8 ms·

Why GitHub’s pricing model stinks (for us)

58 points by tiziano88 14y ago

diziet 14y ago
Github does have per seat pricing (for their enterprise product, which is meant to be hosted locally): https://enterprise.github.com/pricing https://enterprise.github.com/pricing - it costs $21/seat/month. With their per repo pricing I'd imagine they are more likely to earn more revenue per user, since so many developers will end up having many old pet projects in private repos sitting there.
- mcintyre1994 14y ago
  BitBucket's pricing is at $1/seat/month in the worst case though (assuming you match one of their intervals there). But yep I agree, Github is surely significantly more profitable than BitBucket.
  - RyanZAG 14y ago
    Definitely agreed - I use BitBucket to store some private projects, which also means I don't pay them anything (yet). Seems not terribly profitable - I keep a backup elsewhere assuming Bitbucket will go down eventually from lack of funds!
    - joshuakarjala 14y ago
      I wouldn't worry so much about that. Seems like Bitbucket was acquired by Atlassian for two reasons: 1. Free DCVS hosting as a free perk to existing customers, with tight integration to existing Atlassian products. 2. Free DCVS hosting to non-customers, with the hopes of converting some to the Atlassian suite.
      - pearle 14y ago
        A while back my team switched to from an internal SVN system to BitBucket. We're now buying into the Atlassian OnDemand platform so it was definitely #2 for us.
- crooy 14y ago
  The Github enterprise version is unrealistically expensive. We (a dutch 'embedded' software company of about 300 developers) currently use SVN for our version control. We use some tool, of which I forgot the name, to simplify managing repositories and permissions. This costs us a couple of hours per year in maintenance and support, and the tool cost somewhere around 1500 euro. Hours go for around 80 euro's here, so lets say 3.000 euro TCO per year. For us having code in the cloud (read within reach of the US government) is not an option, our customers will not allow it. I believe our insurance will not even allow that. Also we need to have Ldap/Active Directory integration; Ldap is the only way we can effectively manage authorisation between a large amount of services. Looking at all the alternatives, Atlassian Stash, Gitstack, etc. Github is by far the most expensive(75.000 per year). Right now, we have decided that setting up a Gitblit server ourselves, will be the most cost effective. There is no way I can convince my boss that using Github will save us 60.000 euro per year.
  - craftman 14y ago
    Fully agree with you. I use a private git repo on my own cloud server (west europe based). Github make full sense for open source projects, with easy forking and pull requests. However, I dont see any advantage to take a private repo, even worst at the price they propose, and hosted in a complex legal context.
  - notimetorelax 14y ago
    When I learned about GitHub Enterprise I was very happy thinking that we can finally switch to Git (currently we use SVN) only to be saddened by their pricing. We have around 5000 employees, GitHub price for 500 seats is 125,000$, this is incredibly expensive. Judging by their pricing they don't want big companies to be their clients as simple as that. Atlassian for example had a lot of grief with us simply because their products didn't scale that well past 5000 users.
    - kondro 14y ago
      Have you thought about contacting them and asking for a discount for volume? Their enterprise pricing is probably designed for under a 100 employees. No one is going to make you commit to a contract or bite your hand off if you ask them if they can go cheaper.
TamDenholm 14y ago
I think the reason its priced like that is its far more profitable than any other way. Developers like loads of repo's for their many side projects etc. Just a note though, if you're a consulting company and cant afford $200 a month for the 125 repo's, you should be charging more.
- cdavid 14y ago
  200 $ / month is indeed nothing. The problem is when you need more. Arguably, github enterprise follows exactly the model of price per collaborator.
- LordIllidan 14y ago
  Why should we pay 200$ a month though when there's a competitor with a far better plan?
  - kondro 14y ago
    Because the competitor has inferior features.
    - LordIllidan 14y ago
      Github's extra features aren't all that useful to us though - certainly not worth the extra expense. And yes, I do know that rates should be increased and that even 200$ a month are a drop in the bucket to some startups - but not to all startups, especially non US-based ones.
easytiger 14y ago
