35 ms·

GitHub is now free for teams

2589 points by ig0r0 6y ago

LifeIsBio 6y ago
This is pretty cool. Anyone have thoughts as to _why_ they’re making this move?
- faitswulff 6y ago
  My guess is that they're a Big Company that can land Big Contracts now and that subsidizes small teams.
- aroch 6y ago
  The cynical thought would be drive usage of Github specific features/integrations to increase lock-in
- q3k 6y ago
  Probably to lure in early startups away from GitLab, which has this pricing model (free private repos, pay for required reviews and SSO) for a while now.
- cpascal 6y ago
  I suspect Microsoft wants to capture as much developer mindshare as possible and then cross-sell Azure. Reducing/eliminating entry costs for commercial grade features helps to do that.
- 7777fps 6y ago
  GitHub has significant vendor lock-in, so it makes sense to make it free to capture the market before a competitor gets traction. [Speculation:] Perhaps they've run the numbers and can figure out that they make enough money from enterprise clients and will make enough more money from the 'marketplace' being a channel for selling github integrations and addons to cover this cost of not trying to monetize through supporting teams. It also moves a large base from 'customer' with needed support to free users which don't need the same level of support.
  - fileeditview 6y ago
    What exactly is the lock-in mechanism? E.g. I have git repos where I use multiple remotes (1 Github, 2 Gitlab..). So git is the same as everwhere.. I never felt locked in. It's not too hard to transfer your repos to another provider.
    - 7777fps 6y ago
      GitHub is not git. GitHub has pull requests, actions (mini CI integrations), other fuller integrations running off github hooks. It's the issues, and pull requests that are the most immediate lock in. Transfer away and you lose your issues and PR history. But more deeply it's the integrations. Even if it's all theoretically possible through other providers, if you have a working CI system set up to "just work" through GitHub then there's little chance you'll want to migrate to a different provider and have to re-do all that configuration. Even with a dedicated dev-ops team it's weeks of disruption, not to mention the possibility to get half way through and discover something doesn't work the same way in [Competitor]. If you're up and running with github PRs driving JIRA issues and JIRA issues feeding into GitHub issues. And you have paid github marketplace integrations delivering value, then you're not going to look at a competitor unless that competitor is offering something that GitHub doesn't do. Up to now the competitors have only differentiated on price as far as I can tell. There's certainly no killer feature of GitLab that people talk about.
  - dehrmann 6y ago
    > GitHub has significant vendor lock-in Do they? Unless you're on GitHub Enterprise, migrating is just moving your repos over the weekend, setting up new webhooks, emailing everyone a command to switch their upstream URL, and hoping the new workflow works for you. For teams of <100, this it one of the easier transitions to make.
    - bdcravens 6y ago
      There are external services that integrate with Github but not Gitlab. (though more and more are also adding Gitlab integration)
- johannes1234321 6y ago
  For one they have a good budget from Microsoft, secondly GitLab is good competition and thirdly I would assume they see their revenues in project.amangment and CI/CD features (tie in build workers with Azure etc.) and there is more money to make than restricting users (which can be bypassed realticely easily, while more contributors means more build hosts, means larger azure bills)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bdcravens 6y ago
  The fact that they're mirroring Gitlab's offering probably suggests that Gitlab is capturing market share from them. It's probably happening more now, as companies are taking very serious looks at their expenses.
  - Ayesh 6y ago
    I'm sure GitHub lands a lot more Enterprise customers compared to Gitlab, but for individual users who use organizations to have a separation in repos, and smaller teams, this price change is very convincing to move to GitHub even for teams, now that private repos are free.
- jbergstroem 6y ago
  I'll bite: They are shifting profits to CI and service landscape. I paid for 8 seats (previous: $64, now: $32) which gave me 10 000 included CI minutes (now: 3 000). I was just at that limit. Its surprisingly hard to find what the cost per minute is after that, but I guess I can check back in a month and see what my spending ends up at. I'm sure they have enough info about onboarding and unit economics to see how it will pay off mid to long term. I'll happily pay for use though, it makes sense and it makes the value addition of github core vs extra more clear.
  - cf_ 6y ago
    I think it depends on OS (Linux is $0.008/Minute, but macOS is a lot more - like $0.08): https://github.com/features/actions https://github.com/features/actions (scroll to the bottom)
    - jbergstroem 6y ago
      Ok, so that'd cost me USD$56, leading to a higher monthly than previous pricing. So, steering users toward the Action landscape is obviously a better monetization model.
      - jbergstroem 6y ago
        Just got an email from Github. Money quote: > For more than 99% of customers, these changes have lowered their GitHub bills, in many cases quite dramatically. For a very small number of customers who use a large percentage of the free Actions minutes allotment each month, these changes have the potential to cause your bill to increase by $20-50/month, depending on how much you use Actions in the future. To offset that possibility, we’re adding a free credit of $500 to your organization’s GitHub account for you to use in any way you want.
- Grue3 6y ago
  Extinguishing the competition. It's not even the first time. Remember Internet Explorer?
klinskyc 6y ago
Seems like Github is feeling heat from GitLab/BitBucket. I guess the calculation here is that the enterprise contracts are where all the money is, and keeping smaller customers on GitHub is worth the price cut?
- JamesCoyne 6y ago
  Personally, I have been favoring Gitlab over Github because Gitlab allows private repos on the free tier.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    I have been favoring Gitlab over Github because their CI is the best CI I've ever used. It just works, whereas every other CI found a way to make things hard for me. You can even spin up postgres and redis instances for tests by just specifying that you want them. It's amazing.
    - leesalminen 6y ago
      Couldn't agree more. Gitlab's CI is what made me finally fall in love with CI as a concept. Obviously it was needed before, but it always felt like an ugly chore. With Gitlab, it's one of the first things I do when setting up a new project.
      - 1337shadow 6y ago
        And that's exactly how "sprint 0" should be :)
    - CitizenKane 6y ago
      Throwing in a second opinion here for those curious. I've worked with a number of CI systems and had trouble with many. Gitlab CI has been the opposite of other experiences I've had with well over 10k jobs completed across different projects with diverse needs. Even for small hobby projects it's been great for me, it's nice to easily be able to push updates without having to worry about it. Makes it much easier to iterate and test things out!
colinrand 6y ago
They are commoditizing their complement. So what's their core business?
- DylanDmitri 6y ago
  Core business is Azure. Actions, hosting, pushing the C# stack.
smaili 6y ago
For those wondering "what makes it worth paying now?", GitHub briefly addresses that: Teams who need advanced features (like code owners), enterprise features (like SAML), or personalized support can upgrade to one of our paid plans.
- 98codes 6y ago
  Along with the expected limit bumps on Action execution time and package storage.
  - q3k 6y ago
    And, unfortunately, 'required reviews' (which IMO are a critical feature).
    - raziel2p 6y ago
      can you elaborate on what you mean by this? because if you're referring to requiring review approvals before a PR can be merged, that's available in the free plan (under branch protection rules).
      - q3k 6y ago
        That's odd, https://github.com/pricing https://github.com/pricing mentions it as a paid option.
        alecbenzer 6y ago
        A feature that's available for free on public repos isn't necessarily free for private repos, it seems. The wording on the pricing page isn't very clear about this, though. If they mean that they're now removing required reviewers for public repos in the free plan, that's definitely a big step backward I think.
      - armatav 6y ago
        Required reviewers I think means in a team of [A, B, C], (A | B) are required but not C. Unless i’m missing something, it should not be the same as “administrators” - otherwise branch protection rules would be fine.
yingw787 6y ago
Well, this is amazing! I never would have thought the Microsoft acquisition would have these kinds of results! Congrats to Nat and the GitHub team (and by extension Microsoft) for making this possible! I wonder whether this is a result of market conditions, or whether GitHub sees this is a first-to-market play of some sort, or whether it's something else. I hate to be a cynic given how much good Microsoft + GitHub have been doing lately, but what prevents this change from being rolled back? Congrats again! I love using GitHub and look forward to many happy years shipping code on the platform.
- markdog12 6y ago
  > whether GitHub sees this is a first-to-market play of some sort Could be a response to GitLab, which had a similar offering for years, including unlimited free private repos.
  - yingw787 6y ago
    Maybe, but this move looks to flatten GitHub pricing down to two tiers: enterprise and free, while GitLab has four pricing tiers and the enterprise feature offering doesn't seem to be there (Gold doesn't look too enterprise-y at first glance).
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
- sneak 6y ago
  I feel like anyone who lived through the 90s could have expected "these kinds of results". Git is open source and widely supported, which doesn't benefit Microsoft. By causing GitHub-specific features to be an essential part of a "modern" or "industry standard" git workflow, they can capture more marketshare/attention, and cause alternatives to be sidelined. This requires removing all friction to entering the proprietary ecosystem, including purchasing. This, along with the acquisition of NPM, is the "embrace" part. The next will be an expansion of GitHub and NPM's featuresets in ways that are only accessible via branded, first party tools (i.e. not git/ssh/yarn). GitHub has already made some inroads there prior to the Microsoft acquisition with of course the ubiquitous PRs as well as GitHub Issues and Actions. I imagine the ability to check out GitHub wikis as git repos will probably eventually go away to further this. The last part ("extinguish") is turning off support for non-firstparty tools like git-via-ssh, .patch URL support, issue collaboration via email, yarn, et c. By the time they do this, few people will notice, having acclimated to the entirely-proprietary ecosystem they've been incrementally subjected to. The goal, as always: a Microsoft editor (VS Code or Atom), editing code in a Microsoft language (TypeScript/.NET/whatever), signed off via Microsoft review software (GitHub mobile), publishing to a Microsoft website (GitHub/npm), running CI on a Microsoft VM (GitHub Actions), pushing code to a Microsoft datacenter (Azure). It's simply a moat to prevent open, unfettered competition in any intersection of the vertical. Any weak spots (such as GitHub signup friction) are to be subsidized as they will yield benefits when later used as a cohesive whole in an anticompetitive fashion.
gigatexal 6y ago
Microsoft could run all of Github free and still make money by integrating with Github and Azure so tightly that it is so easy to run code in Azure if you use Github But it’s probably just completion in the space
zedpm 6y ago
The pricing change appears to fall right in line with Gitlab's pricing (Free, $4/user/month, ~$20/user/month, and super expensive). I haven't managed to compare their feature matrices to see if the tiers are closely aligned, but from a glance they look similar.
thereyougo 6y ago
Very few companies can make me feel like part of their journey like Github (Cloudflare also) They understand their target audience more than most of the companies out there. When they are making moves such as this, they explain what was behind it. I find it authentic.
- snazz 6y ago
  Me too! Microsoft has done a really great job of managing the acquisition without ruining GitHub. GitHub already had a great understanding of their audience and a pulse on the community prior to being bought, so I'm really glad that they haven't lost that now that they're a Microsoft subsidiary.
  - lucb1e 6y ago
