise is per seat. x1024 is probably frustrated with paid accounts on github.com.
  - x1024 11y ago
    That's exactly true. But even GH Enterprise still has insane pricing. Hosting a git repo and a very very basic issue tracker is so not worth $2500/year. Not to mention that even this isn't a fixed price and it grows linearly with the number of employees. GitLab provides the same service for free. Well, at the cost of "you reading the manual and installing it on a VPS", which takes between "minutes" and "a couple of days" depending on how deep you want to go. A VPS that can easily - easily - scale to the needs of 100 people is "$5/mo". Looking cool and having brand recognition will indeed earn you money, but everything has its limits.
    - Cakez0r 11y ago
      > Well, at the cost of "you reading the manual and installing it on a VPS" ... And managing and maintaining that server and backups of it. $2500 a year starts to look pretty reasonable when you consider the amount it will cost you to put one of your developers on to setting it up and maintaining it. Not to mention the peace of mind of not having to worry about disaster recovery.
      - sytse 11y ago
        GitLab is easy to upgrade via apt-get/yum with the Omnibus packages. But if you want a maintenance free GitLab please consider GitLab.com or our GitHost.io service for single tenant hosting.
      - toast0 11y ago
        Setting up is a real cost, but I manage users on our corporate github and our self hosted gitolite; for github, the user gives me their username, and I add it (after looking up my password), gitolite I add their public key to a directory and their username to a file and git commit; git push. Not a lot of difference. I don't worry about backing up the git repos, one of the promises of git is that every person who checks out the repo has a full copy, any of which we could use for a backup (helpful if we get a recent checkout). Third party hosting hopefully has a good disaster recovery plan, but the disaster could be your hosting provider quietly went out of business and everything is offline.
      - x1024 11y ago
        Literally the only time I have had to administer my GitLab setup in any way was when my SSL certificate was about to expire. It's really very solid, and all of the user management can be done from the web front-end.
    - ceejayoz 11y ago
      > Hosting a git repo and a very very basic issue tracker is so not worth $2500/year. It's $250/year per developer, which is a rounding error at most software companies.
Domenic_S 11y ago
> It means that every scratch project and every prototype needs to be deleted - or paid for in perpetuity. The same is true if you host yourself. Storage is neither free nor infinite. Sure you could scale your storage, but that costs, too. Unless you're absolutely strapped for cash, I think this just encourages good hygiene.
- schwap 11y ago
  Storage is neither free nor infinite but in relation to the overhead of a git repository its cost is too small to be measured in cents.
  - tracker1 11y ago
    It's worth noting, that if you have SSH access that includes filesystem access, you can use that as a git remote target, without the need for a GUI, if it's for personal projects. I've done precisely that for personal projects in the past, as well as for a couple small teams as an intermediate step towards hosted git. I support GH mainly because they are supporting open-source... it's indirect, but I support the model.
- Wilya 11y ago
  Scaling storage? The highest public plan Github allows 125 repositories. Unless you have a lot of huge repositories, 125 repositories fit into a single smallish hard drive. Even with 10x redundancy, that's still cheaper than github. Frankly, there are hard problems in internal IT, but hosting a bunch of git repositories is a non-issue.
- tzs 11y ago
  To store all my repositories as private repositories on Github, I'd need the $200/month plan. Yet all of this comes to less than a gigabyte, which is well under the limits of the free tiers at most major storage providers. In terms of storage costs, Github for most projects is several orders of magnitude more expensive than other storage providers even if you ignore the free tiers.

by x1024 11y ago

ryanjshaw 11y ago

Even as a developer working on my first open source project I find the model a huge turn-off. I want to keep my repo private for now and it appears I have to pay. Instead I'm using Bitbucket which charges by the user -- far more reasonable model IMO.

jeffwilcox 11y ago
Yeah, we're sort of in this odd space: GitHub has a lot of us "big tech" happy to be in a space with a lot of people collaborating, but we're having to spend pretty big in order to be productive.

wyldfire 11y ago

Hmm. I had thought GH-Enterprise was monthly per-developer. Per repository sounds odd. So each fork is paid for independently?

Sir_Cmpwn 11y ago
No, Enterprise is per seat. x1024 is probably frustrated with paid accounts on github.com.
- x1024 11y ago
  That's exactly true. But even GH Enterprise still has insane pricing. Hosting a git repo and a very very basic issue tracker is so not worth $2500/year. Not to mention that even this isn't a fixed price and it grows linearly with the number of employees. GitLab provides the same service for free. Well, at the cost of "you reading the manual and installing it on a VPS", which takes between "minutes" and "a couple of days" depending on how deep you want to go. A VPS that can easily - easily - scale to the needs of 100 people is "$5/mo". Looking cool and having brand recognition will indeed earn you money, but everything has its limits.
  - Cakez0r 11y ago
    > Well, at the cost of "you reading the manual and installing it on a VPS" ... And managing and maintaining that server and backups of it. $2500 a year starts to look pretty reasonable when you consider the amount it will cost you to put one of your developers on to setting it up and maintaining it. Not to mention the peace of mind of not having to worry about disaster recovery.
    - sytse 11y ago
      GitLab is easy to upgrade via apt-get/yum with the Omnibus packages. But if you want a maintenance free GitLab please consider GitLab.com or our GitHost.io service for single tenant hosting.
    - toast0 11y ago
      Setting up is a real cost, but I manage users on our corporate github and our self hosted gitolite; for github, the user gives me their username, and I add it (after looking up my password), gitolite I add their public key to a directory and their username to a file and git commit; git push. Not a lot of difference. I don't worry about backing up the git repos, one of the promises of git is that every person who checks out the repo has a full copy, any of which we could use for a backup (helpful if we get a recent checkout). Third party hosting hopefully has a good disaster recovery plan, but the disaster could be your hosting provider quietly went out of business and everything is offline.
    - x1024 11y ago
      Literally the only time I have had to administer my GitLab setup in any way was when my SSL certificate was about to expire. It's really very solid, and all of the user management can be done from the web front-end.
  - ceejayoz 11y ago
    > Hosting a git repo and a very very basic issue tracker is so not worth $2500/year. It's $250/year per developer, which is a rounding error at most software companies.

Domenic_S 11y ago

> It means that every scratch project and every prototype needs to be deleted - or paid for in perpetuity. The same is true if you host yourself. Storage is neither free nor infinite. Sure you could scale your storage, but that costs, too. Unless you're absolutely strapped for cash, I think this just encourages good hygiene.

schwap 11y ago
Storage is neither free nor infinite but in relation to the overhead of a git repository its cost is too small to be measured in cents.
- tracker1 11y ago
  It's worth noting, that if you have SSH access that includes filesystem access, you can use that as a git remote target, without the need for a GUI, if it's for personal projects. I've done precisely that for personal projects in the past, as well as for a couple small teams as an intermediate step towards hosted git. I support GH mainly because they are supporting open-source... it's indirect, but I support the model.
Wilya 11y ago
Scaling storage? The highest public plan Github allows 125 repositories. Unless you have a lot of huge repositories, 125 repositories fit into a single smallish hard drive. Even with 10x redundancy, that's still cheaper than github. Frankly, there are hard problems in internal IT, but hosting a bunch of git repositories is a non-issue.
tzs 11y ago
To store all my repositories as private repositories on Github, I'd need the $200/month plan. Yet all of this comes to less than a gigabyte, which is well under the limits of the free tiers at most major storage providers. In terms of storage costs, Github for most projects is several orders of magnitude more expensive than other storage providers even if you ignore the free tiers.