I really do not get the big deal. Just set up ssh on your own server and voilà... free unlimited repos. sure you miss out on some tools. But what's more important... repo storage/usage/access/privacy or a pretty graph of your commits? Perhaps catting a ssh key to the end of a text file is a bit too much complexity for a company who claim to be selling themselves as expert software solutions developers. And if you do want all that, it does exist and is available to install on your own host. All for £20 a month. Not even hard to set up multisite replication etc.
- kaolinite 14y ago
  Because it's more work to do. Instead of setting that up, you could be working on your product. The company I work for does the same - code is all hosted locally, emails were (until recently) hosted locally, document sharing too. It was cheap but every so often there'd be a problem and it'd go down for 15-30 minutes, which would cost a few £1000 in lost productivity.
  - easytiger 14y ago
    If you are of a significant size you will want to have a release or build engineer anyway who will normall be the person who takes ownership of these things. If not then it will be your office unix guy. I'm also not a fan of quantifying productivity lost in ££. When someone has a bowl movement do you chart that against company productivity?
    - kaolinite 14y ago
      > If you are of a significant size you will want to have a release or build engineer anyway who will normall be the person who takes ownership of these things. If not then it will be your office unix guy. We have a sysadmin who looks after the servers. However, bad things can happen. If he was able to spend all his time working on these problems, they wouldn't occur, but he has other responsibilities too. Should we hire someone else? No! It's cheaper and more reliable to outsource these responsibilities to a team working 100% of the time on it. > I'm also not a fan of quantifying productivity lost in ££. When someone has a bowl movement do you chart that against company productivity? I don't understand your point. There's a big difference between going to get coffee, go to the toilet, etc - which is normal, expected and accounted for - and having large parts of the company unable to work because particular services are down.
sytse 14y ago
Disclosure: I'm a co-founder of GitLab.com I agree that a per seat pricing model is better because it is more predictable and relates to the value a company gets. We plan to use such a model on GitLab.com http://blog.gitlab.com/pricing/ http://blog.gitlab.com/pricing/ Also, if you self-install GitLab it is completely free (MIT license).
- mcintyre1994 14y ago
  Out of interest, how would you say you compare to BitBucket? Your given plan structures seem to suggest that their pricing structure per user is superior. "A startup with 30 repos and a team of two is completely free." Same with them. "A professional plan with 60 repos and 5 collaborators is $9 per month." 5 collaborators is free with them. "A business plan 150 repos and 10 collaborators is $72 per month." BitBucket supports teams on all plans. That plan would be $10, although I will admit I haven't used their teams feature so you may have superior functionality there. Self-hosted sounds great though, that's a really cool move.
  - sytse 14y ago
    Thank you for the question. We want to make sure that the pricing only increases in small steps. If you add one more user you should never go from $25 to $50. We also have a free issue tracker, you don't have to pay for it. Jira prices are 4 times more expensive than BitBucket prices. And of course there is the option to go self hosted easily in the future. What do you think we can improve in the pricing of GitLab.com?
    - petercooper 14y ago
      Not to put you off, but more to provide an interesting case study.. patio11 wrote about the difference between configurable/scalable pricing and fixed plans recently: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/13/doubling-saas-revenue/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/13/doubling-saas-revenue/
      - sytse 14y ago
rschmitty 14y ago
Github really only makes sense for open source projects. If you are small shop with private repos, bitbucket does everything github does for free If you are small-med+ shop you can pay per user and you should really be considering a more enterprise level of project management other than "issues and wiki docs" First you'll have the money to pay Atlassian for all their tools, and second you will discover you can't live with out them once you have them and will rarely, if ever, visit the bitbucket page for a project (which is a "Good Thing" imo)
molf 14y ago
Agreed, Github does not make sense for small consulting companies. We have hundreds of repositories (way more than the Github top plan) and only 10 employees. We have been hosting our own git server (previously Gitorious and now Gitlab) and haven't looked back. Way more economic than Github enterprise. I guess these days Bitbucket or hosted Gitlab would also be a reasonable alternative.