    > a really great job of managing the acquisition I mean, if they hadn't done a thing it would have been a great job, too. Pumping in cash to fund previously paid features for free sure goes a long way, too, but the changes they've made so far I'd hardly call managing and more not touching it aside from making paid things free.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Speaking of, I just had a momentary panic because Backblaze’s hard disk report timeline is missing a link to the last update (from February) and I thought maybe they’d stopped doing them... Who else is good at this? I’m somewhat fond of Digital Ocean’s docs.
  - Ayesh 6y ago
    Not for the technical aspects, but I'm fond of TransferWise an Signal. Even within Microsoft, their WSL, and new terminal are well-received in open source communities.
dubcanada 6y ago
One thing to note is I had 3 members, it did not automatically downgrade my seats from 5. So in order to get it down to $12 a month I had to go downgrade my seats from 5 to 3.
roland35 6y ago
This is great news! I've always had my repositories spread across GitHub, gitlab, and bitbucket depending on what size group or features I needed but this helps centralize everything to GitHub. That is probably their goal!
- rvz 6y ago
  > this helps centralize everything to GitHub. Oh dear. That doesn't really sound like a good idea in the long term. So once you place all your projects/repositories on a third party git service like Github and it goes down, what can you do to push that critical change? Might be no big deal for personal projects but unacceptable for big business and open source orgs. You might as well call the CEO of GitHub for support. A better way is to self-host...
  - alecbenzer 6y ago
    > A better way is to self-host... Even ignoring the higher cost to set up, are you sure your self-hosted solution will have better uptime? Are you sure you'll be able to get things up and running faster when it does go down than GitHub will when GitHub goes down?
    - rvz 6y ago
      Short answer: Absolutely yes. If you can setup a website using Docker, you can do the same with a Git server on-premise. Many companies have done this without Github for years. Why you ask? You have total control over the stack, CI, etc and some orgs have in-house sys-admins or IT department to do all the work independent of a third party like GitHub. Maybe you should ask the Linux Kernel Project, WebKit, OpenBSD, Mozilla Firefox and even RedoxOS maintainers about why they self-host their projects which some even have mirrors on GitHub. On another note I keep seeing this over on some repositories and now because it is 'private' I don't even think it remotely makes sense or is a good idea to even use GitHub to backup private keys even if the repository is 'private'. As long as it is on someone else's server, you're not in control.
natfriedman 6y ago
Hi HN, I'm the CEO of GitHub. Everyone at GitHub is really excited about this announcement, and I'm happy to answer any questions. We've wanted to make this change for the last 18 months, but needed our Enterprise business to be big enough to enable the free use of GitHub by the rest of the world. I'm happy to say that it's grown dramatically in the last year, and so we're able to make GitHub free for teams that don't need Enterprise features. We also retained our Team pricing plan for people who need email support (and a couple of other features like code owners). In general we think that every developer on earth should be able to use GitHub for their work, and so it is great to remove price as a barrier.
- tekknolagi 6y ago
  Hi Nat. Big fan. I've been on GitHub for a long time now. There's a fair bit of friction in issue/PR management for people who have primarily CLI-centered workflows. I know that `hub` and friends exist, but will there be official, supported clients in the future? Also: are there plans to open source more of GitHub? Post Microsoft acquisition, I have been increasingly concerned about vendor lock-in, EEE, and so forth.
  - natfriedman 6y ago
    Yes, we are working on an official CLI here: https://github.com/cli/cli https://github.com/cli/cli I think open sourcing GitHub is an interesting idea.
    - freedomben 6y ago
      I love github, but the fact that it is not open source has always been a big problem to me, especially given that github has become the de-facto home for so many open source projects, yet is not itself open source. I would love to see that change to a model like Gitlab uses!
    - tekknolagi 6y ago
      Oh, I did not realize that was official & supported. Excellent. Looking forward to its maturity. Unrelated: have you seen https://sourcehut.org/ https://sourcehut.org/? Thoughts?
pkamb 6y ago
Does “for teams” also apply to paid personal accounts?
- rmkrmk 6y ago
  It seems to, on the upgrade page for a personal account it still says "Pro" but for $4/m
- leecb 6y ago
  If you have a personal paid account ("Pro"), the pricing page now says "Continue with Team". It looks like "Pro" has been renamed to "Team".
shrikant 6y ago
Google haven't built up too much of a user base for GCP's Cloud Source Repositories service yet (my speculation), so I wonder if they're viewing Gitlab as an acquisition target. TBQH, I don't see Gitlab lasting too much longer without an acquisition event of some sort, when facing up against this sort of Microsoft-backed feature funding. And I say this as a bigger user of Gitlab than Github (primarily because of the free private repositories and organisations).
- leesalminen 6y ago
  I think an acquisition of Gitlab would be the only way for me to migrate back to GH from GL. I've been a happy user of Gitlab for years now and have no yearning desire to return to Github.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- toyg 6y ago
  Gitlab need only wait before GH starts adding Azure-first and Azure-only features, as they are wont to do. At that point they can just offer "the same but for any other cloud provider". Amazon, Google, or IBM, might even throw them a bone.
  - droopyEyelids 6y ago
    It seems like in the medium term, staying independent could be a huge boon to Gitlab- like you said, it'd allow them to make high quality integrations with all cloud provider utilities. In the long term we'd probably see the cloud providers create their own social revision control projects, and then fuck around with private APIs so the quality of the integration between their cloud service and their source control leads you to stay locked in. Even in that scenario it could make sense for there to be a 'neutral' party like gitlab, though. I acknowledge this is my own imagination and I've no claim to know the future! :)
specialist 6y ago
What safe guards are in place to prevent Microsoft from using GitHub to glean competitive intelligence? Just like Facebook used Onavo. https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-onavo-gives-social-media-firm-inside-peek-at-rivals-users-1502622003 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-onavo-gives-social-me...
- jedieaston 6y ago
  The same safeguards that are in place on Azure (which is used by 99% of Fortune 500s for either Office 365 or cloud stuff), which is to say, ethics, and the fact that if they tried it once most of those companies would reduce their spend with Microsoft immediately. Not to mention the government contracts.
  - specialist 6y ago
    Followup: https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its-own-sellers-to-launch-competing-products-11587650015 https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its... Surely they wouldn't also spy on their own cloud customers.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - specialist 6y ago
    Isn't that exactly what's already happening? [0] We got a sales call (seminar) from elastic.co. Despite all the positives, it was a hard value proposition. Why would we switch from Amazon's offering? For us noobs, elastic.co wasn't enough better to entice us to switch. AWS is clearly scooping up the vast majority of users with their "good enough" offering. (I assume Azure, GCP, do the same.) I'm not saying it's right or wrong. I'm just saying it happens. And now Microsoft has much better forward looking intel. I've been chewing on this ever since. Feels just like the 90s. I used to write AutoCAD add-ons. We third party developers knew in our bones that eventually Autodesk would steal our lunch money. FWIW, I closed my personal repos on GitHub, in case any of my wares some day become popular. -- [0] Amazon Has Gone From Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor, Say Open Source Developers Community leaders say AWS increasingly poses an existential threat https://onezero.medium.com/open-source-betrayed-industry-leaders-accuse-amazon-of-playing-a-rigged-game-with-aws-67177bc748b7 https://onezero.medium.com/open-source-betrayed-industry-lea...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
zentiggr 6y ago
Does anyone remember the arbitrary actions GitHub has taken in the past few months and all the "maybe it's time to start leaving GitHub if you want to avoid getting your repositories permanently deleted?" Or is HN just as susceptible to the narrow news horizon?
- ketralnis 6y ago
  Or maybe different people have different needs and HN isn't a single cohesive hive mind
  - zentiggr 6y ago
    Fair enough... Hence also why Google have plenty of Apps users etc even though they have a long track record of dropping even popular products at their whim. Thanks for reminding me that it really is to each their own, and good luck to you on your path.
- rvz 6y ago
  Microsoft/GitHub is doing something clever this time. They know where the developers are and know that the new consumers are developers, hence 'devsumers'. So how does Microsoft make them happy? Give 'em free stuff: Free repositories, student pack, ebooks, courses, cloud credits, etc and they come running back to GitHub. There's Sign in with GitHub which makes it easy to claim all the freebies, unlike the rest of the alternatives. This is why the majority of developers will stay and some would realise that it will all go down and will leave Github and self-host their own git server instead.
mythz 6y ago
Great news for everyone bar startups competing with them as it looks like Microsoft is turning their multi-billion acquisition of GitHub into a loss leader to get as many devs using their platform as possible, no doubt to flex seamless integrations into Azure which looks like they're executing exceptionally well with their acquisitions & new feature giveaways. From the side-lines it looks like they're slowly becoming an unstoppable dominant force, what's surprising to me is AWS's / GCP's inaction, they're either asleep at the wheel or they don't see Microsoft's dev mindshare grab as a threat.
- jdminhbg 6y ago
  I'm not sure it's great news for those of us who are smaller users of Github. You would expect Github to concentrate even harder on enterprise users now that we're not paying anymore. I'm not complaining; MS should point GH at where the money is and there is competition you can switch to. I'm just not excited to save a few bucks a month given what will likely change.
  - mythz 6y ago
    Unlikely, freemium users would make up the overwhelming majority which has been getting more value & less reasons to need a paid subscription with each release since their acquisition of which I've yet to see any signs of neglecting their existing user base. IMO Microsoft views GitHub's user base as potential Azure leads and Cloud computing as the current & future lucrative computing utilization business model who has been pulling out all stops to grow Azure as fast as possible. They're fortunately rich & big enough that they don't need every one of their business to maximize their profits and are more than happy to leverage the synergies in their different assets to funnel more business into Azure.
- cjdu 6y ago
  Agreed. I cannot believe that GCP and AWS are so asleep at the wheel either. If I were them I would literally be throwing money at some of the GitHub folks to have them fix AWS or GCP. And it was should have been rather obvious when GitHub released the beta of Actions a few years ago. Actions remains the most important thing GitHub has done, ever, in my opinion. It might take a few more years for people to fully realize what this could be. Hope GitHub doesn't screw it up!
tmpz22 6y ago
If you're like us and your entire Github usecase now fits within this free tier, it seems like you'll have to manually downgrade for it to take effect. > We’re also reducing the price of our paid Team plan from $9 per user/month to $4 per user/month, effective immediately. Existing customers will have their bills automatically reduced going forward. I don't mind this - we'll likely stay on the paid plan anyways at that price point. But there you are.
dmw_ng 6y ago
This is an awesome change! In case anyone else was wondering, here's what you lose by cancelling: You are downgrading to GitHub Free After April 15, 2020, ... features and limits will change: Protected branches in private repos Draft PRs in private repos GitHub Pages in private repos (using 1) Wikis in private repos Code owners in private repos Multiple issue assignees in private repos Multiple PR assignees in private repos Code review automatic assignment in private repos Scheduled reminders in private repos Standard support 2,000 minutes for GitHub Actions (currently 3,000) 500MB of storage for packages (currently 2GB)
- markphip 6y ago
  Why would protected branches go away?
  - jswny 6y ago
