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1. Take a gazillion dollars in funding on an over-hyped valuation, 2. Go through significant organizational changes that end up with the departure of a co-foun

• nxzero 10y ago
  Compared to products like Salesforce, GitHub seems cheap to me. What to you is a fair price and why?
  • hunvreus 10y ago
    As stated at the end of my comment, a fair price is what they decide to charge. I simply don't like people to try and spin a price increase into a freebie.
    • blowski 10y ago
      You mean... you don't like it when the marketing department of a profit-making enterprise does marketing in an attempt to make more profit? I work in a small agency, and our GitHub bill will go down as a result of these changes.
      • Chris2048 10y ago
        Yes, that type of "marketing". It's bullshit.
        • deleted 10y ago
          [deleted]
    • wukerplank 10y ago
      I'd fire the PR department if they didn't give this a positive spin.
      • Xylakant 10y ago
        That doesn't mean that customers can't be annoyed being sold for stupid. The release announcement forgets to mention that collaborators are now costly - either a stupid oversight or part of the positive spin. A good marketing department should display things in a positive fashion, but they should also strive to be honest, so they're not loosing credibility.
        • dommer 10y ago
          "loosing credibility" is subjective in this case. Some orgs/people will be better off, some won't. I recall GitHub doing some extensive research on what their customer based wanted. This is most likely the outcome of that research. If I were to migration our org. over we would be worse off. Even with that I don't think this move is disingenuous. Poorly thought through perhaps?
          • Xylakant 10y ago
            > Even with that I don't think this move is disingenuous. I never said that I consider the move disingenuous. Almost no change will unilaterally benefit everybody. I dislike the communication that reads as if the change is unilaterally beneficial - where it clearly is not.
            • dommer 10y ago
              I didn't say you did. Well, I don't think I did. Either way, we agree it wasn't disingenuous. I'd also agree this change won't be beneficial to all. And GitHub is also allowing everyone to make a choice. "...you'll have at least 12 months notice before any mandated change to your plan."
        • spraak 10y ago
          I see it is honest and very positive and supportive
    • dommer 10y ago
      Isn't that one of the points of marketing: Highlight issues as a positives to decrease their impact to sales? ps. No pricing model will suit every org. The current model based on repo numbers has horrid steps which make no sense. eg. 125to300 private repos = $200to$450 cost. So if you need 126 repos you pay more than twice as much for that extra 1 repo. That makes little sense to me.
      • beberlei 10y ago
        yes, but you are comparing apples to oranges. If you had to jump from 125 to 300 users in ONE step as per the current pricing model instead of paying only for the marginal next user. Recognizing the repository steps are a pain for customers and not moving towards a pricing per _single_ repository, say between 1$ or 2$ per private repository - is just plain misleading. They could have still thrown in the personal plan with a large number of private repositories and fewer collaborators.
        • dommer 10y ago
          I'm not directly comparing, only highlighting the step issue. To me, give a per user or private repo cost. Allow the customer to choose between user or repo model, each addition costs a single fixed unit. Simple!
    • wlll 10y ago
      You seem to be ignoring the comments to the contrary made on your original comment when stating this. Sure it's going to cost some orgs more, and it makes sense that it does. I'd wager that data at rest (lots of repos) costs a hell of lot less to run than active requests (lots of users). Personally my bill will be going down from $25 to $7, and I'm fine with that. My companies bill will be going down from $650/month to $583/month.
      • Xylakant 10y ago
        Lots of collaboraters does not translate to lots of requests. I'd be totally fine being charged by size of data, number of requests,... Number of people that I allow to view my code is a very bad metric for me, especially given that most of those people are already part of a paid account.
      • giovannibajo1 10y ago
        The point we are raising is there is an entire category of companies (agencies / software house) where the price is going up dramatically (5x, 10x or more). This happens because of the choice of billing outside collaborators (even read-only ones).
      • odonnellryan 10y ago
        > active requests (lots of users). Also, more users = more problems.
    • mindcrime 10y ago
      It's not like it's a unilateral "price increase". My bill, for example, will be going down as a result of this. Personally I'm pretty stoked about this change. YMMV.
