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A side topic: is there a concrete reason why github's LFS solution has to be so expensive? IIRC, it's $5 per 50GB per month? That's really a deal breaker to me

A side topic: is there a concrete reason why github's LFS solution has to be so expensive? IIRC, it's $5 per 50GB per month? That's really a deal breaker to me and wondering whether people actually use LFS at volume will avoid LFS-over-GitHub.

tux1968 5y ago
$60 / year for a decent fraction of a hard disk and the associated backup resources, seems pretty fair to me. What price would you expect?
- moshmosh 5y ago
  It's a very large markup on the small-user retail cost of the basic thing they're providing (web-accessible, access-controlled file storage—see, for example, BackBlaze B2) but that's utterly typical of services that can get away with charging you a "convenience fee" for that sort of thing once you're on their SaaS. 2-3x markup isn't unusual, and that's about what this is, and that's above typical retail—even if GH's not managing the storage and such themselves, they're likely getting an even better (bulk) rate.
  - klodolph 5y ago
    Yes, I would estimate that the markup is more like 5-10x for GitHub LFS.
    - goodcjw2 5y ago
      Exactly. For us we are dealing with lots of large gaming assets and those are burning through those $50 data packs like butters :)
- Dylan16807 5y ago
  > $60 / year for a decent fraction of a hard disk and the associated backup resources, seems pretty fair to me. What you describe sounds fair to me. The problem is that 50GB is not a decent fraction of a hard disk.
  - Danieru 5y ago
    Just be thankful you are not on Gitlab. We pay $60/year for 10GB. I need the data for my team, so we pay, but I use it as an excuse to force the team to clean up data every so often. As a game company we need large repos. It was either Gitlab or Azure DevOps.
    - acdha 5y ago
      $60/year is $5/month. You said “game” and “company” — how is that not a tiny fraction of your total costs?
      - goodcjw2 5y ago
        Nowadays games assets are just crazily huge. AAA games tends to ship at 50G. Now think about the raw assets size and saving all the intermediate revisions. It's quite easy to burn 1000G of storage on GitHub/GitLab (again, don't forget all the revisions). That puts just the storage cost at $6000/year. At this price point, it's really worth hosting on your own. As Danieru mentioned they are forcing ppl to manually do cleanups, that probably indicates the storage costs are even higher which worth manual interventions.
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
        The problem is that it's per ten gi-- actually, looking it up, I found a page saying there is a 10GB cap!
      - Danieru 5y ago
        Can I afford it? Yes. Do I need it? Yes. An I happy paying 6 dollars a year for a single gigabyte: I'd rather pay less. Edit: I pay attention to costs, and repo size is the sort of thing which has a. Habit of growing. All else being equal I'd prefer my team receive the money. A dollar I can give to my team/employees feels good, a dollar paying for over priced storage feels bad.
        acdha 5y ago
        Doesn't that also apply to, say, GitLab paying their team? The pricing for a highly-available service isn't as cheap as it could be but it doesn't seem terribly far off of S3's pricing. I know that a small game studio must have a tight budget — and yours looks like a really interesting project (just subscribed) — but it seemed like an awfully strong objection to what I would have assumed would be a small fraction of your total expenses.
toomuchtodo 5y ago
Consider S3 storage and egress costs. You’re paying a flat rate to store and then pull that 50GB data (edit: removed an incorrect statement here).
- Someone1234 5y ago
  Just for clarity, it is 50 GB of storage and 50 GB of bandwidth. So definitely not "as much as you want." If you pull it too many times you may get charged another $5.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Thanks for the correction!
  - remram 5y ago
    For S3, that's $1.15 storage ($0.023/GB) + $4.50 transfer ($0.09/GB) so it's actually very comparable.
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      Yikes. Being comparable to amazon in price, purely because of how much amazon overcharges for bandwidth, is not exactly a flattering comparison. If you were to add the $1.15 storage cost onto a reasonable bandwidth number like $0.01/GB you'd just about reach a third of $5.
      - remram 5y ago
        I can't argue with that. I didn't expect the prices to align when I researched it.
adkadskhj 5y ago
Yea i actually wrote my own file chunking and general git-lfs-like backend for this exact reason. I liked Git LFS, but Github's pricing felt insane for my indie dev. For my needs i could backup onto a local server, network drive, or w/e at an insanely cheaper price. Hell even uploading to an S3 compatible API was insanely cheaper than Github. That and i really hated the feeling that Git LFS was being designed for a server architecture. I didn't have an easy way to locally dump the written files without running an HTTP server. There are a couple Git LFS servers that upload to, say, S3 - but i really just wanted a dumb FS or SSH dump of my LFS files. Running a localhost server feels so.. anti-Git to me.
- elcritch 5y ago
  Do you have a repo for it?
  - adkadskhj 5y ago
    I do, but i'm not comfortable sharing it. It's an experimental project, very new, and not polished enough for general use. A POC if you will. Plus this is an anonymous account :P While i was writing it i found the basic process of basic large file storage to be insanely simple with Git. I debated doing the same thing but backed by a seasoned backup solution, like Borg/Bup/etc.