    They are still a premium only feature.
    - markphip 6y ago
      OK.. maybe it is terminology then because Free public repos have Branch Protection rules. Do you not have those with Free private repos? Or is "Protected Branches" some bigger feature?
      - alecbenzer 6y ago
        > Do you not have those with Free private repos? Correct.
  - tomduncalf 6y ago
    There's a more detailed table at the bottom of https://github.com/pricing https://github.com/pricing
- j88439h84 6y ago
  I hope GitHub allows protected branches in private repos. They're really important for everyone, not just enterprises.
unknown_library 6y ago
To think that John Mayer predicted this in his song _Daughters_ 17 years ago: [Individuals] become [small teams] who turn into [big enterprises] / So [GitHub] be good to your [individuals], too
Saaster 6y ago
Hmm, literally the only paid feature left on the Teams plan we're using is Draft PRs. I am worried that as it looks like I won't need to pay for this service, that I, my team and my code will become the product to monetize at some point in the future.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Elsewhere in the thread they say that their big customers earn them enough to keep the lights on. I’m much happier with a sliding scale model than ad or spyware based models. The problem there is that my experiences have been that a lot of expensive scaling work that you might otherwise have deferred gets done for your biggest customers, and we don’t often get the revenue right to absorb that hit. More than once our biggest customers have ended up having the lowest margins, if you de-fuzz the math.
samirsd 6y ago
what is the font for the text in the upper left that says "The GitHub Blog"? Looks cool.
- alecbenzer 6y ago
  Looks like it's one of these: .alt-mono-font { font-family: SFMono-Regular,Consolas,Liberation Mono,Menlo,Courier,monospace; } If you find yourself wondering this a lot, https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/whatfont/jabopobgcpjmedljpbcaablpmlmfcogm?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/whatfont/jabopobgc... is a fun extnesion.
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    If anyone from GitHub's around in this thread, would you mind putting "ui-monospace" at the front of that list? SFMono-Regular no longer works in Safari because of fingerprinting concerns.
- aembleton 6y ago
  Depends on your system and what fonts you have installed. The font-family is `SFMono-Regular,Consolas,Liberation Mono,Menlo,Courier,monospace;` In Firefox: - Right click on the element, select `Inspect Element` - Click on the Font tab on the right hand side and it will tell you which font is being used.
amyhorowitz 6y ago
Amazing - thank you!
microdrum 6y ago
So it will be free until the competition dies, and then it will be expensive? Like... everything MSFT and GOOG have ever done? Great.
- alecbenzer 6y ago
  When has GOOG made something expensive once the competition died? I guess for that matter... also when has MSFT? I buy they have, but not aware of any examples of the top of my head.
  - microdrum 6y ago
    Um, AdWords.
    - xapata 6y ago
      That's auction driven, not a set price.
  - tibyat 6y ago
    have you used youtube lately? i would say the explosion in ads per video lately certainly qualifies as becoming more expensive.
  - patrickaljord 6y ago
    Google Maps, translate etc.
seneca 6y ago
I've not been a big fan of GitHub historically, but the pace of innovation since the MS acquisition is really impressive. I wonder how much of that is MS influence vs just MS funding.
- lucb1e 6y ago
  That's odd, it's the opposite for me. I did like GitHub, but then setup a Gitea and made sure to figure out how to move things over (even if I haven't done it since they haven't really given me a reason) after Microsoft acquired it. Now I watch every move with a weary eye, though truth be told so far it's going fine (mostly by being hands-off, of course). I do assume a lot of this is their own money, but with the financial security that Microsoft offers you just can't do much wrong. Even without actual money actually moving, it might still be MS funding that makes the difference.
burkestar 6y ago
Can you please prioritize stability of your SaaS offering for paying customers? Our dev team and infra gets impacted seemingly every week with github outages, and it especially seems to correlate with delivery of new features. Thanks!
rjvani 6y ago
yeet
orliesaurus 6y ago
Finally & thank you, I oughta say!
Someone1234 6y ago
I think GitHub are doing well, but one cannot deny that GitLab has carved out a fantastic niche (on-prem, private instances, OSS, etc) that GitHub doesn't compete in. So while I agree GitHub are "the" company to beat, I think GitLab is doing a good job of contrasting. PS - No affiliation with anyone.
- muglug 6y ago
  GitHub absolutely does compete for on-prem installation. Source: we use an on-prem installation at Vimeo
  - ascendantlogic 6y ago
    Not at the $0 price point they don't.
    - toyg 6y ago
      I can see that happening at some point... as long as you host in Azure.
      - globular-toast 6y ago
        > on-prem
        Spivak 6y ago
        People still consider using AWS and Azure as "on-prem". Hypervisor as a service doesn't really change much in the day-to-day operations.
- wlll 6y ago
  Github Enterprise is on-premises: https://github.com/enterprise https://github.com/enterprise That only really leaves the fact that its OSS that differentiates Gitlab in your list. Not comparing the two, just making sure you're aware.
EngineerAkbar 6y ago
Pots of pleasantly warm water are now available for multiple frogs to use for free.
buremba 6y ago
Great to hear that! One last thing that would make Github a better alternative to Gitlab for teams is the self-hosted runners for organizations IMO.
- reilly3000 6y ago
  https://help.github.com/en/actions/hosting-your-own-runners/about-self-hosted-runners https://help.github.com/en/actions/hosting-your-own-runners/...
  - buremba 6y ago
    > Note: Currently, you can add a self-hosted runner to a single repository. The ability to add and manage self-hosted runners for an entire organization will come in a future release. Still waiting for it for the last few months. :)
- samanthalee233 6y ago
  Thanks for sharing this feedback, we're doing a #GitChallenge right now (I'm a community advocate at GitLab) asking community members to send us reviews of GitLab vs GitHub (whether positive/negative/neutral) https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/04/14/github-free-for-teams/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/04/14/github-free-for-tea...
oliwarner 6y ago
Thank in large part to GitLab for pushing the market forward on affordable collaborative development. We moved across when GH did their pricing changed. Free CI/CD well before "actions". Never looked back.
- Ayesh 6y ago
  Bitbucket offered free repos before Gitlab, but Gitlab did an amazing job making it affordable and as good as githubs offerings. It's always pleasantly surprisingly to go to Gitlab and see how much they continue to improve.
  - oliwarner 6y ago
    Bitbucket was certainly more generous than GitHub at the time. I used them too. Their problem was the pricing structure. The break between "free" and "all your money, please" felt pretty harsh. They always appeared to be pushing very industrial companion tooling (eg Jira) which might have suited enterprise customers but wasn't very helpful to a freelancer. That's pretty common in SaaS. Enterprise is easier than volume. By contrast GitLab's tiers are... Cheap. And it's perfectly feasible to do professional, modern CI flows on their free tier. It'll be interesting to see what happens next.
jb775 6y ago
Sounds like Microsoft is creating a new branch attempting to replicate the Atlassian business model. First get developers hooked on GitHub, then build GitHub integrations into enterprise software, then let developers make the sale to their own employers (primarily because developers like the little green activity boxes).
ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
Thanks. I'm not surprised by this. I know this isn't a "mainstream" opinion, but I was fairly happy when MS brought GitHub. I think that the Nadella MS is much more streamlined than the old "Enemy of the State" version that got our undies in a bunch, back in the last century.
alexbanks 6y ago
I just realized I've been paying for Github pro for like a year for absolutely no reason at all.
- Old_Thrashbarg 6y ago
  Ask for a refund of all the charges, people don't realize that a lot of companies do that these days. You should be upset if they refuse (assuming you genuinely weren't using their premium features).
ciarancour 6y ago
My legacy silver org plan (20 private repos) only shows a migration plan to teams at $4/user, is there something I'm missing? The new free tier seems effectively the same or better.
jrochkind1 6y ago
> We’re happy to announce we’re making private repositories with unlimited collaborators available to all GitHub accounts. Huh, I thought github made private repos available to free github accounts a while ago? Looking for historical announcement, aha, it was not with "unlimited collaborators" before. From Jan 2019: > GitHub Free now includes unlimited private repositories. For the first time, developers can use GitHub for their private projects with up to three collaborators per repository for free. https://github.blog/2019-01-07-new-year-new-github/ https://github.blog/2019-01-07-new-year-new-github/ So what's new is dropping the 3-collaborators-per-repo restriction. I hadn't actually realized this restriction was there, apparently I've never used a private github repo in a free account! And the messaging from a year ago stuck in my head as "private repos are free on github now", I thought they had already done what they did today, oops. Above natfriedman writes: > We've wanted to make this change for the last 18 months, So apparently they had wanted to do this even in Jan 2019 when they did something less than this...
vaylian 6y ago
I wonder if this will lead to more closed source software being written. I don't mean by MS specifically, but overall.
- lucb1e 6y ago
  Same. I liked that GitHub really nudged you to be open unless you were willing to pay to keep it closed (well, sure, you can go ahead and setup your own server or find a competitor you like, but in the base form, if you want to be part of the ecosystem, be open) and am wondering just how many student projects are now staying behind locked doors because GitHub wants to catch bigger fish. Not saying they're a philanthropic organisation that should promote open source to the kids or anything, just agreeing about an almost certain side effect.
DeathArrow 6y ago
Many comments are saying that Microsoft is doing this move to help cross-selling Azure. I don't see many users of free tier willing to spend money on Azure.
manigandham 6y ago
Note: the minimum of 5 seats is removed so if you're using less than that then you'll have to manually remove those seats to avoid being billed.
vbezhenar 6y ago
This announce is not clear to me, as to what really changed. Can I have protected branch in my private repository now?
- kintalo 6y ago
  No, it looks like protected branches are not part of the "Free" tier. It's introduced in the Teams pricing and up.
  - vbezhenar 6y ago
    So basically they removed restriction of 3 collaborators from free tier and that's it. Well, pretty useful for a lot of teams, I guess.
omani 6y ago
can I downgrade to free now without losing anything? (data, private repos, etc.)
adverbly 6y ago
Bit disappointed that this isn't an "Everyone Wins" pricing change. The new plan is a downgrade from the old one. For example, it will only include 3000 Github Action minutes. The old plan included 10000. The next plan up would be > 2 * old price. Source: https://github.com/pricing https://github.com/pricing vs http://web.archive.org/web/20200406010552/https://github.com/pricing http://web.archive.org/web/20200406010552/https://github.com...
- Guvante 6y ago
  It depends how many users you had. https://github.com/features/actions#pricing-details https://github.com/features/actions#pricing-details shows that if you have 12 members you can buy the difference in Linux Github Actions and still get ahead. The price on Mac is prohibitive though and yeah you definitely lose out there as I don't think many people on that plan have 120 people.
Wehrdo 6y ago
I hope developers still default to making their personal repos public after this change. One of the fringe benefits of GitHub is the ability to search across the entire site for uses of obscure, poorly-documented APIs. Defaulting to most repos becoming private would greatly hinder this.
- roryokane 6y ago
  I agree that’s a potential concern, but you’re worrying about it a year too late. Individual developers have been able to make repos private on the free plan since January 2019: https://github.blog/2019-01-07-new-year-new-github/ https://github.blog/2019-01-07-new-year-new-github/. This announcement only affects the cost of private repos for teams of collaborators.
hank_z 6y ago
I am very thankful to have GitHub on this planet
hubbabubbarex 6y ago