  • vacri 10y ago
    > GitHub seems cheap to me At $9/user/mo, github is 900% more expensive than the $1/user/mo direct competitor BitBucket. BitBucket uses brackets rather than pure scaling, but their most expensive option - 101 users require the $200 unlimited accounts plan - is still only $2/user.
    • musha68k 10y ago
      Maybe it's time to charge more for those closed source projects, just saying..
    • ccannon 10y ago
      It's actually 2500% more expensive for the first 5 users. Github will never learn.
      • chucksmash 10y ago
        I think for the first five users the price is capped at $25 total ($5/user).
        • ccannon 10y ago
          I think you are correct. Boy that is a confusing way to word it on Github's end.
    • frostymarvelous 10y ago
      I don't know who gives them advice, but that's just horrible. First, people ran to bitbucket visit if the per repo pricing. Now that that's been fixed, we're faced with high costs per user. That difference can be used to purchase other Atlassian products like Jira and Bamboo. How can github beat that value? I think github is satisfied with bring #1 for hosting open source software.
      • beberlei 10y ago
        god beware if your open source project needs a single private repository to share passwords between admins for example or private config for your webserver. Suddenly you see yourself at 394$ compared to the 7$ you paid before.
• cstejerean 10y ago
  Per user pricing makes a lot more sense than per repo pricing. This way larger organizations pay more money than smaller ones regardless of how they structure their code. This is a good deal for small organizations that like to have many small repositories (for internal libraries, utilities, micro services, modules, etc). Sure, it screws up a few models that rely on external collaborators to get access to private repos, but those can stick with the old model for a while (at least 12 months). And in the meantime GitHub may adjust their model to accommodate those situations too. Lastly, this is a huge freebie for individual accounts that now get unlimited repos for $7/month. That will benefit a lot of people. So I don't see this as PR spinning, but rather as an overdue move on github's part to a model that makes a lot more sense and benefits small organizations and individuals.
  • odonnellryan 10y ago
    > This is a good deal for small organizations that like to have many small repositories (for internal libraries, utilities, micro services, modules, etc). I'm a small contracting shop: makes more sense to me. I might have 100 repos, but I can only develop so fast. Now all I'm costing GitHub is a little diskspace (which is insanely cheap, especially for text).
  • asher_ 10y ago
    I couldn't agree more. It has annoyed me when companies charge more for decisions about how you choose to do something - in this case how you split up your code. Paying per person makes much more sense.
    • endymi0n 10y ago
      This was exactly the reason we used Bitbucket in the beginning, even if it was worse in some aspects. Github would have been simply too expensive (or restricting) with our "it's always in source control" approach, even for smaller prototypes. We're happy Gitlab users now by the way - and I'm curious how long Github will survive with their over-valuation as the alternatives get seriously better now - the lock-in and network effects are quite shallow IMHO.
• chris_wot 10y ago
  Eh? I was very happy with my micro account, this is pretty awesome! If I ever need to recommend a corporate account, GitHub is pretty much my first choice.
• tmaly 10y ago
  I personally like the bitbucket method. I get my private repos free, but I can only work with 5 people on them before I have to start paying.
  • LeifCarrotson 10y ago
    Agreed. The goal should be accurate market segmentation. Students, open-source devs, and hobbyists pay little or nothing, small shops pay some, and large enterprises pay more. Collaborator count seems to do that better than most metrics.
    • piotrkubisa 10y ago
      It is worth noting that GitHub organizes the Student Developer Pack[1] which comes with a Micro plan ($7 - max 5 repos). It means GitHub will offer unlimited public and private repos for 2-3 years for students who were selected. [1]: https://education.github.com/pack https://education.github.com/pack
  • lucasnemeth 10y ago
    It says you will be able to add a few collaborators. So I think it will be very similar in the end.
    • maaaats 10y ago
      Except that you have to pay for GitHub.
      • mcphage 10y ago
        Which I already was. Now I'm paying less, and getting more.
        • maaaats 10y ago
          But since they now are limiting the number of contributors to your private repos, you might as well use BitBucket for free.
