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I don't understand why Github hasn't solved this problem with pricing updates. My understanding is they are getting hammered with LLM generated code growing the
by leishman 2mo ago
I don't understand why Github hasn't solved this problem with pricing updates. My understanding is they are getting hammered with LLM generated code growing their traffic by over an order of magnitude. So why not rate limit non-paying users and charge for whatever scarce resource is being consumed that is causing them to constantly fall-over? This seems like a basic economics problem.
- noahbp 2mo agoBecause any price at all will immediately cause users to shift to another platform, and GitHub's value is that it is _the_ place to put your code on the internet.
- ljm 2mo agoAnd they can keep training their own models off of the code, and on private repos too. AI makes investors/shareholders go brrr.
- aurareturn 2mo agoAnd another platform will suffer the same thing and charge probably even more?
- MisterPea 2mo agoI wonder how much network effects help here. There's a lot of consumer surplus with the features GitHub offers. I'm sure they can have better pricing tiers to capture the surplus without losing too many users.
- dannyw 2mo agoThe network effects isn’t that much, and like what we see with Steam, you want to be where the audience is. More realistically, MAU or something is a metric/OKR. It’s easy to imagine why a business wouldn’t want to cap that.
- graceful6800 2mo agoAnd the audience you want are users who will never, ever pay to get access. If GitHub starts throttling free users, they throttle the audience you're talking about far, far harder than you. The audience will go away to somewhere you aren't. Then what?
- hinkley 2mo agoSomeone did a study that suggested the network effect is logarithmic in nature, but if that’s true it means something with 95% market share is 3 times “better” for having everyone there. Not 20 or two orders of magnitude better but not nothing.
- penteract 2mo agoPlease could you link to the study if you can find it. The definition of "better" seems quite critical here, as well as whether it's specific to code hosting websites. A messaging platform is pretty useless if I'm the only user, but Github would still be useful to me without anyone else having an account.
- esseph 2mo ago> The network effects isn’t that much There are people in this thread that have said their biggest reason for not moving away is the network effect.
- Brian_K_White 2mo agoThe network effect is 90% of the substance. No one needs github for git itself, nor even for web front-end to git, nor even for hosted/managed someone else's problem web front-end to git, nor even all of that for free.
- sailfast 2mo agoWeird. For me it's in Actions, Issues, and other integrations / workflows / add-ons that aren't that easily replaced.
- stusmall 2mo agoBeing the _the_ place for open source is what let them dominate the enterprise. Now that they dominate the enterprise, it'd make financial sense to put hard limits on the free tier. It's cynical but it would be foolish to lose that cash machine. It'd open them up for a competitor to slowly build up good will in open source then take them on in enterprise, but right now they are risking losing it all.
- dbmikus 2mo agoBig enterprises are on a different github deployment, so I doubt they are affected by this
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- snazz 2mo agoEnterprise Cloud was indeed affected by this (as of this morning)
- milkshakes 2mo agolol
- throw-the-towel 2mo agoIn my experience, we were typically affected just like everyone else. Maybe a public company with its market cap in the billions isn't big enough.
- gib444 2mo agoHaha people have put up with a LOT of price rises the past 5 years in many industries, validating many company's pricing strategy, over and over
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- Quarrelsome 2mo agouh, isn't its value that some of us pay them money to have a service?
- ThrowawayR2 2mo agoThey'll shift to another platform and then that platform will: - Phase 1: Implode even harder than GitHub under the onslaught of LLM generated code - Phase 2: ??? - Phase 3: Profit! Nobody wants users they can't monetize and hosting LLM output for free isn't monetizable. It's not even valuable as training data.
- phtrivier 2mo agoThey also sell the machinery to produce the slop (through OpenAI at least). If they make it harder to push slop on github, people might treat it as an incentive to generate less slop. Less tokens sold. Bad. Very bad. The github paying customers are not going to move away. Plus, it's probably genuinely hard to scale. And they can't throw compute at the problem - all compute is already going to the LLMs.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- devrob 2mo agoAh yes, sloponomics.
- BryanBeshore 2mo agoThey would benefit from a HackerNews-esque karma system.
- internetter 2mo agoThat is essentially your number of followers. Pretty hard to have a system that cannot be gamed. I think followers are probably loosely correlated with tech ecosystem impact in some capacity, but the second there is an incentive to accumulate them, well...