Microsoft products are free ? No thanks. Microsoft partnered artist Marina Abramovich was enought for me. I can't use any product of this company that partnering with Satanist who paint with blood and Siemen .. spirit cooking .. no thanks. Neither should any of you too.
binarymax 6y ago
The way I read the title and heading, it sounded like teams was now free. This messaging is very confusing. Teams is not being made free, you need to pay $4 per user. A better message would be: "we're reducing your price to $4pp, and giving you access to more features."
- vesinisa 6y ago
  Ugh.. did you notice that they also changed what the Free plan includes? Many of the premium features, including unlimited private repos for an org, are now included in the free plan. I am actually going through the list and thinking my company might be able to do with the free plan from now on.
- dang 6y ago
  Normally we'd change the title to be less confusing, but in this case it's a bit tricky, for reasons I've explained here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20less%20not%20more%20yc&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Ensorceled 6y ago
Ouch. Just paid for a yearly pro license at the end of March.
- danpalmer 6y ago
  They’re refunding pro-rata.
  - Ensorceled 6y ago
    Nice! Lot's of issues relating to pricing and plans right now so it is not clear that was happening.
veeralpatel979 6y ago
Actions, Packages, Sponsors, free unlimited private repos, this...Microsoft's GitHub acquisition has turned out really great so far in my view.
- notokay 6y ago
  Embrace, extend, and extinguish. Microsoft is still a company, that called linux a cancer. No trust at all.
devit 6y ago
Probably not very smart to use this feature, since your so-called "private" repository is an exploit or a leaking employee away from becoming public. Instead, use a self-hosted Gitlab instance or similar, preferably with an external firewall preventing outbound and non-team inbound connections if feasible.
- ectospheno 6y ago
  Your proposed solution handles neither the rogue employee nor the exploit scenario. It does incur a lot of additional cost in maintenance.
- xapata 6y ago
  How would that solve the "leaking employee" case?
  - devit 6y ago
    Sorry, I meant "leaking employee of GitHub", not "leaking employee of your organization".
scarface74 6y ago
This isn’t really surprising. Microsoft has had a free equivalent for years with Azure Devops (formerly known as Visual Studio Team Service). Azure Devops has hosted build and deployment orchestration with either hosted build servers or local build servers using local agents. It also has private Nuget repositories, project planning, bug tracking etc. Azure Devops deployment tools are (were? It’s been a couple of years) just as good for deploying to AWS as AWS’s own tools.
SrslyJosh 6y ago
Hi Nat, ICE kidnaps children and forces their captives to live in unsafe, inhumane, over-crowded conditions in the middle of a global pandemic. Why do you work with them?
- rexpop 6y ago
  This should be the overriding concern of everyone in this forum. It's no longer astonishing[0], but it is quite disgusting how HN participants are able to compartmentalize their enthusiasm for technology away from moral or ethical qualms. I suppose the most generous interpretation is to assume that they are simply unaware.[1] Upstream of that ignorance, however, is a fearful unwillingness to interrogate the foundations of one's own life. 0. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." ― Upton Sinclair 1. https://crimethinc.com/books/no-wall-they-can-build https://crimethinc.com/books/no-wall-they-can-build
  - crispinb 6y ago
    Not compartmentalising is trickier than you imply, as the whole corporate-capitalist system of power (which supplies nearly all of your and my goods) depends at its root on current exploitation and drawing down on its investment in future destruction (of the entire biosphere). We can point fingers at many hideous individual corporate citizens in tech (Dropbox & Amazon spring immediately to mind, current Microsoft doesn't), but the whole system depends intrinsically on maintaining the ignorance you write of. How to extricate ourselves from all that? Personally, I'm for revolution to take it all down. But we know that isn't going to happen.
    - rexpop 6y ago
      > hideous individual corporate citizens I agree with you, that pointing fingers like is useless. We very quickly run out of fingers. > I'm for revolution to take it all down. I wonder what you mean by that.
      - crispinb 6y ago
kevindong 6y ago
By and far the main difference between 'Team' ($4/person/month) and 'Enterprise' ($21/person/month) is SSO/LDAP [0]. The SSO tax is real [1]. [0]: https://github.com/pricing https://github.com/pricing [1]: https://sso.tax/ https://sso.tax/
- johnmarcus 6y ago
  Ha! sso.tax, what a great site. As an IT person I always thought this same thing with SSO - even if you have an identity provider, it's often under utilized because nearly everything else needs to go to enterprise pricing for SAML auth. I wouldn't mind paying $1-2 more per user/platform, but as sso.tax tallies, the price jump is often much more.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- chacham15 6y ago
  IMO the biggest difference between the two is self-hosting which makes sense for the price difference. Even setting that aside, SSO is a feature which is very meaningful to businesses and relatively meaningless to individuals. Because of that its often used to differentiate between the customers. This differentiation results in individuals getting a discount at the expense of the businesses; which to me makes sense.
- efrafa 6y ago
  I get where you are comming from, but from sales perspective, charging extra for SSO makes total sense.
- oars 6y ago
  On sso.tax, it states that "Single sign-on (SSO) is a mechanism for outsourcing the authentication for your website (or other product) to a third party identity provider, such as Google, Facebook, Okta, PingFederate, etc." Isn't this the definition of Federation, rather than SSO?
  - adityasaky 6y ago
3xblah 6y ago
Would it be fair to explain this move as a "user retention" tactic. Perhaps it becomes a more difficult decision for teams to close out their paid accounts, even amidst an economic downturn, when the fees are removed. One could argue some MSFT acquisitions have been focused on acquiring large swaths of exisiting users moreso than acquiring revenue streams or work product. Github could have been one such acquisition.
- colechristensen 6y ago
  Maybe GitLab is starting to seem like more and more competition so they're having to add more free features to compete for users.
m0zg 6y ago
I'd much rather they threw in more LFS storage on my $7 plan. But I suppose they know that already if they're moving towards a more "freemium" model. First hit is free, and then pay through the nose for LFS.
tumidpandora 6y ago
What's the catch?
hestefisk 6y ago
Good on MS / Github for doing this.
prirun 6y ago
437 comments, 6 from Nat Friedman. That seems a little weird for an AMA discussion.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  I don't think this was really supposed to be an AMA.
randomsearch 6y ago
First you win the developers. Then you get the apps. Then you win the consumers. How long to the next Microsoft Phone? Wouldn’t want to be Google.
- Old_Thrashbarg 6y ago
  All the places Microsoft has shipped awesome products and won the market didn't have as strong monopoly (or duopoly) effects as in the mobile space. I don't think we'll see a MS phone any time soon unfortunately.
DenisM 6y ago
Bitbucket is in trouble now. With no more paying customer for Git and no support for Mercurial what are they going to do?
- vorpalhex 6y ago
  Continue selling Jira plans.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    Yeah, I just see BitBucket as a value-add to sell Jira and Confluence licenses. Some people really like having all that stuff integrated. Our team doesn't really see the value when it's just fine to have links to PRs or commit hashes but hey, to each their own.
- acdha 6y ago
  They lost that battle a decade ago. I would previously have suggested some kind of enterprise devops offering pairing with their other services but Microsoft will probably get there faster and better.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
Old_Thrashbarg 6y ago
That's awesome, I feel like many companies increase prices over time trying to squeeze more revenue, but that usually requires monopoly power. I remember from economics that in an idealized, efficient, large market, the price of a product should tend towards the marginal cost of production. In the case of SaaS, that's almost $0 (server costs being fairly low), so SaaS products ideally should all get cheaper over time. Good to see theory matching real-world here.
Corrado 6y ago
I'm confused about the "Collaborators for private repositories" feature. The Free plan shows an "unlimited" number of collaborators but each of the paid plans show "Up to org size". What does "Up to org size" mean? Which organization are you talking about? Does this mean that the free plans have more functionality?
tarun_anand 6y ago
Hi Nat, finally MS responded to the Gitlab threat. Recently Gitlab has announced that they would be making a bunch of products free. "We're open sourcing rich functionality across Plan, Create, Verify, Package, Release, Configure, and Defend." https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/03/30/new-features-to-core/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/03/30/new-features-to-cor... It's good to see that MS has joined the party. Are there any plans to make GitHub itself available for self-hosting? I am not sure but the go-to place for open source software cannot be closed source. Cheers, Tarun
alex_young 6y ago
Compare this with Microsoft’s other notable purchase of recent years, LinkedIn. At LinkedIn they are tightening all of the screws and extracting cash from all comers. What is different about GitHub? My guess is GitLab. This is an old strategy for Microsoft. They used to call it Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
- Kliment 6y ago
  Linkedin was always a predatory organization, and now they are empowered to do what they actually wanted to do without the risk of going bankrupt if they miscalculate. Github is also empowered to do what they actually wanted to do without the risk of going bankrupt if they miscalculate. This is what you end up. You can't fundamentally change an organization by acquisition without destroying it. For example, Skype was destroyed like that. Github and Linkedin were not, and you are seeing them acting with fewer constraints. Linkedin is using their newfound power for evil, Github much less so.
lerpapoo 6y ago
wtf i love microsoft, now.
epigramx 6y ago
Nice, now you can share all your secrets with Microsoft, for free.
Rainymood 6y ago
Here's a little quiz, which of the three phases are we in now? a) Embrace b) Extend c) Extinguish
twsghost 6y ago
Will you ever apologize for enforcing Trump's racist, xenophobic holy-war against Iran and harming Iranian developers?
sheng1 6y ago
:)
- sheng1 6y ago
  :)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
craigds 6y ago
However, looks like the Actions minutes included in the Team plan have dropped from 10K to 3K, so if you're currently paying for a team plan and using Actions your costs might not decrease, or might increase a bit
cryptos 6y ago
What do you think will be the response of GitLab?
- ahuang1018 6y ago
  https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/04/14/github-free-for-teams/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=responses&utm_campaign=gitchallenge&utm_content=blog https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/04/14/github-free-for-tea...
wildpeaks 6y ago
Is it 4$/user on top of the minimum 20$ (which includes 5 users) ? Because my billing still says 20$/month and I have less than 5 users.
- gilbertbw 6y ago
  You have to go in and reduce your seat count on the billing page
  - wildpeaks 6y ago
    Thanks, there is indeed a "Remove Seats" option now (there used to be only "Downgrade to Free"), exactly what I was looking for.
nemacol 6y ago
This is great and I will most likely take advantage of this new offering, but I cant help but wonder why. "everyone deserves GitHub" is marketing, not a corporate strategy. How does GitHub stand to benefit from this change? How does more non-paying users help the company? I am not trying to be a tinfoil hat jerk here. Life in the age of information has taught us all that (again) "nothing is free". So what am I paying here?
rampatra 6y ago
This is great news. I can now move some of my projects from BitBucket to GitHub. However, I wish GitHub supported GitHub Pages for private repositories for free as well.
rynop 6y ago
Are you grandfathered into the 10,000 free Action minutes for paid Teams? 10k -> 3k drop is pretty substantial.
ainam48948 6y ago
Yeah, I just checked my email, and I remember reading this. This is pretty cool.
classified 6y ago
Well, hosting "open-source" software on a commercial platform does create something of a cognitive dissonance, doesn't it?
foxknox 6y ago
This is really great news. I've been happy paying for GitHub for years and it was already great value but this makes it even better.