- Argorak 14y ago
  We solved that by having the client decide on the code hosting. If the client decides for Github, he is expected to create an Organization and pay for the private repos he uses.
  - gm 14y ago
    What kind of clients do you have? If I asked my clients what code repo to use and then asked them to set up a github org, they laugh me out of their building, probably making some sort of comment that I turned my problem into their problem. Maybe you have tech-savvy clients who care about source control. Mine only care that I do what I said I'd do when I said I'd do it.
    - Argorak 14y ago
      Large and small companies, most somehow technology-minded, but not fully. The ploy is easy: if they set up the org, they have full control over it, even in the case that everything goes downhill and all of us get hit by a bus. Most people nowadays have seen a tech project going downhill with the freelancer leaving with the keys for the castle. No technological argument. At all.
mcdee 14y ago
Sorry, just to confirm: GitHub's cost model aligns with your revenue model (as opposed to your cost model), and this is a bad thing?
Argorak 14y ago
For this use case, a one time payment model like the new Basecamp plan would make sense.
nicholassmith 14y ago
It might stink for you, but if you put it down in rational terms it's not actually much. If you start with a Micro it's costing you $5 a month, which (without knowing how much you charge per contract) is probably about 10 minutes work on one contract. 10 minutes of work for all the GitHub goodies. We all want things to be cheaper, but sometimes you need to rationalise things off and realise whilst they emotionally look expensive, they're actually really not when you work out what the cost is to you in terms of work to cover it. Put it this way, if you go to BitBucket (they're great as well! Highly recommended!) you'll save money, but lose the headline features of GH. For you this may or may not be a big problem. If you go down the self-hosted route (super valid!) then you've got a specific amount of admin time that needs to be put in per month by either a dev or sysadmin and that's more than likely to either cost the as much or more than GHs pricing. Pricing is hard, but GitHub is pricing where GitHub needs it's prices to be.
- d0m 14y ago
  Or the client can pay for it. I.e. add x$/mo to the maintenance cost for "code hosting" or whatever.
  - nicholassmith 14y ago
    Or that, it is technically a per project expense.
sgentle 14y ago
I agree and I wish I'd written this article myself. One of the great things about git compared to the version control systems of yesteryear is that it's lightweight enough and (with Github) discoverable enough to make many small repos a viable development pattern. I never liked the old giant-repo-for-all-the-code system, although I understand it's still popular at Google and many other large shops. I think what really rankles is that it fires up my developer edge-case sense. Wait, so you mean I can have one repository of 100MB, but if I have two of 50MB that costs more? Bits are bits, so why are you punishing one particular factoring of my data vs another? That's like charging for S3 per top-level directory, or for iTunes by album. I feel like charging per repository makes you feel bad about making more repositories, which can often lead to feeling bad about good decisions. Also, realistically, a cost per developer is so miniscule compared to the overall cost of that developer. The proportional cost per project is much higher, particularly if it's some skunkworks side-project and you're the one trying to explain why you should double how much you're paying github so that you can have a live coffee consumption dashboard for the break room. It might be irrational, but it's the truth - we associate costs together in buckets, and Github is associating itself with the wrong bucket.
- StavrosK 14y ago
  Bits might be bits, but you aren't paying for storage. If you are, just get a 1TB hard disk for $50 and have more space than you'll ever need for repos. You're paying for Github, and it's not priced by bits stored.
  - derefr 14y ago
    I think the idea is that all the stuff Github gives you scales pretty much linearly with the number of bits you're storing. Bigger repo = longer commit history; more commits = more issues tracked, more features, bigger wiki, more forks, etc. When you split a project into two subprojects that are fairly equal in scope, each one will likely get just about half of the number of tickets/wiki articles/forks made that the original would have. So making a new repo isn't adding overhead for Github in any marginal way; the overhead would be there either way, as long as that original repo was being used to do the work of two sub-projects.