• ProblemFactory 10y ago
  > But I'd appreciate if their PR department didn't expect us to swallow this as a positive change. I don't have any numbers on how people structure their accounts on Github, but my feeling is that this is a positive change for the majority of Github users. Git encourages having many smaller repos for modules over massive single repos. $1/repo/month is fine for active projects, but gets expensive really fast if you want to keep archives of small private experiments around. Because of the per-repo pricing on Github, I've seen many friends and startups I've worked with keeping their open-source public repos on Github (for free), while moving private repos to Bitbucket. I would not be surprised if this pricing change would be a net revenue loss for Github, but still implemented to avoid losing market share to Bitbucket.
  • eddieroger 10y ago
    Majority user, here. I already pay GitHub monthly because I have some repos that I want private. I'm a solo dev, only hacking on side projects that may or may not be something one day, but want to keep them private anyway. My bill is about to go down, and my benefits go up. All in all, I'm quite alright with this change, agree that it's positive. I get that it gets worse if I ever take on N number of developers, but that's a hurdle I'll deal with if I ever get there. I do imagine I'm not alone in this position.
    • dorfsmay 10y ago
      I'm curious, as a solo dev, had you considered bitbicket?
      • pc86 10y ago
        I've used BitBucket as a solo dev working on personal projects, a solo consultant, and an employee on a team. It's pretty mediocre, especially if you look beyond its integration with the rest of the Atlassian ecosystem. The number of times I've wanted to search a repo for something only to have to clone it and search in my IDE is staggering.
        • 10y ago
• musha68k 10y ago
  I actually love it and I'm thankful for Github's consistently great service - looking forward to all the bitbucket/gitlab customer project migrations over the coming months.
• thijsc 10y ago
  For us as a small team it's a very positive change. Our monthly bill just went from $100 to $25.
  • unfunco 10y ago
    And for us it's negative, our monthly bill has just increased by hundreds of dollars. In theory, our respective organisations could be in competition, and GitHub has just increased our monthly bill to subsidise your organisation, instead of shouldering the financial burden themselves.
    • odonnellryan 10y ago
      > GitHub has just increased our monthly bill to subsidise your organisation, instead of shouldering the financial burden themselves. This is a really weird argument. They are a company supplying a service, why should they ever have to shoulder the bill? I'd argue that if things stayed the same, this small company would subsidize you: if you have 100 accounts using 1 repo it's more likely you're using more resources than 1 account with even 1000 repos :)
      • unfunco 10y ago
        My point is that larger companies are now be punished for a failed initial pricing model by GitHub. I prefer the new pricing model from a personal point of view, but for larger organisations it's now too expensive and I think many will relocate their repositories to BitBucket, or GitLab, or Gogs, or etcetera. Edit: My parent post is being down voted and that's fine, my point was not made in anger, it was an observation that smaller companies are having their monthly costs decreased, and the larger companies are seeing an increase, for organisations created after today that's a fair premise, but for those organisations that have been using GitHub for years and have now seen their monthly costs increase, it's a slap in the face.
        • uxp 10y ago
          > a failed initial pricing model by GitHub It's been 8 years since they revealed their pricing model, which has remained mostly unchanged on the lower end and only adjusted on the high end to account for GitHub Enterprise and suggest people move to that instead of the gargantuan $3k/mo plans. I don't know many SaaS companies that don't tweak their pricing much more infrequently than that. Thoughtbot's Giant Robots Smashing into Other Giant Robots podcast for the past few episodes has been consistently talking about A/B testing pricing models, prices changes and signup, conversion and churn, as a weekly adjustment on some of their services (FormKeep, Upcase, etc) https://github.com/blog/22-the-pricing-plans https://github.com/blog/22-the-pricing-plans
• frostymarvelous 10y ago
  Per repo pricing was why we didn't go with github. Atlassian was our only option till we shopped around till we found Visual Studio Team Services. For a team of 4. Simply great. No need to pay for Jira or anything at this point. Now, I won't go back to github even if it was completely free. The value Atlassian gives makes it a much better and attractive offering if you don't like Microsoft.