2589 points by ig0r0 6y ago

LifeIsBio 6y ago

This is pretty cool. Anyone have thoughts as to _why_ they’re making this move?

faitswulff 6y ago
My guess is that they're a Big Company that can land Big Contracts now and that subsidizes small teams.
aroch 6y ago
The cynical thought would be drive usage of Github specific features/integrations to increase lock-in
q3k 6y ago
Probably to lure in early startups away from GitLab, which has this pricing model (free private repos, pay for required reviews and SSO) for a while now.
cpascal 6y ago
I suspect Microsoft wants to capture as much developer mindshare as possible and then cross-sell Azure. Reducing/eliminating entry costs for commercial grade features helps to do that.
7777fps 6y ago
GitHub has significant vendor lock-in, so it makes sense to make it free to capture the market before a competitor gets traction. [Speculation:] Perhaps they've run the numbers and can figure out that they make enough money from enterprise clients and will make enough more money from the 'marketplace' being a channel for selling github integrations and addons to cover this cost of not trying to monetize through supporting teams. It also moves a large base from 'customer' with needed support to free users which don't need the same level of support.
- fileeditview 6y ago
  What exactly is the lock-in mechanism? E.g. I have git repos where I use multiple remotes (1 Github, 2 Gitlab..). So git is the same as everwhere.. I never felt locked in. It's not too hard to transfer your repos to another provider.
  - 7777fps 6y ago
    GitHub is not git. GitHub has pull requests, actions (mini CI integrations), other fuller integrations running off github hooks. It's the issues, and pull requests that are the most immediate lock in. Transfer away and you lose your issues and PR history. But more deeply it's the integrations. Even if it's all theoretically possible through other providers, if you have a working CI system set up to "just work" through GitHub then there's little chance you'll want to migrate to a different provider and have to re-do all that configuration. Even with a dedicated dev-ops team it's weeks of disruption, not to mention the possibility to get half way through and discover something doesn't work the same way in [Competitor]. If you're up and running with github PRs driving JIRA issues and JIRA issues feeding into GitHub issues. And you have paid github marketplace integrations delivering value, then you're not going to look at a competitor unless that competitor is offering something that GitHub doesn't do. Up to now the competitors have only differentiated on price as far as I can tell. There's certainly no killer feature of GitLab that people talk about.
- dehrmann 6y ago
  > GitHub has significant vendor lock-in Do they? Unless you're on GitHub Enterprise, migrating is just moving your repos over the weekend, setting up new webhooks, emailing everyone a command to switch their upstream URL, and hoping the new workflow works for you. For teams of <100, this it one of the easier transitions to make.
  - bdcravens 6y ago
    There are external services that integrate with Github but not Gitlab. (though more and more are also adding Gitlab integration)
johannes1234321 6y ago
For one they have a good budget from Microsoft, secondly GitLab is good competition and thirdly I would assume they see their revenues in project.amangment and CI/CD features (tie in build workers with Azure etc.) and there is more money to make than restricting users (which can be bypassed realticely easily, while more contributors means more build hosts, means larger azure bills)
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bdcravens 6y ago
The fact that they're mirroring Gitlab's offering probably suggests that Gitlab is capturing market share from them. It's probably happening more now, as companies are taking very serious looks at their expenses.
- Ayesh 6y ago
  I'm sure GitHub lands a lot more Enterprise customers compared to Gitlab, but for individual users who use organizations to have a separation in repos, and smaller teams, this price change is very convincing to move to GitHub even for teams, now that private repos are free.
jbergstroem 6y ago
I'll bite: They are shifting profits to CI and service landscape. I paid for 8 seats (previous: $64, now: $32) which gave me 10 000 included CI minutes (now: 3 000). I was just at that limit. Its surprisingly hard to find what the cost per minute is after that, but I guess I can check back in a month and see what my spending ends up at. I'm sure they have enough info about onboarding and unit economics to see how it will pay off mid to long term. I'll happily pay for use though, it makes sense and it makes the value addition of github core vs extra more clear.
- cf_ 6y ago
  I think it depends on OS (Linux is $0.008/Minute, but macOS is a lot more - like $0.08): https://github.com/features/actions https://github.com/features/actions (scroll to the bottom)
  - jbergstroem 6y ago
    Ok, so that'd cost me USD$56, leading to a higher monthly than previous pricing. So, steering users toward the Action landscape is obviously a better monetization model.
    - jbergstroem 6y ago
      Just got an email from Github. Money quote: > For more than 99% of customers, these changes have lowered their GitHub bills, in many cases quite dramatically. For a very small number of customers who use a large percentage of the free Actions minutes allotment each month, these changes have the potential to cause your bill to increase by $20-50/month, depending on how much you use Actions in the future. To offset that possibility, we’re adding a free credit of $500 to your organization’s GitHub account for you to use in any way you want.
Grue3 6y ago
Extinguishing the competition. It's not even the first time. Remember Internet Explorer?

klinskyc 6y ago

Seems like Github is feeling heat from GitLab/BitBucket. I guess the calculation here is that the enterprise contracts are where all the money is, and keeping smaller customers on GitHub is worth the price cut?

JamesCoyne 6y ago
Personally, I have been favoring Gitlab over Github because Gitlab allows private repos on the free tier.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  I have been favoring Gitlab over Github because their CI is the best CI I've ever used. It just works, whereas every other CI found a way to make things hard for me. You can even spin up postgres and redis instances for tests by just specifying that you want them. It's amazing.
  - leesalminen 6y ago
    Couldn't agree more. Gitlab's CI is what made me finally fall in love with CI as a concept. Obviously it was needed before, but it always felt like an ugly chore. With Gitlab, it's one of the first things I do when setting up a new project.
    - 1337shadow 6y ago
      And that's exactly how "sprint 0" should be :)
  - CitizenKane 6y ago
    Throwing in a second opinion here for those curious. I've worked with a number of CI systems and had trouble with many. Gitlab CI has been the opposite of other experiences I've had with well over 10k jobs completed across different projects with diverse needs. Even for small hobby projects it's been great for me, it's nice to easily be able to push updates without having to worry about it. Makes it much easier to iterate and test things out!

colinrand 6y ago

They are commoditizing their complement. So what's their core business?

DylanDmitri 6y ago
Core business is Azure. Actions, hosting, pushing the C# stack.

smaili 6y ago

For those wondering "what makes it worth paying now?", GitHub briefly addresses that: Teams who need advanced features (like code owners), enterprise features (like SAML), or personalized support can upgrade to one of our paid plans.

98codes 6y ago
Along with the expected limit bumps on Action execution time and package storage.
- q3k 6y ago
  And, unfortunately, 'required reviews' (which IMO are a critical feature).
  - raziel2p 6y ago
    can you elaborate on what you mean by this? because if you're referring to requiring review approvals before a PR can be merged, that's available in the free plan (under branch protection rules).
    - q3k 6y ago
      That's odd, https://github.com/pricing https://github.com/pricing mentions it as a paid option.
      - alecbenzer 6y ago
        A feature that's available for free on public repos isn't necessarily free for private repos, it seems. The wording on the pricing page isn't very clear about this, though. If they mean that they're now removing required reviewers for public repos in the free plan, that's definitely a big step backward I think.
    - armatav 6y ago
      Required reviewers I think means in a team of [A, B, C], (A | B) are required but not C. Unless i’m missing something, it should not be the same as “administrators” - otherwise branch protection rules would be fine.

yingw787 6y ago

Well, this is amazing! I never would have thought the Microsoft acquisition would have these kinds of results! Congrats to Nat and the GitHub team (and by extension Microsoft) for making this possible! I wonder whether this is a result of market conditions, or whether GitHub sees this is a first-to-market play of some sort, or whether it's something else. I hate to be a cynic given how much good Microsoft + GitHub have been doing lately, but what prevents this change from being rolled back? Congrats again! I love using GitHub and look forward to many happy years shipping code on the platform.

markdog12 6y ago
> whether GitHub sees this is a first-to-market play of some sort Could be a response to GitLab, which had a similar offering for years, including unlimited free private repos.
- yingw787 6y ago
  Maybe, but this move looks to flatten GitHub pricing down to two tiers: enterprise and free, while GitLab has four pricing tiers and the enterprise feature offering doesn't seem to be there (Gold doesn't look too enterprise-y at first glance).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
sneak 6y ago
I feel like anyone who lived through the 90s could have expected "these kinds of results". Git is open source and widely supported, which doesn't benefit Microsoft. By causing GitHub-specific features to be an essential part of a "modern" or "industry standard" git workflow, they can capture more marketshare/attention, and cause alternatives to be sidelined. This requires removing all friction to entering the proprietary ecosystem, including purchasing. This, along with the acquisition of NPM, is the "embrace" part. The next will be an expansion of GitHub and NPM's featuresets in ways that are only accessible via branded, first party tools (i.e. not git/ssh/yarn). GitHub has already made some inroads there prior to the Microsoft acquisition with of course the ubiquitous PRs as well as GitHub Issues and Actions. I imagine the ability to check out GitHub wikis as git repos will probably eventually go away to further this. The last part ("extinguish") is turning off support for non-firstparty tools like git-via-ssh, .patch URL support, issue collaboration via email, yarn, et c. By the time they do this, few people will notice, having acclimated to the entirely-proprietary ecosystem they've been incrementally subjected to. The goal, as always: a Microsoft editor (VS Code or Atom), editing code in a Microsoft language (TypeScript/.NET/whatever), signed off via Microsoft review software (GitHub mobile), publishing to a Microsoft website (GitHub/npm), running CI on a Microsoft VM (GitHub Actions), pushing code to a Microsoft datacenter (Azure). It's simply a moat to prevent open, unfettered competition in any intersection of the vertical. Any weak spots (such as GitHub signup friction) are to be subsidized as they will yield benefits when later used as a cohesive whole in an anticompetitive fashion.

gigatexal 6y ago

Microsoft could run all of Github free and still make money by integrating with Github and Azure so tightly that it is so easy to run code in Azure if you use Github But it’s probably just completion in the space

zedpm 6y ago

The pricing change appears to fall right in line with Gitlab's pricing (Free, $4/user/month, ~$20/user/month, and super expensive). I haven't managed to compare their feature matrices to see if the tiers are closely aligned, but from a glance they look similar.

thereyougo 6y ago

Very few companies can make me feel like part of their journey like Github (Cloudflare also) They understand their target audience more than most of the companies out there. When they are making moves such as this, they explain what was behind it. I find it authentic.

snazz 6y ago
Me too! Microsoft has done a really great job of managing the acquisition without ruining GitHub. GitHub already had a great understanding of their audience and a pulse on the community prior to being bought, so I'm really glad that they haven't lost that now that they're a Microsoft subsidiary.
- lucb1e 6y ago
  > a really great job of managing the acquisition I mean, if they hadn't done a thing it would have been a great job, too. Pumping in cash to fund previously paid features for free sure goes a long way, too, but the changes they've made so far I'd hardly call managing and more not touching it aside from making paid things free.
hinkley 6y ago
Speaking of, I just had a momentary panic because Backblaze’s hard disk report timeline is missing a link to the last update (from February) and I thought maybe they’d stopped doing them... Who else is good at this? I’m somewhat fond of Digital Ocean’s docs.
- Ayesh 6y ago
  Not for the technical aspects, but I'm fond of TransferWise an Signal. Even within Microsoft, their WSL, and new terminal are well-received in open source communities.