_pmf_ 14y ago
Using the number of repositories for pricing is a ridiculous metric in many ways and for many reasons. What is the rationale behind it? Transparency?
- stuartmemo 14y ago
  How so? What would you use instead?
derefr 14y ago
I use both: I stick my private repos up on Bitbucket (where I don't need to show them to anyone, and thus pay nothing), and my public repos on Github (where I don't need to hide them from anyone, and thus pay nothing.) And I don't miss Github's collaborative features in my private repos because I'm not collaborating in those :) Bitbucket is literally just "a place to push my repo where it'll be safe" for me[1]; Github is "a place where I can collaborate with others." And you know what? You can even use both for a single project. Push your public branches to Github, accept patches, then base a private product on the result [just some extra non-pushed-to-public branches] and work on that in Bitbucket. For example, you could have, say, the Chromium codebase on Github, and then Chrome on Bitbucket. [1] Well, okay, Bitbucket is also pretty good for doing deploys from: you can CNAME git.yourcompany.com to them, set up some Deploy Keys and Deploy Hooks, and it'll feel just like you had your own internal repo server for your deploy server to talk to.
- why-el 14y ago
  Yep, this is exactly what I do. Though I will start collaborating on a private project beginning June and I am not sure how Bitbucket fares in that regard? Any experience with that?
  - Hates_ 14y ago
    I'm collaborating on some projects on Bitbucket and it has pretty much everything you need. It doesn't have some of the nice little touches that Github has like autocomplete emoji etc, but nothing that wouldn't make me miss Github if I had to move over to it 100% for private repos.
patio11 14y ago
So from one consultant to another consultant, what do you say when a potential client starts to say "Actually, we don't think we can do this engagement, because $X is too much" where $X is some number in three digits?
- orangethirty 14y ago
  Exactly. They can just create a new account for each new client for peanuts. No client is going to bark for an extra $20 for the github account.
- RobAley 14y ago
  I don't think he's saying that its too much, its that there is a cheaper option with better financial predictability, and that is why he's not using github. Its more of a heads up to github, paraphrasing : "if you want our business, this is the kind of plan that we like to buy, it solves our pain points, which for us is stability of pricing" or similar.
  - imsofuture 14y ago
    That's a bit of an abstract point though. I don't know how many private repos I will be using in a year, so I pay for what I'm currently using. It may go up or down, and my plan will be adjusted accordingly. If the problem isn't the on-my-credit-card-statement cost for the service that you'd use, and is instead a philosophical disagreement with how the cost is calculated... that's just a little bonkers.
    - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
      Thank you for stating clearly what was bothering me.
    - RobAley 14y ago
      Its not an abstract point. My costs may go up, without my income going up, if I need more repos, which I can't necessarily predict in advance. I then either have to eat the extra cost or go cap in hand to the client because part way through the project or starting the next stage we've restructured the way we're using repos. Maybe we should plan better in advance, but with the other service he is using he doesn't have to.
molukk 14y ago
We've also been discussing this recently where I work. Our problem is that the small wordpress projects quickly eat up the repo quota. The price isn't a problem, but their largest plan only gives 125 repos, which we'll reach relatively quick at this rate. Enterprise is not an option, as we're not really interested in hosting and maintaining it ourselves. They do however say "If you need a plan larger than Platinum, contact us for details about our larger business plans." Does anyone have any details about what their larger business plans consist of? Most likely we'll eventually migrate to Bitbucket.
- kondro 14y ago
  Just contact them. They aren't going to bite you or bill you because you enquire about a bigger plan?
alexyoung 14y ago
