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If Dropbox Used GitHub’s Pricing Plan

295 points by joshuacc 15y ago

zavulon 15y ago
And that's reason #1 we don't use Github. Assembla lets us host all of our git, SVN and Mercurial repos for free.. currently we have 32 and counting, no issues ever, without paying a single penny.
- thirsteh 15y ago
  Maybe, but GitHub's pricing model encourages sharing, and that's a good thing. Think of how many repositories might've been private and not benefited thousands of people. Granted, the prices might be steep/strange, but I see no problem in charging for things that people don't want to share on a social code sharing site.
  - deleted 15y ago
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  - Maro 15y ago
    How much sharing actually goes on? (And just because somebody impulse clones a repo doesn't actually mean there's meaningful sharing going on.)
    - khill 15y ago
      Sharing doesn't necessarily mean someone cloning or contributing to your project. I find github useful because it lets me read other people's code both for evaluating potential co-workers and getting better at my craft. I've learned a lot from reading other people's code and I still think it's one of the best ways to learn new languages and techniques.
    - nuclear_eclipse 15y ago
      Even with some of my more obscure projects on Github (like a ZNC module that sends IRC notifications to my phone via Notifo) have garnered some observers, forks, and pull requests with features or improvements that I probably never would have gotten if it had either been on my own repo hosting.
  - Dove 15y ago
    Well, anyone GitHub's pricing model has driven over to Assembla isn't sharing.
  - zavulon 15y ago
    While I agree in some cases it's a good thing, but for projects that you do for clients, privacy is paramount
- mnutt 15y ago
  Isn't there some value in paying for a service that you use and value?
- Dove 15y ago
  I just made the same tradeoff yesterday. I'd love to use Github and all, Github's cool. But I can't justify paying that much for private repositories. Even with all of the annoying junk on the site, Assembla's free plan won hands down.
  - mst 15y ago
    The crucial difference is that in the case of github, their business is github. In the case of Assembla, their business is consulting and the site is a loss leader for that division. This quite effectively explains both the pricing and feature set differences.
- kenneth_reitz 15y ago
  You get what you pay for.
canistr 15y ago
This is why BitBucket's price plan makes more sense.
- chaselee 15y ago
  Totally agree and they also have free unlimited plans for academia and students :)
  - bphogan 15y ago
    http://github.com/edu http://github.com/edu has information about educational plans, including small free ones for students.
    - canistr 15y ago
      The GH edu account bumps you to a micro account. While it's nice to finally get the private repos, that still doesn't really beat BB.
      - bphogan 15y ago
        I was just responding to the perceived lack of support for students.
patio11 15y ago
Dropbox is targeting a B2C market and started with poor twenty-somethings. Github, and virtually every other thing that costs more than $20 a month, targets primarily a B2B market. It might be popular with some local poor 20-somethings, but honestly, you're just an infection vector to get your day job on board. The pricing is designed to extract maximum value out of business customers. If they have 125 simultaneous projects, they officially have More Money Than God. "The price of a residential Internet connection" is not a pricing anchor to them. (Should they need one, they're probably going to be persuaded by "We have 500 man-years of labor in our projects, one man-month costs us $15k, lemme break out Excel for a minute, oh it seems all my options cost pigeon poop.") I strongly, strongly encourage you to listen to the Mixergy video about Wufoo or talk to anyone who runs a SaaS business if you do not understand where most of the money is likely getting made. That topmost plan which costs $$$$$ prints money, primarily from people who don't need all that it offers and couldn't care less because it costs less than pigeon poop on their scales. If you don't use Github for your projects because $100 is a lot of money for you that's perfectly fine for Github because it does not make them meaningfully worse off.
- Sapient 15y ago
  I assume that what the poor twenty-somethings actually want is the interface since alternatives like Gitosis and Gitolite are cheap and cheery, but unpopular amongst that crowd. If that is the case however, then I am surprised noone has made a FOSS clone duplicating the interface ideas. However your argument doesn't explain why there is not even a single private repo free tier. That wouldn't canibalize their B2B tiers at all, while keeping a lot of very small developers happy.
  - patio11 15y ago
    It's very easy to message "Free for OSS, paid for other folks", and it prevents you from having a failure to convert moment when a) you start using Github internally at a job/startup/etc and b) you need to add the second repo. If you then have to go get authorization for a purchase, you might do something stupid like a) migrate or b) cheat, rather than go through the authorization process, because you've got work to do today. It is much easier to say "Look, you know Github, you like Github. You want to use Github for work? Get them to fork out for it. No, not fork(1). fork($)" Hypothetically suppose a particular company's advantage is UI/UX. If this is true, that company is in less than zero danger of getting FOSSed.
skrebbel 15y ago
It's called "Software as a Service" for a reason. Hint: it's not "Data storage as a Service".
deleted 15y ago
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deleted 15y ago
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rmc 15y ago