dubcanada 6y ago

One thing to note is I had 3 members, it did not automatically downgrade my seats from 5. So in order to get it down to $12 a month I had to go downgrade my seats from 5 to 3.

roland35 6y ago

This is great news! I've always had my repositories spread across GitHub, gitlab, and bitbucket depending on what size group or features I needed but this helps centralize everything to GitHub. That is probably their goal!

rvz 6y ago
> this helps centralize everything to GitHub. Oh dear. That doesn't really sound like a good idea in the long term. So once you place all your projects/repositories on a third party git service like Github and it goes down, what can you do to push that critical change? Might be no big deal for personal projects but unacceptable for big business and open source orgs. You might as well call the CEO of GitHub for support. A better way is to self-host...
- alecbenzer 6y ago
  > A better way is to self-host... Even ignoring the higher cost to set up, are you sure your self-hosted solution will have better uptime? Are you sure you'll be able to get things up and running faster when it does go down than GitHub will when GitHub goes down?
  - rvz 6y ago
    Short answer: Absolutely yes. If you can setup a website using Docker, you can do the same with a Git server on-premise. Many companies have done this without Github for years. Why you ask? You have total control over the stack, CI, etc and some orgs have in-house sys-admins or IT department to do all the work independent of a third party like GitHub. Maybe you should ask the Linux Kernel Project, WebKit, OpenBSD, Mozilla Firefox and even RedoxOS maintainers about why they self-host their projects which some even have mirrors on GitHub. On another note I keep seeing this over on some repositories and now because it is 'private' I don't even think it remotely makes sense or is a good idea to even use GitHub to backup private keys even if the repository is 'private'. As long as it is on someone else's server, you're not in control.

natfriedman 6y ago

Hi HN, I'm the CEO of GitHub. Everyone at GitHub is really excited about this announcement, and I'm happy to answer any questions. We've wanted to make this change for the last 18 months, but needed our Enterprise business to be big enough to enable the free use of GitHub by the rest of the world. I'm happy to say that it's grown dramatically in the last year, and so we're able to make GitHub free for teams that don't need Enterprise features. We also retained our Team pricing plan for people who need email support (and a couple of other features like code owners). In general we think that every developer on earth should be able to use GitHub for their work, and so it is great to remove price as a barrier.

tekknolagi 6y ago
Hi Nat. Big fan. I've been on GitHub for a long time now. There's a fair bit of friction in issue/PR management for people who have primarily CLI-centered workflows. I know that `hub` and friends exist, but will there be official, supported clients in the future? Also: are there plans to open source more of GitHub? Post Microsoft acquisition, I have been increasingly concerned about vendor lock-in, EEE, and so forth.
- natfriedman 6y ago
  Yes, we are working on an official CLI here: https://github.com/cli/cli https://github.com/cli/cli I think open sourcing GitHub is an interesting idea.
  - freedomben 6y ago
    I love github, but the fact that it is not open source has always been a big problem to me, especially given that github has become the de-facto home for so many open source projects, yet is not itself open source. I would love to see that change to a model like Gitlab uses!
  - tekknolagi 6y ago
    Oh, I did not realize that was official & supported. Excellent. Looking forward to its maturity. Unrelated: have you seen https://sourcehut.org/ https://sourcehut.org/? Thoughts?

pkamb 6y ago

Does “for teams” also apply to paid personal accounts?

rmkrmk 6y ago
It seems to, on the upgrade page for a personal account it still says "Pro" but for $4/m
leecb 6y ago
If you have a personal paid account ("Pro"), the pricing page now says "Continue with Team". It looks like "Pro" has been renamed to "Team".

shrikant 6y ago

Google haven't built up too much of a user base for GCP's Cloud Source Repositories service yet (my speculation), so I wonder if they're viewing Gitlab as an acquisition target. TBQH, I don't see Gitlab lasting too much longer without an acquisition event of some sort, when facing up against this sort of Microsoft-backed feature funding. And I say this as a bigger user of Gitlab than Github (primarily because of the free private repositories and organisations).

leesalminen 6y ago
I think an acquisition of Gitlab would be the only way for me to migrate back to GH from GL. I've been a happy user of Gitlab for years now and have no yearning desire to return to Github.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
toyg 6y ago
Gitlab need only wait before GH starts adding Azure-first and Azure-only features, as they are wont to do. At that point they can just offer "the same but for any other cloud provider". Amazon, Google, or IBM, might even throw them a bone.
- droopyEyelids 6y ago
  It seems like in the medium term, staying independent could be a huge boon to Gitlab- like you said, it'd allow them to make high quality integrations with all cloud provider utilities. In the long term we'd probably see the cloud providers create their own social revision control projects, and then fuck around with private APIs so the quality of the integration between their cloud service and their source control leads you to stay locked in. Even in that scenario it could make sense for there to be a 'neutral' party like gitlab, though. I acknowledge this is my own imagination and I've no claim to know the future! :)

specialist 6y ago

What safe guards are in place to prevent Microsoft from using GitHub to glean competitive intelligence? Just like Facebook used Onavo. https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-onavo-gives-social-media-firm-inside-peek-at-rivals-users-1502622003 https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebooks-onavo-gives-social-me...

jedieaston 6y ago
The same safeguards that are in place on Azure (which is used by 99% of Fortune 500s for either Office 365 or cloud stuff), which is to say, ethics, and the fact that if they tried it once most of those companies would reduce their spend with Microsoft immediately. Not to mention the government contracts.
- specialist 6y ago
  Followup: https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its-own-sellers-to-launch-competing-products-11587650015 https://www.wsj.com/articles/amazon-scooped-up-data-from-its... Surely they wouldn't also spy on their own cloud customers.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- specialist 6y ago
  Isn't that exactly what's already happening? [0] We got a sales call (seminar) from elastic.co. Despite all the positives, it was a hard value proposition. Why would we switch from Amazon's offering? For us noobs, elastic.co wasn't enough better to entice us to switch. AWS is clearly scooping up the vast majority of users with their "good enough" offering. (I assume Azure, GCP, do the same.) I'm not saying it's right or wrong. I'm just saying it happens. And now Microsoft has much better forward looking intel. I've been chewing on this ever since. Feels just like the 90s. I used to write AutoCAD add-ons. We third party developers knew in our bones that eventually Autodesk would steal our lunch money. FWIW, I closed my personal repos on GitHub, in case any of my wares some day become popular. -- [0] Amazon Has Gone From Neutral Platform to Cutthroat Competitor, Say Open Source Developers Community leaders say AWS increasingly poses an existential threat https://onezero.medium.com/open-source-betrayed-industry-leaders-accuse-amazon-of-playing-a-rigged-game-with-aws-67177bc748b7 https://onezero.medium.com/open-source-betrayed-industry-lea...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

zentiggr 6y ago

Does anyone remember the arbitrary actions GitHub has taken in the past few months and all the "maybe it's time to start leaving GitHub if you want to avoid getting your repositories permanently deleted?" Or is HN just as susceptible to the narrow news horizon?

ketralnis 6y ago
Or maybe different people have different needs and HN isn't a single cohesive hive mind
- zentiggr 6y ago
  Fair enough... Hence also why Google have plenty of Apps users etc even though they have a long track record of dropping even popular products at their whim. Thanks for reminding me that it really is to each their own, and good luck to you on your path.
rvz 6y ago
Microsoft/GitHub is doing something clever this time. They know where the developers are and know that the new consumers are developers, hence 'devsumers'. So how does Microsoft make them happy? Give 'em free stuff: Free repositories, student pack, ebooks, courses, cloud credits, etc and they come running back to GitHub. There's Sign in with GitHub which makes it easy to claim all the freebies, unlike the rest of the alternatives. This is why the majority of developers will stay and some would realise that it will all go down and will leave Github and self-host their own git server instead.

mythz 6y ago

Great news for everyone bar startups competing with them as it looks like Microsoft is turning their multi-billion acquisition of GitHub into a loss leader to get as many devs using their platform as possible, no doubt to flex seamless integrations into Azure which looks like they're executing exceptionally well with their acquisitions & new feature giveaways. From the side-lines it looks like they're slowly becoming an unstoppable dominant force, what's surprising to me is AWS's / GCP's inaction, they're either asleep at the wheel or they don't see Microsoft's dev mindshare grab as a threat.

jdminhbg 6y ago
I'm not sure it's great news for those of us who are smaller users of Github. You would expect Github to concentrate even harder on enterprise users now that we're not paying anymore. I'm not complaining; MS should point GH at where the money is and there is competition you can switch to. I'm just not excited to save a few bucks a month given what will likely change.
- mythz 6y ago
  Unlikely, freemium users would make up the overwhelming majority which has been getting more value & less reasons to need a paid subscription with each release since their acquisition of which I've yet to see any signs of neglecting their existing user base. IMO Microsoft views GitHub's user base as potential Azure leads and Cloud computing as the current & future lucrative computing utilization business model who has been pulling out all stops to grow Azure as fast as possible. They're fortunately rich & big enough that they don't need every one of their business to maximize their profits and are more than happy to leverage the synergies in their different assets to funnel more business into Azure.
cjdu 6y ago
Agreed. I cannot believe that GCP and AWS are so asleep at the wheel either. If I were them I would literally be throwing money at some of the GitHub folks to have them fix AWS or GCP. And it was should have been rather obvious when GitHub released the beta of Actions a few years ago. Actions remains the most important thing GitHub has done, ever, in my opinion. It might take a few more years for people to fully realize what this could be. Hope GitHub doesn't screw it up!

tmpz22 6y ago

If you're like us and your entire Github usecase now fits within this free tier, it seems like you'll have to manually downgrade for it to take effect. > We’re also reducing the price of our paid Team plan from $9 per user/month to $4 per user/month, effective immediately. Existing customers will have their bills automatically reduced going forward. I don't mind this - we'll likely stay on the paid plan anyways at that price point. But there you are.

dmw_ng 6y ago

This is an awesome change! In case anyone else was wondering, here's what you lose by cancelling: You are downgrading to GitHub Free After April 15, 2020, ... features and limits will change: Protected branches in private repos Draft PRs in private repos GitHub Pages in private repos (using 1) Wikis in private repos Code owners in private repos Multiple issue assignees in private repos Multiple PR assignees in private repos Code review automatic assignment in private repos Scheduled reminders in private repos Standard support 2,000 minutes for GitHub Actions (currently 3,000) 500MB of storage for packages (currently 2GB)

markphip 6y ago
Why would protected branches go away?
- jswny 6y ago
  They are still a premium only feature.
  - markphip 6y ago
    OK.. maybe it is terminology then because Free public repos have Branch Protection rules. Do you not have those with Free private repos? Or is "Protected Branches" some bigger feature?
    - alecbenzer 6y ago
      > Do you not have those with Free private repos? Correct.
- tomduncalf 6y ago
  There's a more detailed table at the bottom of https://github.com/pricing https://github.com/pricing
j88439h84 6y ago
I hope GitHub allows protected branches in private repos. They're really important for everyone, not just enterprises.