I'm in a similar position. I'm a freelancer, and I have quite a few clients for various Ruby/iOS/Node projects. I need more private repositories, but the jump to Gold is too much for my business. The issue is largely down to older clients that I only occasionally do maintenance work for. I've got about 15 of these, and they cut into my private repo count. Of course, it's easy to dump repositories on a server, which I have done in some cases, but I find my clients often like GitHub's interface. I've also put a few onto Bitbucket to give myself a bit of breathing room, this works well when projects are effectively 'archived' and have little client involvement but are still running. I'm thinking about using GitLab, but I'm wondering about the amount of effort it'd take to maintain it. Cost for GitHub/Bitbucket vs. time to maintain another web application? Hmm...
- Cthulhu_ 14y ago
  > Cost for GitHub/Bitbucket vs. time to maintain another web application? Hmm... Both Github's and Bitbucket's prices max out at $200 a month; if you're a freelancer, that's worth about 2 - 4 hours of your time per month. That amount is easily spent on hosting/managing your own repositories. If you can avoid spending 2 - 4 hours a month on repositories, go for those. $200 is nothing if you're running a business.
  - guan 14y ago
    If you bill 160 hours per week and work maybe 200 hours, that’s still 1.5 to 2 percent of your time. I would call that non-trivial and worth at least looking into.
    - mcintyre1994 14y ago
      Not sure what point you're trying to make, but there's only 168 hours in a week.
      - guan 14y ago
        Sorry, I meant per month.
pjmlp 14y ago
What happened to just have a server rack in place? We never use such public hosts.
ericb 14y ago
The only reason I have a bitbucket account is because github's pricing model is so bad. I even wanted to pay for a small account, but 5 or even 10 repos is nothing compared to my number of repos. In business cases like this, a bad tradeoff is being made. There may be some amount of money that their repo based pricing might make them over a per-user model. If they leave that money on the table though, they'd shrink what is left for their competitors and make themselves harder to disrupt. They would also get a greater pool of accounts that may grow to paid-status.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
oellegaard 14y ago
I think the GitHub pricing model is excellent - and super cheap. I have multiple accounts and I happily pay for all of them - the value of not having to use a bad interface like bitbucket is far larger than the price for GitHub. With a cost of 200$ for 125 repos, it is less than 2$ per client - if thats a problem, I think you should rethink your business plan. Keep in mind, nothing prevents you from removing clients you didn't work on for e.g. 6 months and put them on a NAS (although I would not do that myself)
- gtaylor 14y ago
  > With a cost of 200$ for 125 repos, it is less than 2$ per client Something that I keep seeing go un-mentioned is that all GitHub users are not software consultants in the traditional sense. For those that have an actual product and own their code, this breaks down very quickly. For example, at Pathwright, we have a growing number of private repositories that are various components of our platform, marketing sites, one-off static sites we do to for various things, and etc. We have butted up against our limit several times now, though only a few of our many repositories see regular activity. GitHub is making excellent profit from us, given that we are under ten employees, and the vast majority of our activity is in 2-3 repos at most. The point of the article is that their model doesn't make complete sense for everyone. I think this is a very valid point. He also [correctly] concedes that the BitBucket model doesn't work for everyone. In other words, this is a subjective piece that is billing itself as subjective. It is meant to provoke thought about pricing models without declaring one way the "best" way.
largesse 14y ago
You're a consultant and variable overhead of $20 to $100 a month is unmanageable??
ricardobeat 14y ago
Here you go: http://beanstalkapp.com/ http://beanstalkapp.com/ https://codeplane.com/ https://codeplane.com/ http://www.codebasehq.com/ http://www.codebasehq.com/ http://projectlocker.com/ http://projectlocker.com/ https://unfuddle.com/ https://unfuddle.com/ https://www.assembla.com/ https://www.assembla.com/ http://gitorious.org/ http://gitorious.org/ http://gitlab.org/ http://gitlab.org/ good luck :)
- duwqihu 14y ago
  335253616173627`1+
- duwqihu 14y ago
  +4407870826787
analog 14y ago
Github costs just over $1 per repo per month. If the projects you're consulting on generate less revenue than this you've got bigger problems than Github's pricing.
eloisant 14y ago
It's very clear that their pricing model stinks. I told it to Scott Chacon once, his answer was something like "yeah, we have to make money too, whatever". So I give my money to BitBucket.
steeve 14y ago
Or you can just email them and I'm sure you could work something out.