- account42 2mo agoI can't wait for the "please like and subscribe" popups on all software I use.
- Waterluvian 2mo agoThe people with the spreadsheets have determined the value of this loss leader to be too enormous to shut it off.
- duped 2mo agoMicrosoft executives have an incentive to pretend that AI is great and scaling it has no problems
- aurareturn 2mo agoI recently analyzed my commit history. Last month, I made more commits than my entire 2025 combined.
- duped 2mo agoHow much more value did those commits create than in 2025? But that discards my point, which is that you should probably have been prevented from pushing all those to github unless you were paying them for it, but you weren't because the executives running github can't admit that AI is bad for their platform.
- aurareturn 2mo agoHow much more value did those commits create than in 2025? We have 2x fewer developers now than in 2025. Yet, the amount of features and bug fixes we're pushing is something like 5x. So probably 10x more value is my guess for my entire team. If you mean translating that into revenue, I'm not sure. Our product is better than ever with features a much bigger team couldn't dream of building before. Stability has also been better with fewer bugs, issues, downtime. When there are bugs, it gets fixed far quicker than before.
- AlexeyBelov 2mo agoSo.. you fired your devs and replaced them with AI?
- aurareturn 2mo agoSome of them left. Some of them moved to different teams. We just never replaced them on the team. So more accurately, we placed developers who left the team with humans using more tokens.
- guluarte 2mo agothey want that code (from private repos) to train the models
- adverbly 2mo ago> My understanding is they are getting hammered with LLM generated code growing their traffic by over an order of magnitude Seems presumptuous to assume a root case while the incident is still ongoing, no?
- MatthiasPortzel 2mo agohttps://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-github-availability/ https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-... They’ve been having issues for a while.
- agos 2mo agothey've been complaining about LLM generated code and the related traffic for months now, this specific incident might not be caused by it but the general trend is
- justinbaker84 2mo agoI have wondered the same thing. Even a small fee like $50 a year would get rid of a lot of AI slop that justs eats up resources. I would gladly pay that fee if it means Github is reliable for paying customers.
- dbbk 2mo agoPrivate personal repos used to be paid. Maybe they should bring that back.
- jamesfinlayson 2mo agoI remember! I think they changed that like 10 years ago? I thought BitBucket had done something not long before and assumed GitHub was just keeping up with a competitor.
- dbbk 2mo agoI think it came right after Microsoft bought them cause they could afford it now
- blitzar 2mo agoI don't understand why Github hasn't solved this problem with vibe coded updates.
- rob-lag 2mo agoWhy not just add a rule such as: "Non paying customers can only upload X commits per day" X doesn't even need to be that low. It could be 100 or 200. Just something that slows down the agents that spam them with commits/pushes.
- frollogaston 2mo agoIt's easy from an armchair to say things like they should just get more capacity, or they should segregate free repos onto other servers. But maybe they are doing what you're thinking, and with that churn they get mistakes that cause outages, esp dealing with legacy systems. I've been there (not at GitHub or MSFT).
- sqren 2mo agoThey do not need to make any technical changes. They could make the change overnight: $1 per repo per month (or whatever). This would stop the aggressive growth that they clearly cannot handle anyway. The question is: are they willing to compromise growth for QoS. So far the answer is a resounding: "no". They are deliberately sacrificing the experience of existing users to gain new ones.
- frollogaston 2mo agoThere are tons of existing free users, they'd be sacrificing those too. And yeah they don't want to sacrifice growth either, so the remaining is an engineering question.
- ksbd-pls-finish 2mo agoNo way I pay $1/repo/month. No way I pay $1/repo/year. I still host and maintain my old code on GitHub, but any free tier pricing update and I jump ship immediately.
- matkoniecz 1mo agoI would migrate my 246 repositories before paying even a cent.
- dogleash 2mo ago>So why not rate limit non-paying users and charge for whatever scarce resource is being consumed that is causing them to constantly fall-over? I think it behooves them for the public presentation of their issues to too much load. If they implemented load shedding and still had issues the follow-up questions would be less comfortable.
- bigstrat2003 2mo agoTheir problem is partly scale, but also that they are making a ton of use of AI tools, which is undermining the quality of their software. The latter can't be fixed with a price increase, they need to pull their heads out of the AI groupthink for that.