unknown_library 6y ago

To think that John Mayer predicted this in his song _Daughters_ 17 years ago: [Individuals] become [small teams] who turn into [big enterprises] / So [GitHub] be good to your [individuals], too

Saaster 6y ago

Hmm, literally the only paid feature left on the Teams plan we're using is Draft PRs. I am worried that as it looks like I won't need to pay for this service, that I, my team and my code will become the product to monetize at some point in the future.

hinkley 6y ago
Elsewhere in the thread they say that their big customers earn them enough to keep the lights on. I’m much happier with a sliding scale model than ad or spyware based models. The problem there is that my experiences have been that a lot of expensive scaling work that you might otherwise have deferred gets done for your biggest customers, and we don’t often get the revenue right to absorb that hit. More than once our biggest customers have ended up having the lowest margins, if you de-fuzz the math.

samirsd 6y ago

what is the font for the text in the upper left that says "The GitHub Blog"? Looks cool.

alecbenzer 6y ago
Looks like it's one of these: .alt-mono-font { font-family: SFMono-Regular,Consolas,Liberation Mono,Menlo,Courier,monospace; } If you find yourself wondering this a lot, https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/whatfont/jabopobgcpjmedljpbcaablpmlmfcogm?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/whatfont/jabopobgc... is a fun extnesion.
- saagarjha 6y ago
  If anyone from GitHub's around in this thread, would you mind putting "ui-monospace" at the front of that list? SFMono-Regular no longer works in Safari because of fingerprinting concerns.
aembleton 6y ago
Depends on your system and what fonts you have installed. The font-family is `SFMono-Regular,Consolas,Liberation Mono,Menlo,Courier,monospace;` In Firefox: - Right click on the element, select `Inspect Element` - Click on the Font tab on the right hand side and it will tell you which font is being used.

amyhorowitz 6y ago

Amazing - thank you!

microdrum 6y ago

So it will be free until the competition dies, and then it will be expensive? Like... everything MSFT and GOOG have ever done? Great.

alecbenzer 6y ago
When has GOOG made something expensive once the competition died? I guess for that matter... also when has MSFT? I buy they have, but not aware of any examples of the top of my head.
- microdrum 6y ago
  Um, AdWords.
  - xapata 6y ago
    That's auction driven, not a set price.
- tibyat 6y ago
  have you used youtube lately? i would say the explosion in ads per video lately certainly qualifies as becoming more expensive.
- patrickaljord 6y ago
  Google Maps, translate etc.

seneca 6y ago

I've not been a big fan of GitHub historically, but the pace of innovation since the MS acquisition is really impressive. I wonder how much of that is MS influence vs just MS funding.

lucb1e 6y ago
That's odd, it's the opposite for me. I did like GitHub, but then setup a Gitea and made sure to figure out how to move things over (even if I haven't done it since they haven't really given me a reason) after Microsoft acquired it. Now I watch every move with a weary eye, though truth be told so far it's going fine (mostly by being hands-off, of course). I do assume a lot of this is their own money, but with the financial security that Microsoft offers you just can't do much wrong. Even without actual money actually moving, it might still be MS funding that makes the difference.

burkestar 6y ago

Can you please prioritize stability of your SaaS offering for paying customers? Our dev team and infra gets impacted seemingly every week with github outages, and it especially seems to correlate with delivery of new features. Thanks!

rjvani 6y ago

yeet

orliesaurus 6y ago

Finally & thank you, I oughta say!

Someone1234 6y ago

I think GitHub are doing well, but one cannot deny that GitLab has carved out a fantastic niche (on-prem, private instances, OSS, etc) that GitHub doesn't compete in. So while I agree GitHub are "the" company to beat, I think GitLab is doing a good job of contrasting. PS - No affiliation with anyone.

muglug 6y ago
GitHub absolutely does compete for on-prem installation. Source: we use an on-prem installation at Vimeo
- ascendantlogic 6y ago
  Not at the $0 price point they don't.
  - toyg 6y ago
    I can see that happening at some point... as long as you host in Azure.
    - globular-toast 6y ago
      > on-prem
      - Spivak 6y ago
        People still consider using AWS and Azure as "on-prem". Hypervisor as a service doesn't really change much in the day-to-day operations.
wlll 6y ago
Github Enterprise is on-premises: https://github.com/enterprise https://github.com/enterprise That only really leaves the fact that its OSS that differentiates Gitlab in your list. Not comparing the two, just making sure you're aware.

EngineerAkbar 6y ago

Pots of pleasantly warm water are now available for multiple frogs to use for free.

buremba 6y ago

Great to hear that! One last thing that would make Github a better alternative to Gitlab for teams is the self-hosted runners for organizations IMO.

reilly3000 6y ago
https://help.github.com/en/actions/hosting-your-own-runners/about-self-hosted-runners https://help.github.com/en/actions/hosting-your-own-runners/...
- buremba 6y ago
  > Note: Currently, you can add a self-hosted runner to a single repository. The ability to add and manage self-hosted runners for an entire organization will come in a future release. Still waiting for it for the last few months. :)
samanthalee233 6y ago
Thanks for sharing this feedback, we're doing a #GitChallenge right now (I'm a community advocate at GitLab) asking community members to send us reviews of GitLab vs GitHub (whether positive/negative/neutral) https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/04/14/github-free-for-teams/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/04/14/github-free-for-tea...

oliwarner 6y ago

Thank in large part to GitLab for pushing the market forward on affordable collaborative development. We moved across when GH did their pricing changed. Free CI/CD well before "actions". Never looked back.

Ayesh 6y ago
Bitbucket offered free repos before Gitlab, but Gitlab did an amazing job making it affordable and as good as githubs offerings. It's always pleasantly surprisingly to go to Gitlab and see how much they continue to improve.
- oliwarner 6y ago
  Bitbucket was certainly more generous than GitHub at the time. I used them too. Their problem was the pricing structure. The break between "free" and "all your money, please" felt pretty harsh. They always appeared to be pushing very industrial companion tooling (eg Jira) which might have suited enterprise customers but wasn't very helpful to a freelancer. That's pretty common in SaaS. Enterprise is easier than volume. By contrast GitLab's tiers are... Cheap. And it's perfectly feasible to do professional, modern CI flows on their free tier. It'll be interesting to see what happens next.

jb775 6y ago

Sounds like Microsoft is creating a new branch attempting to replicate the Atlassian business model. First get developers hooked on GitHub, then build GitHub integrations into enterprise software, then let developers make the sale to their own employers (primarily because developers like the little green activity boxes).

ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago

Thanks. I'm not surprised by this. I know this isn't a "mainstream" opinion, but I was fairly happy when MS brought GitHub. I think that the Nadella MS is much more streamlined than the old "Enemy of the State" version that got our undies in a bunch, back in the last century.

alexbanks 6y ago

I just realized I've been paying for Github pro for like a year for absolutely no reason at all.

Old_Thrashbarg 6y ago
Ask for a refund of all the charges, people don't realize that a lot of companies do that these days. You should be upset if they refuse (assuming you genuinely weren't using their premium features).

ciarancour 6y ago

My legacy silver org plan (20 private repos) only shows a migration plan to teams at $4/user, is there something I'm missing? The new free tier seems effectively the same or better.

jrochkind1 6y ago

> We’re happy to announce we’re making private repositories with unlimited collaborators available to all GitHub accounts. Huh, I thought github made private repos available to free github accounts a while ago? Looking for historical announcement, aha, it was not with "unlimited collaborators" before. From Jan 2019: > GitHub Free now includes unlimited private repositories. For the first time, developers can use GitHub for their private projects with up to three collaborators per repository for free. https://github.blog/2019-01-07-new-year-new-github/ https://github.blog/2019-01-07-new-year-new-github/ So what's new is dropping the 3-collaborators-per-repo restriction. I hadn't actually realized this restriction was there, apparently I've never used a private github repo in a free account! And the messaging from a year ago stuck in my head as "private repos are free on github now", I thought they had already done what they did today, oops. Above natfriedman writes: > We've wanted to make this change for the last 18 months, So apparently they had wanted to do this even in Jan 2019 when they did something less than this...

vaylian 6y ago

I wonder if this will lead to more closed source software being written. I don't mean by MS specifically, but overall.

lucb1e 6y ago
Same. I liked that GitHub really nudged you to be open unless you were willing to pay to keep it closed (well, sure, you can go ahead and setup your own server or find a competitor you like, but in the base form, if you want to be part of the ecosystem, be open) and am wondering just how many student projects are now staying behind locked doors because GitHub wants to catch bigger fish. Not saying they're a philanthropic organisation that should promote open source to the kids or anything, just agreeing about an almost certain side effect.

DeathArrow 6y ago

Many comments are saying that Microsoft is doing this move to help cross-selling Azure. I don't see many users of free tier willing to spend money on Azure.

manigandham 6y ago

Note: the minimum of 5 seats is removed so if you're using less than that then you'll have to manually remove those seats to avoid being billed.

vbezhenar 6y ago

This announce is not clear to me, as to what really changed. Can I have protected branch in my private repository now?

kintalo 6y ago
No, it looks like protected branches are not part of the "Free" tier. It's introduced in the Teams pricing and up.
- vbezhenar 6y ago
  So basically they removed restriction of 3 collaborators from free tier and that's it. Well, pretty useful for a lot of teams, I guess.

omani 6y ago

can I downgrade to free now without losing anything? (data, private repos, etc.)

adverbly 6y ago

Bit disappointed that this isn't an "Everyone Wins" pricing change. The new plan is a downgrade from the old one. For example, it will only include 3000 Github Action minutes. The old plan included 10000. The next plan up would be > 2 * old price. Source: https://github.com/pricing https://github.com/pricing vs http://web.archive.org/web/20200406010552/https://github.com/pricing http://web.archive.org/web/20200406010552/https://github.com...

Guvante 6y ago
It depends how many users you had. https://github.com/features/actions#pricing-details https://github.com/features/actions#pricing-details shows that if you have 12 members you can buy the difference in Linux Github Actions and still get ahead. The price on Mac is prohibitive though and yeah you definitely lose out there as I don't think many people on that plan have 120 people.

Wehrdo 6y ago

I hope developers still default to making their personal repos public after this change. One of the fringe benefits of GitHub is the ability to search across the entire site for uses of obscure, poorly-documented APIs. Defaulting to most repos becoming private would greatly hinder this.

roryokane 6y ago
I agree that’s a potential concern, but you’re worrying about it a year too late. Individual developers have been able to make repos private on the free plan since January 2019: https://github.blog/2019-01-07-new-year-new-github/ https://github.blog/2019-01-07-new-year-new-github/. This announcement only affects the cost of private repos for teams of collaborators.

hank_z 6y ago

I am very thankful to have GitHub on this planet

hubbabubbarex 6y ago

Microsoft products are free ? No thanks. Microsoft partnered artist Marina Abramovich was enought for me. I can't use any product of this company that partnering with Satanist who paint with blood and Siemen .. spirit cooking .. no thanks. Neither should any of you too.

binarymax 6y ago

The way I read the title and heading, it sounded like teams was now free. This messaging is very confusing. Teams is not being made free, you need to pay $4 per user. A better message would be: "we're reducing your price to $4pp, and giving you access to more features."

vesinisa 6y ago
Ugh.. did you notice that they also changed what the Free plan includes? Many of the premium features, including unlimited private repos for an org, are now included in the free plan. I am actually going through the list and thinking my company might be able to do with the free plan from now on.
dang 6y ago
Normally we'd change the title to be less confusing, but in this case it's a bit tricky, for reasons I've explained here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20moderate%20less%20not%20more%20yc&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...