58 points by tiziano88 14y ago

Github does have per seat pricing (for their enterprise product, which is meant to be hosted locally): https://enterprise.github.com/pricing https://enterprise.github.com/pricing - it costs $21/seat/month. With their per repo pricing I'd imagine they are more likely to earn more revenue per user, since so many developers will end up having many old pet projects in private repos sitting there.

mcintyre1994 14y ago
BitBucket's pricing is at $1/seat/month in the worst case though (assuming you match one of their intervals there). But yep I agree, Github is surely significantly more profitable than BitBucket.
- RyanZAG 14y ago
  Definitely agreed - I use BitBucket to store some private projects, which also means I don't pay them anything (yet). Seems not terribly profitable - I keep a backup elsewhere assuming Bitbucket will go down eventually from lack of funds!
  - joshuakarjala 14y ago
    I wouldn't worry so much about that. Seems like Bitbucket was acquired by Atlassian for two reasons: 1. Free DCVS hosting as a free perk to existing customers, with tight integration to existing Atlassian products. 2. Free DCVS hosting to non-customers, with the hopes of converting some to the Atlassian suite.
    - pearle 14y ago
      A while back my team switched to from an internal SVN system to BitBucket. We're now buying into the Atlassian OnDemand platform so it was definitely #2 for us.
crooy 14y ago
The Github enterprise version is unrealistically expensive. We (a dutch 'embedded' software company of about 300 developers) currently use SVN for our version control. We use some tool, of which I forgot the name, to simplify managing repositories and permissions. This costs us a couple of hours per year in maintenance and support, and the tool cost somewhere around 1500 euro. Hours go for around 80 euro's here, so lets say 3.000 euro TCO per year. For us having code in the cloud (read within reach of the US government) is not an option, our customers will not allow it. I believe our insurance will not even allow that. Also we need to have Ldap/Active Directory integration; Ldap is the only way we can effectively manage authorisation between a large amount of services. Looking at all the alternatives, Atlassian Stash, Gitstack, etc. Github is by far the most expensive(75.000 per year). Right now, we have decided that setting up a Gitblit server ourselves, will be the most cost effective. There is no way I can convince my boss that using Github will save us 60.000 euro per year.
- craftman 14y ago
  Fully agree with you. I use a private git repo on my own cloud server (west europe based). Github make full sense for open source projects, with easy forking and pull requests. However, I dont see any advantage to take a private repo, even worst at the price they propose, and hosted in a complex legal context.
- notimetorelax 14y ago
  When I learned about GitHub Enterprise I was very happy thinking that we can finally switch to Git (currently we use SVN) only to be saddened by their pricing. We have around 5000 employees, GitHub price for 500 seats is 125,000$, this is incredibly expensive. Judging by their pricing they don't want big companies to be their clients as simple as that. Atlassian for example had a lot of grief with us simply because their products didn't scale that well past 5000 users.
  - kondro 14y ago
    Have you thought about contacting them and asking for a discount for volume? Their enterprise pricing is probably designed for under a 100 employees. No one is going to make you commit to a contract or bite your hand off if you ask them if they can go cheaper.

TamDenholm 14y ago

I think the reason its priced like that is its far more profitable than any other way. Developers like loads of repo's for their many side projects etc. Just a note though, if you're a consulting company and cant afford $200 a month for the 125 repo's, you should be charging more.

cdavid 14y ago
200 $ / month is indeed nothing. The problem is when you need more. Arguably, github enterprise follows exactly the model of price per collaborator.
LordIllidan 14y ago
Why should we pay 200$ a month though when there's a competitor with a far better plan?
- kondro 14y ago
  Because the competitor has inferior features.
  - LordIllidan 14y ago
    Github's extra features aren't all that useful to us though - certainly not worth the extra expense. And yes, I do know that rates should be increased and that even 200$ a month are a drop in the bucket to some startups - but not to all startups, especially non US-based ones.