Not really a fair comparison. GitHub is aimed at open source development, and is doing quite well at that. So for github you want your data to be visible to everyone in the world. Imagine if someone thought a blogging software was like a diary in days gone by. "You mean everyone can see what I write in my diary?! How terrible!"
- programminggeek 15y ago
  Acutally, github is aimed at making money proving awesome code hosting. They host open source stuff because it is a GREAT way to acquire new paid customers. It's the freemium model done really well. github is still a business and at the end of the day they need to make money.
masnick 15y ago
This is why https://codeplane.com/ https://codeplane.com/ was created. 2GB worth of private repos for $9/month. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2674417 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2674417 for the discussion of Codeplane on HN.
- slig 15y ago
  Are you the owner? How does your product differ from RepositoryHosting.com ?
programminggeek 15y ago
Nerds are so cheap it's ridiculous. Let's look at the standard plans for smaller teams - it maxes at $22/month for 20 private repos and 10 collaborators. Not bad. On the business side the max is 125 repos for $200/month. Even in the midwest a full time dev costs say at least $4,000 a month. Assuming you have a team of 10-20 devs, that is what $40,000 - $80,000 a month. So, at the high end to keep your team of 10-20 devs happy it costs you an extra $200 a month on top of the $40k+ you are spending in salary and so forth. Drop in the bucket. And if you're an indie dev and you can't afford $22/month for awesome code hosting for all your projects, you are the kind of cheapskate that you might as well look elsewhere. Also, there are a TON of options out there like bitbucket, assembla, and so on if you want "cheaper" hosting. Seriously, you could put out a crappy android app that makes you $100 a month in a weekend and that pays for your github hosting. Why complain?
- a3camero 15y ago
  This is what the internet does. I've grown up with a price point of $0.
  - saturn 15y ago
    Well you're just going to have to un-grow out of that delusion because in the real world absolutely nothing is free.
    - a3camero 15y ago
      Wrong. The vast majority of the world is free. Friendships are free. Families are free. Nature is free (in Canada, much of it is). Not really the free you're looking for? Feel free to walk around on public property and enjoy your right to free speech (talking to people is free). Local libraries have free books and free internet, the news is free (CBC), although I'll grant you that these are run by the government but if you're living a near $0 life you're probably not paying a lot of taxes. Running for MP (federal government) here isn't quite free but the $500 you get back at the end unless you don't fill in some forms properly. Facebook is free, Google is free, Hacker News is free... Although these are ad-supported. There's a whole world of free stuff available through .torrent but I'll admit most of that others would like not to be free. How about free music? Jamendo? Wrong sort of free? How about buskers or my neighbours that play guitar and classical music on their balcony (they're actually pretty good). Oh, you mean other stuff? A $0 price point isn't far off of where many internet services are headed. EC2 is incredibly cheap. Compare that to what a server cost even ten years ago. Name your backbone service: it's aiming for free and making it up in volume. The $0 price point is not a delusion.
davidedicillo 15y ago
I don't mind GitHub pricing, but I wish it had a "Archive" option for the private repo, for those projects that aren't active anymore but still want to keep the repo on GitHub just in case. And of course the archived repos wouldn't count towards your total repo unless they are reactivated.
- rubyrescue 15y ago
  agreed, but I just put 'archived' git repos in, ironically, dropbox, and delete the private repo on github.
- masklinn 15y ago
  Have you considered suggesting it to github?
  - nirvdrum 15y ago
    I suggested that very thing. Several times over the years. I suggested it to the CodaSet guys, too. Apparently there's enough of a market without this to not warrant adding the new pricing option.
    - danieldk 15y ago
      Codebase(HQ) allows archived projects (until your diskspace runs out). However, putting your open repositories there does not have the same network effect as putting them on Github.
- DevX101 15y ago
  Why don't you just call one repo "Archive" and put all your old stuff in there.
eLobato 15y ago
To be fair, the markets of Dropbox and Github are dramatically different. In fact I'd say that the Github pricing model is quite better in terms of adjusting the price to the demand. As I've read in some other comment here in HN, if you don't use Github because $100 is a lot of money to spend in your project, then you probably shouldn't be using Github. Still, they offer great and FREE micro accounts for students (I have one) and the support is great.
roel_v 15y ago
I expected this to be a post on how Dropbox is too expensive. Also, putting my grumpy hat on, what's with all the cheapskate whining? "Give me more, I want it FREE!"... bleh.
marcf 15y ago
For businesses looking to be cost effective, remember there is www.projectlocker.com Not as sexy as GitHub but it has Trac (or Agilo Trac) and a choice of GIT/SVN. Unlimited projects, but it has disk space limits and user limits that differentiate the levels (similar to dropbox.) Cost structure is here: https://projectlocker.com/signup/startup https://projectlocker.com/signup/startup There is no public visibility on projectlocker.com, thus it is best for teams that don't want their stuff public (which actually most companies.) Disclaimer: I have used PL as a paying customer for 4 years at the Equity level (<30 users, <30GB of repos) and am a very happy with it. I haven't noticed it go down in all that time.
dools 15y ago