  • TheOtherHobbes 10y ago
    All the production code here is on BitBucket. Forcing users to pay for privacy has always stuck in my throat as a business model. I think this change is due to GitHub feeling some heat from Atlassian and GitLab.
    • elbigbad 10y ago
      I have a lot of half-finished projects kicking around that I would love to start on github, but I'm concerned about privacy and it certainly isn't worth it to me to pay $7/mo rather than keeping them on my Dropbox. I haven't checked out BitBucket as I kind of thought GitHub was the only game in town, but will check it out. Would be nice to get these projects off my machine but not make them public. edit: ohh and I'm just starting on BitBucket and it both imports from Git directly and defaults to private. Awesome.
      • deleted 10y ago
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      • matwood 10y ago
        Yeah, I dropped github years ago for bitbucket for my personal private repos. Can't beat free. Their strategy worked because when I moved my employer off of SVN, a paid Bitbucket is where we went.
        • matwood 10y ago
          Also, I think gh has this now, but for a long time bitbucket was the only one that gave you the ability to prevent history changes on certain branches (I always do develop and master). If this had been available in gh we would not have seen those couple big projects accidentally force push develop.
• robbiemitchell 10y ago
  Points 1-2 seem irrelevant to your argument. > 4. Switch to a user-based pricing to generate more revenue for investors You add "for investors" as a slur, like it's a bad thing. Every company, public or private, has investors -- even if it's just the founders. > but spin it as a freebie "Hey! Look at the cool unlimited shit! No, no! Don't pay attention to the fact you're gonna be charged 3 times as much as before for the same service". Except not everyone will be charged 3x as much. Many will be charged much less. It totally depends on the setup. I have heard countless times over the years what a pain it is for orgs to be charged per repo. It incentives monolithic repos. Equally important: from the perspective of a company trying to maintain budgets, it might actually make more sense to _them_. Factoring Github as a per-head charge, similar to everything from Slack/Gmail/Photoshop to laptops to food and other perks to healthcare benefits, might make things easier than worrying about whether your employees are structuring their repos in a way that minimizes costs.
  • tjl 10y ago
    When I was doing my PhD I ended up putting all my development into one repo and all my documents in a second because of GitHub's per repo rules. I didn't know about an academic pricing (they might have had it, but I think it was added after I finished) and I asked about the rules because I wanted a number of small repos, but all told would only be a few hundred meg at most. I was told no, so I decided on the two repo strategy. It worked, but it was awkward.
• pc86 10y ago
  From the perspective of a customer: repositories should be cheap, users shouldn't be. This is a positive change and one that will make me strongly consider moving from BitBucket to GitHub. I've worked at places with two developers and 150 repositories. I've worked at places with 12 developers and 5 repositories. Who do you think gets more marginal utility out of another repository? Every place I've worked that hasn't used GitHub either did so because of a regulatory reason (HIPAA and not wanting to do on-premise) or because the per-repository pricing model made it absolutely stupid expensive, or dumped you straight into Enterprise. If you make a lot of money off a single private repo with many users, you'll move from "so cheap you don't even need to think about it" to "market rate." If you make a little money off of a lot of repos with a handful of users, you'll move from "don't even consider it due to cost" to "let's try it out for six months and see how it goes."
  • profmonocle 10y ago
    I work at a small company (7 engineers) and per-repo pricing is exactly why we chose not to use GitHub. Most of our projects are short-term, meaning we have hundreds of repos going back over ten years, the majority of which are inactive. GitHub's pricing didn't make sense for us at all. (We ended up using self-hosted GitLab which we're pretty happy with.)
• mindcrime 10y ago
  Switch to a user-based pricing to generate more revenue for investors, but spin it as a freebie "Hey! Look at the cool unlimited shit! No, no! Don't pay attention to the fact you're gonna be charged 3 times as much as before for the same service". Cynicism much? I don't know how your organization is structured, but for us, this will represent a price discount. Not by a huge margin now, but as the number of private repos we use will almost certainly grow faster than the number of users we have, this is definitely a better situation for us, now and in the future.