easytiger 14y ago

I really do not get the big deal. Just set up ssh on your own server and voilà... free unlimited repos. sure you miss out on some tools. But what's more important... repo storage/usage/access/privacy or a pretty graph of your commits? Perhaps catting a ssh key to the end of a text file is a bit too much complexity for a company who claim to be selling themselves as expert software solutions developers. And if you do want all that, it does exist and is available to install on your own host. All for £20 a month. Not even hard to set up multisite replication etc.

kaolinite 14y ago
Because it's more work to do. Instead of setting that up, you could be working on your product. The company I work for does the same - code is all hosted locally, emails were (until recently) hosted locally, document sharing too. It was cheap but every so often there'd be a problem and it'd go down for 15-30 minutes, which would cost a few £1000 in lost productivity.
- easytiger 14y ago
  If you are of a significant size you will want to have a release or build engineer anyway who will normall be the person who takes ownership of these things. If not then it will be your office unix guy. I'm also not a fan of quantifying productivity lost in ££. When someone has a bowl movement do you chart that against company productivity?
  - kaolinite 14y ago
    > If you are of a significant size you will want to have a release or build engineer anyway who will normall be the person who takes ownership of these things. If not then it will be your office unix guy. We have a sysadmin who looks after the servers. However, bad things can happen. If he was able to spend all his time working on these problems, they wouldn't occur, but he has other responsibilities too. Should we hire someone else? No! It's cheaper and more reliable to outsource these responsibilities to a team working 100% of the time on it. > I'm also not a fan of quantifying productivity lost in ££. When someone has a bowl movement do you chart that against company productivity? I don't understand your point. There's a big difference between going to get coffee, go to the toilet, etc - which is normal, expected and accounted for - and having large parts of the company unable to work because particular services are down.

sytse 14y ago

Disclosure: I'm a co-founder of GitLab.com I agree that a per seat pricing model is better because it is more predictable and relates to the value a company gets. We plan to use such a model on GitLab.com http://blog.gitlab.com/pricing/ http://blog.gitlab.com/pricing/ Also, if you self-install GitLab it is completely free (MIT license).

mcintyre1994 14y ago
Out of interest, how would you say you compare to BitBucket? Your given plan structures seem to suggest that their pricing structure per user is superior. "A startup with 30 repos and a team of two is completely free." Same with them. "A professional plan with 60 repos and 5 collaborators is $9 per month." 5 collaborators is free with them. "A business plan 150 repos and 10 collaborators is $72 per month." BitBucket supports teams on all plans. That plan would be $10, although I will admit I haven't used their teams feature so you may have superior functionality there. Self-hosted sounds great though, that's a really cool move.
- sytse 14y ago
  Thank you for the question. We want to make sure that the pricing only increases in small steps. If you add one more user you should never go from $25 to $50. We also have a free issue tracker, you don't have to pay for it. Jira prices are 4 times more expensive than BitBucket prices. And of course there is the option to go self hosted easily in the future. What do you think we can improve in the pricing of GitLab.com?
  - petercooper 14y ago
    Not to put you off, but more to provide an interesting case study.. patio11 wrote about the difference between configurable/scalable pricing and fixed plans recently: http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/13/doubling-saas-revenue/ http://www.kalzumeus.com/2012/08/13/doubling-saas-revenue/
    - sytse 14y ago

rschmitty 14y ago

Github really only makes sense for open source projects. If you are small shop with private repos, bitbucket does everything github does for free If you are small-med+ shop you can pay per user and you should really be considering a more enterprise level of project management other than "issues and wiki docs" First you'll have the money to pay Atlassian for all their tools, and second you will discover you can't live with out them once you have them and will rarely, if ever, visit the bitbucket page for a project (which is a "Good Thing" imo)

molf 14y ago

Agreed, Github does not make sense for small consulting companies. We have hundreds of repositories (way more than the Github top plan) and only 10 employees. We have been hosting our own git server (previously Gitorious and now Gitlab) and haven't looked back. Way more economic than Github enterprise. I guess these days Bitbucket or hosted Gitlab would also be a reasonable alternative.