I don't actually understand why anyone pays for github when it's so trivial to set up a central git repository on a $10/month VPS and you can have unlimited repositories. Surely developers aren't that desperate for a nice UI for their git repos?! I assume that there are a bunch of web based repo browsing tools you could install for free if you were that hell bent on looking at your code in a web browser
- varikin 15y ago
  I love the ease of UI. I like a graphical way to look through logs and diffs and Github does this better than anyone else. Beyond that, if I want a nice web based alternative, I would have to maintain it which I hate doing. Really, $7 is not a bad deal for letting them be the sys admins. All that said, I am a cheap bastard. I have all public projects on a free Github account and a couple nonfree ones on my hosting account. I don't have a pretty front end, just the default gitweb. It is ugly, not as easy to use, but it works for my personal projects. If I ever needed it for a non-personal project, Github is much better since I will need to code, not maintain my own repos.
necenzurat 15y ago
http://www.syncany.org/ http://www.syncany.org/ will kill you all
jedbrown 15y ago
Academic research is one more data point. Sometimes you have faculty and students from multiple institutions. It's not so much the cost that's the problem, rather the paperwork to bill it to various grants over the lifetime of a project. In many ways, it's simpler for one of the leaders to just pay for it personally. I personally prefer doing public development, but this has been cited by a number of colleagues as a reason not to host at github.
- bostonvaulter2 15y ago
  Have you looked at github's academic pricing? https://github.com/edu https://github.com/edu
  - fluidcruft 15y ago
    So as a post-doc/researcher... Do I click Student, Teacher or Administrator?
DannoHung 15y ago
Man, I totally would love it if my company would let us use github for our source control. Unfortunately, we are strictly not allowed to store anything outside of the company servers for security reasons and I'm reasonably sure the local github service cost would necessitate making a successful case that we should transition the entire company to it. Which involves not just proving that github is a better source control management suite, but that the git model is superior to the centrally managed, monolithic perforce model we use.
- darklajid 15y ago
  I started by converting a team to git. Then, after they settled in and started to get it, I made repositories available from the outside (only ssh, still only selected people). When more and more people learned that it _is_ possible to work in a train/plane/at a customer site and still use a decent toolset, they wanted in. I hosted gitorious (with decent backups, a redmine next to it) on an old server. In the end management gave in to peer pressure - and the price point was - erm - attractive. It's the official toolset now.
nzoschke 15y ago
Just make your small projects public, and with a proper copyright. It's incredibly hard to get someone to pay attention to you and your code even if you want them to. Nobody will notice one way or another. GitHub is the Library of Alexandria, not a safety deposit box.
pjhyett 15y ago
We're trying to fundamentally change how people write, collaborate, and discover code and the sooner people stop thinking of us as just a repo depository, the better, because we've never been about that. Ask yourself what kind of markup we'd have to charge on storage space and still be able to grow our business when most of the repos we host are less than 1 MB. We charge what we do because it makes money. Money that allows us to continue hiring really talented people that are all focused on building an even better service. Doing things like including private repos with our free plan would eat into our margins and only satisfy the people that are likely to never convert to a paid plan. Frankly, I think being able to use all of the tools we provide for the price of a pint of Guinness every month is a damn good deal.
- carbonica 15y ago
  I laughed at the article, but you have a really good point. If you have 30 projects and only want a place to put your code, you're far better off just using a private server, which you undoubtedly already have. If you have a development culture that is well-modeled by how GitHub approaches collaboration, that's where you'll see a lot of added value over a private server. I think the tough part is that GitHub's innovations in collaboration are primarily a huge win for open source. GitHub makes discovery of these projects so much easier, connects disparate people across communities (and countries!), and provides a unified technical stack and process "stack" for those people to contribute (same bug trackers, same "send me a pull request" approach, same wiki). That's something that's a pretty big deal for OSS. Most of those issues aren't as big a deal for a business in my experience - most businesses either don't have such problems (discovery) or have their own solutions (process). But hey - you guys have got customers, you're hiring like crazy, and I love your stack personally; I'm certainly not judging! Just offering my perspective on why some folks might not buy in to the collaboration stuff from a business point of view.
- programminggeek 15y ago
  I'm a happy GitHub customer and your service is worth every penny. Keep building awesome stuff!
- Kudos 15y ago
frankus 15y ago
I guess I always saw github as more of a flickr for code than a private repo hosting service for hobbyists. I'd still like a good way to back up my private solo-project repositories off-site using git, but I suppose DropBox works pretty well for that?
- tyler_ball 15y ago
  Flickr costs 24.95/year for a pro account, giving you unlimited storage, sets, collections, stats and no ads. So I don't think the analogy really works.
g123g 15y ago
How about providing a github like interface on top of dropbox? Has anybody done this? The best thing about this will be that 2GB of storage is free from dropbox which is quite sufficient for most of the needs.
watty 15y ago