Ensorceled 6y ago

Ouch. Just paid for a yearly pro license at the end of March.

danpalmer 6y ago
They’re refunding pro-rata.
- Ensorceled 6y ago
  Nice! Lot's of issues relating to pricing and plans right now so it is not clear that was happening.

veeralpatel979 6y ago

Actions, Packages, Sponsors, free unlimited private repos, this...Microsoft's GitHub acquisition has turned out really great so far in my view.

notokay 6y ago
Embrace, extend, and extinguish. Microsoft is still a company, that called linux a cancer. No trust at all.

devit 6y ago

Probably not very smart to use this feature, since your so-called "private" repository is an exploit or a leaking employee away from becoming public. Instead, use a self-hosted Gitlab instance or similar, preferably with an external firewall preventing outbound and non-team inbound connections if feasible.

ectospheno 6y ago
Your proposed solution handles neither the rogue employee nor the exploit scenario. It does incur a lot of additional cost in maintenance.
xapata 6y ago
How would that solve the "leaking employee" case?
- devit 6y ago
  Sorry, I meant "leaking employee of GitHub", not "leaking employee of your organization".

scarface74 6y ago

This isn’t really surprising. Microsoft has had a free equivalent for years with Azure Devops (formerly known as Visual Studio Team Service). Azure Devops has hosted build and deployment orchestration with either hosted build servers or local build servers using local agents. It also has private Nuget repositories, project planning, bug tracking etc. Azure Devops deployment tools are (were? It’s been a couple of years) just as good for deploying to AWS as AWS’s own tools.

SrslyJosh 6y ago

Hi Nat, ICE kidnaps children and forces their captives to live in unsafe, inhumane, over-crowded conditions in the middle of a global pandemic. Why do you work with them?

rexpop 6y ago
This should be the overriding concern of everyone in this forum. It's no longer astonishing[0], but it is quite disgusting how HN participants are able to compartmentalize their enthusiasm for technology away from moral or ethical qualms. I suppose the most generous interpretation is to assume that they are simply unaware.[1] Upstream of that ignorance, however, is a fearful unwillingness to interrogate the foundations of one's own life. 0. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." ― Upton Sinclair 1. https://crimethinc.com/books/no-wall-they-can-build https://crimethinc.com/books/no-wall-they-can-build
- crispinb 6y ago
  Not compartmentalising is trickier than you imply, as the whole corporate-capitalist system of power (which supplies nearly all of your and my goods) depends at its root on current exploitation and drawing down on its investment in future destruction (of the entire biosphere). We can point fingers at many hideous individual corporate citizens in tech (Dropbox & Amazon spring immediately to mind, current Microsoft doesn't), but the whole system depends intrinsically on maintaining the ignorance you write of. How to extricate ourselves from all that? Personally, I'm for revolution to take it all down. But we know that isn't going to happen.
  - rexpop 6y ago
    > hideous individual corporate citizens I agree with you, that pointing fingers like is useless. We very quickly run out of fingers. > I'm for revolution to take it all down. I wonder what you mean by that.
    - crispinb 6y ago

kevindong 6y ago

By and far the main difference between 'Team' ($4/person/month) and 'Enterprise' ($21/person/month) is SSO/LDAP [0]. The SSO tax is real [1]. [0]: https://github.com/pricing https://github.com/pricing [1]: https://sso.tax/ https://sso.tax/

johnmarcus 6y ago
Ha! sso.tax, what a great site. As an IT person I always thought this same thing with SSO - even if you have an identity provider, it's often under utilized because nearly everything else needs to go to enterprise pricing for SAML auth. I wouldn't mind paying $1-2 more per user/platform, but as sso.tax tallies, the price jump is often much more.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
chacham15 6y ago
IMO the biggest difference between the two is self-hosting which makes sense for the price difference. Even setting that aside, SSO is a feature which is very meaningful to businesses and relatively meaningless to individuals. Because of that its often used to differentiate between the customers. This differentiation results in individuals getting a discount at the expense of the businesses; which to me makes sense.
efrafa 6y ago
I get where you are comming from, but from sales perspective, charging extra for SSO makes total sense.
oars 6y ago
On sso.tax, it states that "Single sign-on (SSO) is a mechanism for outsourcing the authentication for your website (or other product) to a third party identity provider, such as Google, Facebook, Okta, PingFederate, etc." Isn't this the definition of Federation, rather than SSO?
- adityasaky 6y ago

3xblah 6y ago

Would it be fair to explain this move as a "user retention" tactic. Perhaps it becomes a more difficult decision for teams to close out their paid accounts, even amidst an economic downturn, when the fees are removed. One could argue some MSFT acquisitions have been focused on acquiring large swaths of exisiting users moreso than acquiring revenue streams or work product. Github could have been one such acquisition.

colechristensen 6y ago
Maybe GitLab is starting to seem like more and more competition so they're having to add more free features to compete for users.

m0zg 6y ago

I'd much rather they threw in more LFS storage on my $7 plan. But I suppose they know that already if they're moving towards a more "freemium" model. First hit is free, and then pay through the nose for LFS.

tumidpandora 6y ago

What's the catch?

hestefisk 6y ago

Good on MS / Github for doing this.

prirun 6y ago

437 comments, 6 from Nat Friedman. That seems a little weird for an AMA discussion.

saagarjha 6y ago
I don't think this was really supposed to be an AMA.

randomsearch 6y ago

First you win the developers. Then you get the apps. Then you win the consumers. How long to the next Microsoft Phone? Wouldn’t want to be Google.

Old_Thrashbarg 6y ago
All the places Microsoft has shipped awesome products and won the market didn't have as strong monopoly (or duopoly) effects as in the mobile space. I don't think we'll see a MS phone any time soon unfortunately.

DenisM 6y ago

Bitbucket is in trouble now. With no more paying customer for Git and no support for Mercurial what are they going to do?

vorpalhex 6y ago
Continue selling Jira plans.
- Spivak 6y ago
  Yeah, I just see BitBucket as a value-add to sell Jira and Confluence licenses. Some people really like having all that stuff integrated. Our team doesn't really see the value when it's just fine to have links to PRs or commit hashes but hey, to each their own.
acdha 6y ago
They lost that battle a decade ago. I would previously have suggested some kind of enterprise devops offering pairing with their other services but Microsoft will probably get there faster and better.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Old_Thrashbarg 6y ago

That's awesome, I feel like many companies increase prices over time trying to squeeze more revenue, but that usually requires monopoly power. I remember from economics that in an idealized, efficient, large market, the price of a product should tend towards the marginal cost of production. In the case of SaaS, that's almost $0 (server costs being fairly low), so SaaS products ideally should all get cheaper over time. Good to see theory matching real-world here.

Corrado 6y ago

I'm confused about the "Collaborators for private repositories" feature. The Free plan shows an "unlimited" number of collaborators but each of the paid plans show "Up to org size". What does "Up to org size" mean? Which organization are you talking about? Does this mean that the free plans have more functionality?

tarun_anand 6y ago

Hi Nat, finally MS responded to the Gitlab threat. Recently Gitlab has announced that they would be making a bunch of products free. "We're open sourcing rich functionality across Plan, Create, Verify, Package, Release, Configure, and Defend." https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/03/30/new-features-to-core/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/03/30/new-features-to-cor... It's good to see that MS has joined the party. Are there any plans to make GitHub itself available for self-hosting? I am not sure but the go-to place for open source software cannot be closed source. Cheers, Tarun

alex_young 6y ago

Compare this with Microsoft’s other notable purchase of recent years, LinkedIn. At LinkedIn they are tightening all of the screws and extracting cash from all comers. What is different about GitHub? My guess is GitLab. This is an old strategy for Microsoft. They used to call it Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

Kliment 6y ago
Linkedin was always a predatory organization, and now they are empowered to do what they actually wanted to do without the risk of going bankrupt if they miscalculate. Github is also empowered to do what they actually wanted to do without the risk of going bankrupt if they miscalculate. This is what you end up. You can't fundamentally change an organization by acquisition without destroying it. For example, Skype was destroyed like that. Github and Linkedin were not, and you are seeing them acting with fewer constraints. Linkedin is using their newfound power for evil, Github much less so.

lerpapoo 6y ago

wtf i love microsoft, now.

epigramx 6y ago

Nice, now you can share all your secrets with Microsoft, for free.

Rainymood 6y ago

Here's a little quiz, which of the three phases are we in now? a) Embrace b) Extend c) Extinguish

twsghost 6y ago

Will you ever apologize for enforcing Trump's racist, xenophobic holy-war against Iran and harming Iranian developers?

sheng1 6y ago

sheng1 6y ago
:)
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

craigds 6y ago

However, looks like the Actions minutes included in the Team plan have dropped from 10K to 3K, so if you're currently paying for a team plan and using Actions your costs might not decrease, or might increase a bit

cryptos 6y ago

What do you think will be the response of GitLab?

ahuang1018 6y ago
https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/04/14/github-free-for-teams/?utm_medium=social&utm_source=responses&utm_campaign=gitchallenge&utm_content=blog https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/04/14/github-free-for-tea...

wildpeaks 6y ago

Is it 4$/user on top of the minimum 20$ (which includes 5 users) ? Because my billing still says 20$/month and I have less than 5 users.

gilbertbw 6y ago
You have to go in and reduce your seat count on the billing page
- wildpeaks 6y ago
  Thanks, there is indeed a "Remove Seats" option now (there used to be only "Downgrade to Free"), exactly what I was looking for.

nemacol 6y ago

This is great and I will most likely take advantage of this new offering, but I cant help but wonder why. "everyone deserves GitHub" is marketing, not a corporate strategy. How does GitHub stand to benefit from this change? How does more non-paying users help the company? I am not trying to be a tinfoil hat jerk here. Life in the age of information has taught us all that (again) "nothing is free". So what am I paying here?

rampatra 6y ago

This is great news. I can now move some of my projects from BitBucket to GitHub. However, I wish GitHub supported GitHub Pages for private repositories for free as well.

rynop 6y ago

Are you grandfathered into the 10,000 free Action minutes for paid Teams? 10k -> 3k drop is pretty substantial.

ainam48948 6y ago

Yeah, I just checked my email, and I remember reading this. This is pretty cool.

classified 6y ago

Well, hosting "open-source" software on a commercial platform does create something of a cognitive dissonance, doesn't it?

foxknox 6y ago

This is really great news. I've been happy paying for GitHub for years and it was already great value but this makes it even better.