• jlarocco 10y ago
  > 3. Notice that a significant segment of your growth (VC-funded startups) are running out of money. No comment on the rest of your post, but I doubt this part is true. I'm sure a lot of VC funded startups use GitHub, but there just aren't enough of them to be a "significant" part of the GH customer base.
• partiallypro 10y ago
  I use GitHub for my public repos, but use Visual Studio Online (poorly named, since it is not actually Visual Studio) for my private ones (also unlimited, but free.) I know a lot of others that use Bitbucket, etc because of GitHub's pricing. I feel like GitHub would make more sense to smaller devs, like myself, if it were bundled with other services. Like, if they partnered with Microsoft, Google & Amazon and offered some sort of bundling packages with their cloud services. I don't know, to me GitHub...from a small dev perspective only makes sense to share things publicly. I'm sure this new pricing model will help push some smaller devs onto the platform, but it's hard to compete in that space when you have others providing private repos for free.
  • sosuke 10y ago
    I just looked it up again, they changed the name to Visual Studio Team Services which makes much more sense. https://www.visualstudio.com/products/visual-studio-team-services-vs https://www.visualstudio.com/products/visual-studio-team-ser...
• mratzloff 10y ago
  Works well for me. I have like 10 or 12 private repos for personal projects I'm not ready to release publicly yet (or ever).
• avn2109 10y ago
  From the article: "And while we're currently not enforcing a timeline to move..." I too was sad to see many of the new developments at Github, but if they were money grubbing like you say, wouldn't they make everyone switch faster than this?
• krschultz 10y ago
  It's not basic math, it depends entirely on your code structure. In a world of 'microservices' repos proliferate very quickly. My last company has hundreds of repos, but only dozens of engineers. The pricing model was becoming a major pain point for us. As an individual this model makes way more sense for me. I pay the same as before but get unlimited private repos? Awesome.
• tn13 10y ago
  It is sensible pricing model.
• nodesocket 10y ago
  I'm getting really tired of engineers complaining about pricing and being cheap (I'm a engineer + founder). User pricing is a much better model for organizations (scales as you do in terms of headcount). And for individual accounts this is a win, win, no matter what. A flat $7 get's you unlimited repos. GitHub is not out to get you. GitHub's "PR" department is not trying to trick you. GitHub builds and maintains a crazy powerful tool that you probably use hours a day. It should cost money, and honestly it should cost more if you ask me.
• joering2 10y ago
  Meanwhile many use BitBucket free private repos for years and are very happy about it.
• manigandham 10y ago
  > But I'd appreciate if their PR department didn't expect us to swallow this as a positive change. Most coders understand basic maths. If you don't like PR, then why can't you just see past it? Why wouldn't an organization try to make it sound like a positive change? Do you expect them to come out with negative changes? What does valuation or organization changes have to do with this anyway? Are you somehow unhappy with their company? Sure they have issues but they have also created a great platform with lots of networks effects and value. It works, and it's very cheap for what it does. And if you don't like it, there are tons of competitors. Seriously, what's the problem here?
• abiox 10y ago
  > I'd appreciate if their PR department didn't expect us to swallow this as a positive change. it really depends on your perspective. i significantly prefer per-user over per-repo. i can see how per-repo might benefit others, however.
  • Cerium 10y ago
    Why not have both options continue to be available?
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• mmaunder 10y ago
  I had no idea about any of the above, but for our team this is awesome. I love that they're doing this because limiting repo's based on price is a serious PITA - it really is the way GH described is which is that every time a user wants a new repo, they have to ask billing/accounting for permission. For us and any company that uses github heavily, which is pretty much everyone in tech, this is awesome!
• skywhopper 10y ago
  40 times as much in our case. But sounds like they aren't forcing it on us right away.
• erikb 10y ago
  I think before it was $5, now it's $7? Three times? Anyway... both below $10, so no problem I see here, young padawan.
  • tjl 10y ago
    It's been $7 for a while. It was $7/month when I cancelled my service back in 2013. I was paying for private repos when I was doing my PhD thesis and once I finished I just kept my local copies and deleted the GitHub version. Now I just use my GitHub for public projects. All my private projects are on GitLab at the moment.