Many of you are missing the point. It's not as much about the actual cost but about the model of charging per repo rather than data usage (or both options). This model is not cost effective for small businesses and contractors who have many small projects. For example, my company has two full time devs and a few contractors for small projects. We have accumulated over 30 projects and that number will continue to grow. It's not uncommon for an older project to be re-opened after a period of inactivity for new features or fixes. It's not cost effective to shell out $100/month. We've moved to Springloops which allows 10 active repos and unlimited archived for $15/month.
Duff 15y ago
I know this is pretty much a joke, but never underestimate the ability of people to do ridiculous things. I've personally witnessed individuals with email Inboxes with over 50,000 items in them -- total size 30GB. No use of folders, no meaningful search capability.
a3_nm 15y ago
Actually, "all your files are visible to everyone" isn't a restriction at all if you're using crypto. Likewise, it's funny to think that you could encrypt your git repositories and use github public hosting for private projects. I wonder if someone already did, but I guess github wouldn't care (if you're doing this, you wouldn't be paying for the service anyway).
- wtracy 15y ago
  I suspect that most of GitHub's features are useless if the files you are uploading are encrypted. Seriously, are diffs of encrypted files going to be meaningful?
  - a3_nm 15y ago
    Actually, what I was saying amounts to using github as an agnostic data store, and doing the actual work on the clients. So, yeah, most of the usefulness of github goes away and you can just use pretty much any file hosting service.
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grandalf 15y ago
I think people are misinterpreting the frustration with Github's pricing. It's not that people have a problem paying $22 for 20 repos, it's that the 21st repo costs $23 per month! Github's pricing structure has friction in this area. Without a controlled experiment it's impossible to determine whether this pricing model is best for Github or not. Imagine if when you bought toothpaste there were two options, a small travel-size tube for $1 or a crate full of 500 full size tubes for $250. Or imagine if a restaurant served ice cream at $0.25 for a spoonful and then your next option was a full gallon. The friction occurs b/c people don't like wasting money, and the pricing model Github has chosen feels like unused repos are costing money but not being put to use. In other words, there is a nonlinear relationship between money spent and usefulness gained per dollar, which makes it difficult for people to maximize utility over. This is friction and it probably has mixed results. I think the most important thing to note is that we don't know whether it helps or hurts Github's business to do things this way. Assertions that it does one vs the other are only speculation.
- allwein 15y ago
  See, that's the problem in thinking. People go, "Hmm, 10 repos cost $12, so that's $1.20 per repo. But if I have 11 repos, it costs me $22, it costs me $22 so it's $2 per repo, what a ripoff!" Or conversely how you stated it, "$1.20 per repo for the first 10, then $10 for the 11th, and the next 9 are free." If they restated it that it costs $2 per repo, but if you order in bulk you get a discount, people would be happier. So even if they always paid $22, they'd be thrilled because the "real" prices would be 11 for $2 each all the way down to 20 for $1.10 each!
bphogan 15y ago
I don't get the problems that people have with Github's pricing. I can have all the private repos I want by creating repositories on my computer. Git is decentralized. Putting it in a central location is centralized. :) But seriously, I can have as many private repositories as I want - all I need is a server with SSH support. What I want is the user interface for adding comments and collaboration on my private repos that I get for public repos. If I find that valuable to me, I'll pay it. If it's a "toy" project that I'll never touch, a local repo and a backup of my computer is all I need - I don't need others to have that code.
mcantor 15y ago
Yeah! What a bunch of dickbags. What if Western Digital used Dropbox's pricing plan?
chow 15y ago
Funny article, but it misses the fact that GitHub's pricing is less about code separation, and more about access management. There's nothing stopping a customer from cramming several projects into a single Git repository. You could theoretically take advantage of GitHub's "unlimited" storage for cheap this way. The problem is, you need separate repositories if you want to manage access for different collaborators. Folders aren't expensive, but access management can be. Github understands this, which is why their Business plans, which are differentiated by having finer-grained access control features, are more expensive.
nivertech 15y ago
When using git every library/dependency is a separate repo. So 125 private repos limit for $200 is only enough for 3-4 real life projects, or one really big project.
Revisor 15y ago
It's a simple price segmenting. No one says the axis of projects makes financial sense on the expense side. It makes sense in distinguishing the type of customer. Ironically it's nicely illustrated by the employee/owner of a web agency complaining in the comments. Obviously it worked and Github managed to extract more value from a larger customer.
JoelMcCracken 15y ago
Any big reason not to have an archive repo, with tars of your archived projects? You still have git for your tars, and thus all your versions. It seems like a fine idea, to me. To archive a project, tar its project directory, copy it in to an archive repo on github, commit and push it, and remove the directory locally. To unarchive a project, pull and untar the project in its own directory. When done, tar it back up into the archive repo, commit, and push.
overshard 15y ago
Would work great for me. I store everything on dropbox in one giant lump truecrypt file...