tux1968 5y ago

$60 / year for a decent fraction of a hard disk and the associated backup resources, seems pretty fair to me. What price would you expect?

moshmosh 5y ago
It's a very large markup on the small-user retail cost of the basic thing they're providing (web-accessible, access-controlled file storage—see, for example, BackBlaze B2) but that's utterly typical of services that can get away with charging you a "convenience fee" for that sort of thing once you're on their SaaS. 2-3x markup isn't unusual, and that's about what this is, and that's above typical retail—even if GH's not managing the storage and such themselves, they're likely getting an even better (bulk) rate.
- klodolph 5y ago
  Yes, I would estimate that the markup is more like 5-10x for GitHub LFS.
  - goodcjw2 5y ago
    Exactly. For us we are dealing with lots of large gaming assets and those are burning through those $50 data packs like butters :)
Dylan16807 5y ago
> $60 / year for a decent fraction of a hard disk and the associated backup resources, seems pretty fair to me. What you describe sounds fair to me. The problem is that 50GB is not a decent fraction of a hard disk.
- Danieru 5y ago
  Just be thankful you are not on Gitlab. We pay $60/year for 10GB. I need the data for my team, so we pay, but I use it as an excuse to force the team to clean up data every so often. As a game company we need large repos. It was either Gitlab or Azure DevOps.
  - acdha 5y ago
    $60/year is $5/month. You said “game” and “company” — how is that not a tiny fraction of your total costs?
    - goodcjw2 5y ago
      Nowadays games assets are just crazily huge. AAA games tends to ship at 50G. Now think about the raw assets size and saving all the intermediate revisions. It's quite easy to burn 1000G of storage on GitHub/GitLab (again, don't forget all the revisions). That puts just the storage cost at $6000/year. At this price point, it's really worth hosting on your own. As Danieru mentioned they are forcing ppl to manually do cleanups, that probably indicates the storage costs are even higher which worth manual interventions.
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      The problem is that it's per ten gi-- actually, looking it up, I found a page saying there is a 10GB cap!
    - Danieru 5y ago
      Can I afford it? Yes. Do I need it? Yes. An I happy paying 6 dollars a year for a single gigabyte: I'd rather pay less. Edit: I pay attention to costs, and repo size is the sort of thing which has a. Habit of growing. All else being equal I'd prefer my team receive the money. A dollar I can give to my team/employees feels good, a dollar paying for over priced storage feels bad.
      - acdha 5y ago
        Doesn't that also apply to, say, GitLab paying their team? The pricing for a highly-available service isn't as cheap as it could be but it doesn't seem terribly far off of S3's pricing. I know that a small game studio must have a tight budget — and yours looks like a really interesting project (just subscribed) — but it seemed like an awfully strong objection to what I would have assumed would be a small fraction of your total expenses.

toomuchtodo 5y ago

Consider S3 storage and egress costs. You’re paying a flat rate to store and then pull that 50GB data (edit: removed an incorrect statement here).

Someone1234 5y ago
Just for clarity, it is 50 GB of storage and 50 GB of bandwidth. So definitely not "as much as you want." If you pull it too many times you may get charged another $5.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Thanks for the correction!
- remram 5y ago
  For S3, that's $1.15 storage ($0.023/GB) + $4.50 transfer ($0.09/GB) so it's actually very comparable.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    Yikes. Being comparable to amazon in price, purely because of how much amazon overcharges for bandwidth, is not exactly a flattering comparison. If you were to add the $1.15 storage cost onto a reasonable bandwidth number like $0.01/GB you'd just about reach a third of $5.
    - remram 5y ago
      I can't argue with that. I didn't expect the prices to align when I researched it.

adkadskhj 5y ago

Yea i actually wrote my own file chunking and general git-lfs-like backend for this exact reason. I liked Git LFS, but Github's pricing felt insane for my indie dev. For my needs i could backup onto a local server, network drive, or w/e at an insanely cheaper price. Hell even uploading to an S3 compatible API was insanely cheaper than Github. That and i really hated the feeling that Git LFS was being designed for a server architecture. I didn't have an easy way to locally dump the written files without running an HTTP server. There are a couple Git LFS servers that upload to, say, S3 - but i really just wanted a dumb FS or SSH dump of my LFS files. Running a localhost server feels so.. anti-Git to me.

elcritch 5y ago
Do you have a repo for it?
- adkadskhj 5y ago
  I do, but i'm not comfortable sharing it. It's an experimental project, very new, and not polished enough for general use. A POC if you will. Plus this is an anonymous account :P While i was writing it i found the basic process of basic large file storage to be insanely simple with Git. I debated doing the same thing but backed by a seasoned backup solution, like Borg/Bup/etc.