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Because 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 interne
by noahbp 1mo ago
Because 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 1mo agoAnd they can keep training their own models off of the code, and on private repos too. AI makes investors/shareholders go brrr.
- aurareturn 1mo agoAnd another platform will suffer the same thing and charge probably even more?
- MisterPea 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo agoWeird. For me it's in Actions, Issues, and other integrations / workflows / add-ons that aren't that easily replaced.
- stusmall 1mo 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 1mo agoBig enterprises are on a different github deployment, so I doubt they are affected by this
- deleted 1mo ago[deleted]
- snazz 1mo agoEnterprise Cloud was indeed affected by this (as of this morning)
- milkshakes 1mo agolol
- throw-the-towel 1mo 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 1mo 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 1mo ago[deleted]
- Quarrelsome 1mo agouh, isn't its value that some of us pay them money to have a service?
- ThrowawayR2 1mo 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.