295 points by joshuacc 15y ago

And that's reason #1 we don't use Github. Assembla lets us host all of our git, SVN and Mercurial repos for free.. currently we have 32 and counting, no issues ever, without paying a single penny.

thirsteh 15y ago
Maybe, but GitHub's pricing model encourages sharing, and that's a good thing. Think of how many repositories might've been private and not benefited thousands of people. Granted, the prices might be steep/strange, but I see no problem in charging for things that people don't want to share on a social code sharing site.
- deleted 15y ago
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- Maro 15y ago
  How much sharing actually goes on? (And just because somebody impulse clones a repo doesn't actually mean there's meaningful sharing going on.)
  - khill 15y ago
    Sharing doesn't necessarily mean someone cloning or contributing to your project. I find github useful because it lets me read other people's code both for evaluating potential co-workers and getting better at my craft. I've learned a lot from reading other people's code and I still think it's one of the best ways to learn new languages and techniques.
  - nuclear_eclipse 15y ago
    Even with some of my more obscure projects on Github (like a ZNC module that sends IRC notifications to my phone via Notifo) have garnered some observers, forks, and pull requests with features or improvements that I probably never would have gotten if it had either been on my own repo hosting.
- Dove 15y ago
  Well, anyone GitHub's pricing model has driven over to Assembla isn't sharing.
- zavulon 15y ago
  While I agree in some cases it's a good thing, but for projects that you do for clients, privacy is paramount
mnutt 15y ago
Isn't there some value in paying for a service that you use and value?
Dove 15y ago
I just made the same tradeoff yesterday. I'd love to use Github and all, Github's cool. But I can't justify paying that much for private repositories. Even with all of the annoying junk on the site, Assembla's free plan won hands down.
- mst 15y ago
  The crucial difference is that in the case of github, their business is github. In the case of Assembla, their business is consulting and the site is a loss leader for that division. This quite effectively explains both the pricing and feature set differences.
kenneth_reitz 15y ago
You get what you pay for.

canistr 15y ago

This is why BitBucket's price plan makes more sense.

chaselee 15y ago
Totally agree and they also have free unlimited plans for academia and students :)
- bphogan 15y ago
  http://github.com/edu http://github.com/edu has information about educational plans, including small free ones for students.
  - canistr 15y ago
    The GH edu account bumps you to a micro account. While it's nice to finally get the private repos, that still doesn't really beat BB.
    - bphogan 15y ago
      I was just responding to the perceived lack of support for students.

patio11 15y ago

Dropbox is targeting a B2C market and started with poor twenty-somethings. Github, and virtually every other thing that costs more than $20 a month, targets primarily a B2B market. It might be popular with some local poor 20-somethings, but honestly, you're just an infection vector to get your day job on board. The pricing is designed to extract maximum value out of business customers. If they have 125 simultaneous projects, they officially have More Money Than God. "The price of a residential Internet connection" is not a pricing anchor to them. (Should they need one, they're probably going to be persuaded by "We have 500 man-years of labor in our projects, one man-month costs us $15k, lemme break out Excel for a minute, oh it seems all my options cost pigeon poop.") I strongly, strongly encourage you to listen to the Mixergy video about Wufoo or talk to anyone who runs a SaaS business if you do not understand where most of the money is likely getting made. That topmost plan which costs $$$$$ prints money, primarily from people who don't need all that it offers and couldn't care less because it costs less than pigeon poop on their scales. If you don't use Github for your projects because $100 is a lot of money for you that's perfectly fine for Github because it does not make them meaningfully worse off.

Sapient 15y ago
I assume that what the poor twenty-somethings actually want is the interface since alternatives like Gitosis and Gitolite are cheap and cheery, but unpopular amongst that crowd. If that is the case however, then I am surprised noone has made a FOSS clone duplicating the interface ideas. However your argument doesn't explain why there is not even a single private repo free tier. That wouldn't canibalize their B2B tiers at all, while keeping a lot of very small developers happy.
- patio11 15y ago
  It's very easy to message "Free for OSS, paid for other folks", and it prevents you from having a failure to convert moment when a) you start using Github internally at a job/startup/etc and b) you need to add the second repo. If you then have to go get authorization for a purchase, you might do something stupid like a) migrate or b) cheat, rather than go through the authorization process, because you've got work to do today. It is much easier to say "Look, you know Github, you like Github. You want to use Github for work? Get them to fork out for it. No, not fork(1). fork($)" Hypothetically suppose a particular company's advantage is UI/UX. If this is true, that company is in less than zero danger of getting FOSSed.

skrebbel 15y ago

It's called "Software as a Service" for a reason. Hint: it's not "Data storage as a Service".

