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> 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 accou

> 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.
    - jetcata 10y ago
      Same for me - lack of searching kills me every time!
    - kmfrk 10y ago
      The repo migration functionality is also super flimsy.
    - Akkuma 10y ago
      You might want to look into https://github.com/etsy/hound https://github.com/etsy/hound if you ever want to search. I found this superior to Github as well if I want to find all repos that reference something.
  - eddieroger 10y ago
    Yeah, but GitHub got me early on before I cared about private repos, and honestly I was just too lazy to move stuff over. They also win me over with integrations, though I'm sure BitBucket has a similarly expansive set now. Had I ever gone full Atlassian, I'd have switched, but never wanted to add Jira to my life badly enough (though when I was seriously working on a project with a friend, I considered it).
mangeletti 10y ago
Wow, you actually just made me think of something that could have been a great change for GitHub. Rather than completely limiting private repos in their old pricing model, they could have limited "active" repos, and created an archive feature, where archived repos were not available via Git, but still existed as backups and in case you ever wanted to make them active again. I do, however, believe that the new, per-user pricing is more sustainable. File storage is rather cheap; running Git pull / push is not necessarily.
- pc86 10y ago
  You can still remove a repo and keep backups yourself. Allowing it through GH makes it very easy to exploit this by archiving/unarchiving repos constantly.
  - ProblemFactory 10y ago
    The problem for Github was that the best place to "keep backups yourself" was Bitbucket. I archived a number of inactive projects from Github to Bitbucket. But that gets tedious, so why not start them on Bitbucket in the first place?
- emkman 10y ago
  They already had this in their old model. If you downgrade your plan and have more repos than allowed, they don't force you to delete them. They archive them and if you ever need to access them and make them active again, you just upgrade, for at least the month. Seemed pretty fair.
Fomite 10y ago
This is a positive change for me as well.

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.
  - jetcata 10y ago
    Same for me - lack of searching kills me every time!
  - kmfrk 10y ago
    The repo migration functionality is also super flimsy.
  - Akkuma 10y ago
    You might want to look into https://github.com/etsy/hound https://github.com/etsy/hound if you ever want to search. I found this superior to Github as well if I want to find all repos that reference something.
- eddieroger 10y ago
  Yeah, but GitHub got me early on before I cared about private repos, and honestly I was just too lazy to move stuff over. They also win me over with integrations, though I'm sure BitBucket has a similarly expansive set now. Had I ever gone full Atlassian, I'd have switched, but never wanted to add Jira to my life badly enough (though when I was seriously working on a project with a friend, I considered it).

mangeletti 10y ago

Wow, you actually just made me think of something that could have been a great change for GitHub. Rather than completely limiting private repos in their old pricing model, they could have limited "active" repos, and created an archive feature, where archived repos were not available via Git, but still existed as backups and in case you ever wanted to make them active again. I do, however, believe that the new, per-user pricing is more sustainable. File storage is rather cheap; running Git pull / push is not necessarily.

pc86 10y ago
You can still remove a repo and keep backups yourself. Allowing it through GH makes it very easy to exploit this by archiving/unarchiving repos constantly.
- ProblemFactory 10y ago
  The problem for Github was that the best place to "keep backups yourself" was Bitbucket. I archived a number of inactive projects from Github to Bitbucket. But that gets tedious, so why not start them on Bitbucket in the first place?
emkman 10y ago
They already had this in their old model. If you downgrade your plan and have more repos than allowed, they don't force you to delete them. They archive them and if you ever need to access them and make them active again, you just upgrade, for at least the month. Seemed pretty fair.

Fomite 10y ago

This is a positive change for me as well.