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rmc 15y ago

Not really a fair comparison. GitHub is aimed at open source development, and is doing quite well at that. So for github you want your data to be visible to everyone in the world. Imagine if someone thought a blogging software was like a diary in days gone by. "You mean everyone can see what I write in my diary?! How terrible!"

programminggeek 15y ago
Acutally, github is aimed at making money proving awesome code hosting. They host open source stuff because it is a GREAT way to acquire new paid customers. It's the freemium model done really well. github is still a business and at the end of the day they need to make money.

masnick 15y ago

This is why https://codeplane.com/ https://codeplane.com/ was created. 2GB worth of private repos for $9/month. See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2674417 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2674417 for the discussion of Codeplane on HN.

slig 15y ago
Are you the owner? How does your product differ from RepositoryHosting.com ?

programminggeek 15y ago

Nerds are so cheap it's ridiculous. Let's look at the standard plans for smaller teams - it maxes at $22/month for 20 private repos and 10 collaborators. Not bad. On the business side the max is 125 repos for $200/month. Even in the midwest a full time dev costs say at least $4,000 a month. Assuming you have a team of 10-20 devs, that is what $40,000 - $80,000 a month. So, at the high end to keep your team of 10-20 devs happy it costs you an extra $200 a month on top of the $40k+ you are spending in salary and so forth. Drop in the bucket. And if you're an indie dev and you can't afford $22/month for awesome code hosting for all your projects, you are the kind of cheapskate that you might as well look elsewhere. Also, there are a TON of options out there like bitbucket, assembla, and so on if you want "cheaper" hosting. Seriously, you could put out a crappy android app that makes you $100 a month in a weekend and that pays for your github hosting. Why complain?

a3camero 15y ago
This is what the internet does. I've grown up with a price point of $0.
- saturn 15y ago
  Well you're just going to have to un-grow out of that delusion because in the real world absolutely nothing is free.
  - a3camero 15y ago
    Wrong. The vast majority of the world is free. Friendships are free. Families are free. Nature is free (in Canada, much of it is). Not really the free you're looking for? Feel free to walk around on public property and enjoy your right to free speech (talking to people is free). Local libraries have free books and free internet, the news is free (CBC), although I'll grant you that these are run by the government but if you're living a near $0 life you're probably not paying a lot of taxes. Running for MP (federal government) here isn't quite free but the $500 you get back at the end unless you don't fill in some forms properly. Facebook is free, Google is free, Hacker News is free... Although these are ad-supported. There's a whole world of free stuff available through .torrent but I'll admit most of that others would like not to be free. How about free music? Jamendo? Wrong sort of free? How about buskers or my neighbours that play guitar and classical music on their balcony (they're actually pretty good). Oh, you mean other stuff? A $0 price point isn't far off of where many internet services are headed. EC2 is incredibly cheap. Compare that to what a server cost even ten years ago. Name your backbone service: it's aiming for free and making it up in volume. The $0 price point is not a delusion.

davidedicillo 15y ago

I don't mind GitHub pricing, but I wish it had a "Archive" option for the private repo, for those projects that aren't active anymore but still want to keep the repo on GitHub just in case. And of course the archived repos wouldn't count towards your total repo unless they are reactivated.

rubyrescue 15y ago
agreed, but I just put 'archived' git repos in, ironically, dropbox, and delete the private repo on github.
masklinn 15y ago
Have you considered suggesting it to github?
- nirvdrum 15y ago
  I suggested that very thing. Several times over the years. I suggested it to the CodaSet guys, too. Apparently there's enough of a market without this to not warrant adding the new pricing option.
  - danieldk 15y ago
    Codebase(HQ) allows archived projects (until your diskspace runs out). However, putting your open repositories there does not have the same network effect as putting them on Github.
DevX101 15y ago
Why don't you just call one repo "Archive" and put all your old stuff in there.

eLobato 15y ago

To be fair, the markets of Dropbox and Github are dramatically different. In fact I'd say that the Github pricing model is quite better in terms of adjusting the price to the demand. As I've read in some other comment here in HN, if you don't use Github because $100 is a lot of money to spend in your project, then you probably shouldn't be using Github. Still, they offer great and FREE micro accounts for students (I have one) and the support is great.

roel_v 15y ago

I expected this to be a post on how Dropbox is too expensive. Also, putting my grumpy hat on, what's with all the cheapskate whining? "Give me more, I want it FREE!"... bleh.

marcf 15y ago

For businesses looking to be cost effective, remember there is www.projectlocker.com Not as sexy as GitHub but it has Trac (or Agilo Trac) and a choice of GIT/SVN. Unlimited projects, but it has disk space limits and user limits that differentiate the levels (similar to dropbox.) Cost structure is here: https://projectlocker.com/signup/startup https://projectlocker.com/signup/startup There is no public visibility on projectlocker.com, thus it is best for teams that don't want their stuff public (which actually most companies.) Disclaimer: I have used PL as a paying customer for 4 years at the Equity level (<30 users, <30GB of repos) and am a very happy with it. I haven't noticed it go down in all that time.

dools 15y ago

I don't actually understand why anyone pays for github when it's so trivial to set up a central git repository on a $10/month VPS and you can have unlimited repositories. Surely developers aren't that desperate for a nice UI for their git repos?! I assume that there are a bunch of web based repo browsing tools you could install for free if you were that hell bent on looking at your code in a web browser

varikin 15y ago
I love the ease of UI. I like a graphical way to look through logs and diffs and Github does this better than anyone else. Beyond that, if I want a nice web based alternative, I would have to maintain it which I hate doing. Really, $7 is not a bad deal for letting them be the sys admins. All that said, I am a cheap bastard. I have all public projects on a free Github account and a couple nonfree ones on my hosting account. I don't have a pretty front end, just the default gitweb. It is ugly, not as easy to use, but it works for my personal projects. If I ever needed it for a non-personal project, Github is much better since I will need to code, not maintain my own repos.

necenzurat 15y ago

http://www.syncany.org/ http://www.syncany.org/ will kill you all

jedbrown 15y ago

Academic research is one more data point. Sometimes you have faculty and students from multiple institutions. It's not so much the cost that's the problem, rather the paperwork to bill it to various grants over the lifetime of a project. In many ways, it's simpler for one of the leaders to just pay for it personally. I personally prefer doing public development, but this has been cited by a number of colleagues as a reason not to host at github.

bostonvaulter2 15y ago
Have you looked at github's academic pricing? https://github.com/edu https://github.com/edu
- fluidcruft 15y ago
  So as a post-doc/researcher... Do I click Student, Teacher or Administrator?

DannoHung 15y ago

Man, I totally would love it if my company would let us use github for our source control. Unfortunately, we are strictly not allowed to store anything outside of the company servers for security reasons and I'm reasonably sure the local github service cost would necessitate making a successful case that we should transition the entire company to it. Which involves not just proving that github is a better source control management suite, but that the git model is superior to the centrally managed, monolithic perforce model we use.

darklajid 15y ago
I started by converting a team to git. Then, after they settled in and started to get it, I made repositories available from the outside (only ssh, still only selected people). When more and more people learned that it _is_ possible to work in a train/plane/at a customer site and still use a decent toolset, they wanted in. I hosted gitorious (with decent backups, a redmine next to it) on an old server. In the end management gave in to peer pressure - and the price point was - erm - attractive. It's the official toolset now.

nzoschke 15y ago

Just make your small projects public, and with a proper copyright. It's incredibly hard to get someone to pay attention to you and your code even if you want them to. Nobody will notice one way or another. GitHub is the Library of Alexandria, not a safety deposit box.

pjhyett 15y ago

We're trying to fundamentally change how people write, collaborate, and discover code and the sooner people stop thinking of us as just a repo depository, the better, because we've never been about that. Ask yourself what kind of markup we'd have to charge on storage space and still be able to grow our business when most of the repos we host are less than 1 MB. We charge what we do because it makes money. Money that allows us to continue hiring really talented people that are all focused on building an even better service. Doing things like including private repos with our free plan would eat into our margins and only satisfy the people that are likely to never convert to a paid plan. Frankly, I think being able to use all of the tools we provide for the price of a pint of Guinness every month is a damn good deal.

carbonica 15y ago
I laughed at the article, but you have a really good point. If you have 30 projects and only want a place to put your code, you're far better off just using a private server, which you undoubtedly already have. If you have a development culture that is well-modeled by how GitHub approaches collaboration, that's where you'll see a lot of added value over a private server. I think the tough part is that GitHub's innovations in collaboration are primarily a huge win for open source. GitHub makes discovery of these projects so much easier, connects disparate people across communities (and countries!), and provides a unified technical stack and process "stack" for those people to contribute (same bug trackers, same "send me a pull request" approach, same wiki). That's something that's a pretty big deal for OSS. Most of those issues aren't as big a deal for a business in my experience - most businesses either don't have such problems (discovery) or have their own solutions (process). But hey - you guys have got customers, you're hiring like crazy, and I love your stack personally; I'm certainly not judging! Just offering my perspective on why some folks might not buy in to the collaboration stuff from a business point of view.
programminggeek 15y ago
I'm a happy GitHub customer and your service is worth every penny. Keep building awesome stuff!
Kudos 15y ago

frankus 15y ago

I guess I always saw github as more of a flickr for code than a private repo hosting service for hobbyists. I'd still like a good way to back up my private solo-project repositories off-site using git, but I suppose DropBox works pretty well for that?

tyler_ball 15y ago
Flickr costs 24.95/year for a pro account, giving you unlimited storage, sets, collections, stats and no ads. So I don't think the analogy really works.

g123g 15y ago

How about providing a github like interface on top of dropbox? Has anybody done this? The best thing about this will be that 2GB of storage is free from dropbox which is quite sufficient for most of the needs.

watty 15y ago

Many of you are missing the point. It's not as much about the actual cost but about the model of charging per repo rather than data usage (or both options). This model is not cost effective for small businesses and contractors who have many small projects. For example, my company has two full time devs and a few contractors for small projects. We have accumulated over 30 projects and that number will continue to grow. It's not uncommon for an older project to be re-opened after a period of inactivity for new features or fixes. It's not cost effective to shell out $100/month. We've moved to Springloops which allows 10 active repos and unlimited archived for $15/month.

Duff 15y ago

I know this is pretty much a joke, but never underestimate the ability of people to do ridiculous things. I've personally witnessed individuals with email Inboxes with over 50,000 items in them -- total size 30GB. No use of folders, no meaningful search capability.

a3_nm 15y ago

Actually, "all your files are visible to everyone" isn't a restriction at all if you're using crypto. Likewise, it's funny to think that you could encrypt your git repositories and use github public hosting for private projects. I wonder if someone already did, but I guess github wouldn't care (if you're doing this, you wouldn't be paying for the service anyway).

wtracy 15y ago
I suspect that most of GitHub's features are useless if the files you are uploading are encrypted. Seriously, are diffs of encrypted files going to be meaningful?
- a3_nm 15y ago
  Actually, what I was saying amounts to using github as an agnostic data store, and doing the actual work on the clients. So, yeah, most of the usefulness of github goes away and you can just use pretty much any file hosting service.

deleted 15y ago

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grandalf 15y ago

I think people are misinterpreting the frustration with Github's pricing. It's not that people have a problem paying $22 for 20 repos, it's that the 21st repo costs $23 per month! Github's pricing structure has friction in this area. Without a controlled experiment it's impossible to determine whether this pricing model is best for Github or not. Imagine if when you bought toothpaste there were two options, a small travel-size tube for $1 or a crate full of 500 full size tubes for $250. Or imagine if a restaurant served ice cream at $0.25 for a spoonful and then your next option was a full gallon. The friction occurs b/c people don't like wasting money, and the pricing model Github has chosen feels like unused repos are costing money but not being put to use. In other words, there is a nonlinear relationship between money spent and usefulness gained per dollar, which makes it difficult for people to maximize utility over. This is friction and it probably has mixed results. I think the most important thing to note is that we don't know whether it helps or hurts Github's business to do things this way. Assertions that it does one vs the other are only speculation.

allwein 15y ago
See, that's the problem in thinking. People go, "Hmm, 10 repos cost $12, so that's $1.20 per repo. But if I have 11 repos, it costs me $22, it costs me $22 so it's $2 per repo, what a ripoff!" Or conversely how you stated it, "$1.20 per repo for the first 10, then $10 for the 11th, and the next 9 are free." If they restated it that it costs $2 per repo, but if you order in bulk you get a discount, people would be happier. So even if they always paid $22, they'd be thrilled because the "real" prices would be 11 for $2 each all the way down to 20 for $1.10 each!

bphogan 15y ago

I don't get the problems that people have with Github's pricing. I can have all the private repos I want by creating repositories on my computer. Git is decentralized. Putting it in a central location is centralized. :) But seriously, I can have as many private repositories as I want - all I need is a server with SSH support. What I want is the user interface for adding comments and collaboration on my private repos that I get for public repos. If I find that valuable to me, I'll pay it. If it's a "toy" project that I'll never touch, a local repo and a backup of my computer is all I need - I don't need others to have that code.

mcantor 15y ago

Yeah! What a bunch of dickbags. What if Western Digital used Dropbox's pricing plan?

chow 15y ago

Funny article, but it misses the fact that GitHub's pricing is less about code separation, and more about access management. There's nothing stopping a customer from cramming several projects into a single Git repository. You could theoretically take advantage of GitHub's "unlimited" storage for cheap this way. The problem is, you need separate repositories if you want to manage access for different collaborators. Folders aren't expensive, but access management can be. Github understands this, which is why their Business plans, which are differentiated by having finer-grained access control features, are more expensive.

nivertech 15y ago

When using git every library/dependency is a separate repo. So 125 private repos limit for $200 is only enough for 3-4 real life projects, or one really big project.

Revisor 15y ago

It's a simple price segmenting. No one says the axis of projects makes financial sense on the expense side. It makes sense in distinguishing the type of customer. Ironically it's nicely illustrated by the employee/owner of a web agency complaining in the comments. Obviously it worked and Github managed to extract more value from a larger customer.

JoelMcCracken 15y ago

Any big reason not to have an archive repo, with tars of your archived projects? You still have git for your tars, and thus all your versions. It seems like a fine idea, to me. To archive a project, tar its project directory, copy it in to an archive repo on github, commit and push it, and remove the directory locally. To unarchive a project, pull and untar the project in its own directory. When done, tar it back up into the archive repo, commit, and push.

overshard 15y ago

Would work great for me. I store everything on dropbox in one giant lump truecrypt file...