Argorak 14y ago
We solved that by having the client decide on the code hosting. If the client decides for Github, he is expected to create an Organization and pay for the private repos he uses.
- gm 14y ago
  What kind of clients do you have? If I asked my clients what code repo to use and then asked them to set up a github org, they laugh me out of their building, probably making some sort of comment that I turned my problem into their problem. Maybe you have tech-savvy clients who care about source control. Mine only care that I do what I said I'd do when I said I'd do it.
  - Argorak 14y ago
    Large and small companies, most somehow technology-minded, but not fully. The ploy is easy: if they set up the org, they have full control over it, even in the case that everything goes downhill and all of us get hit by a bus. Most people nowadays have seen a tech project going downhill with the freelancer leaving with the keys for the castle. No technological argument. At all.

mcdee 14y ago

Sorry, just to confirm: GitHub's cost model aligns with your revenue model (as opposed to your cost model), and this is a bad thing?

Argorak 14y ago

For this use case, a one time payment model like the new Basecamp plan would make sense.

nicholassmith 14y ago

It might stink for you, but if you put it down in rational terms it's not actually much. If you start with a Micro it's costing you $5 a month, which (without knowing how much you charge per contract) is probably about 10 minutes work on one contract. 10 minutes of work for all the GitHub goodies. We all want things to be cheaper, but sometimes you need to rationalise things off and realise whilst they emotionally look expensive, they're actually really not when you work out what the cost is to you in terms of work to cover it. Put it this way, if you go to BitBucket (they're great as well! Highly recommended!) you'll save money, but lose the headline features of GH. For you this may or may not be a big problem. If you go down the self-hosted route (super valid!) then you've got a specific amount of admin time that needs to be put in per month by either a dev or sysadmin and that's more than likely to either cost the as much or more than GHs pricing. Pricing is hard, but GitHub is pricing where GitHub needs it's prices to be.

d0m 14y ago
Or the client can pay for it. I.e. add x$/mo to the maintenance cost for "code hosting" or whatever.
- nicholassmith 14y ago
  Or that, it is technically a per project expense.

sgentle 14y ago

I agree and I wish I'd written this article myself. One of the great things about git compared to the version control systems of yesteryear is that it's lightweight enough and (with Github) discoverable enough to make many small repos a viable development pattern. I never liked the old giant-repo-for-all-the-code system, although I understand it's still popular at Google and many other large shops. I think what really rankles is that it fires up my developer edge-case sense. Wait, so you mean I can have one repository of 100MB, but if I have two of 50MB that costs more? Bits are bits, so why are you punishing one particular factoring of my data vs another? That's like charging for S3 per top-level directory, or for iTunes by album. I feel like charging per repository makes you feel bad about making more repositories, which can often lead to feeling bad about good decisions. Also, realistically, a cost per developer is so miniscule compared to the overall cost of that developer. The proportional cost per project is much higher, particularly if it's some skunkworks side-project and you're the one trying to explain why you should double how much you're paying github so that you can have a live coffee consumption dashboard for the break room. It might be irrational, but it's the truth - we associate costs together in buckets, and Github is associating itself with the wrong bucket.

StavrosK 14y ago
Bits might be bits, but you aren't paying for storage. If you are, just get a 1TB hard disk for $50 and have more space than you'll ever need for repos. You're paying for Github, and it's not priced by bits stored.
- derefr 14y ago
  I think the idea is that all the stuff Github gives you scales pretty much linearly with the number of bits you're storing. Bigger repo = longer commit history; more commits = more issues tracked, more features, bigger wiki, more forks, etc. When you split a project into two subprojects that are fairly equal in scope, each one will likely get just about half of the number of tickets/wiki articles/forks made that the original would have. So making a new repo isn't adding overhead for Github in any marginal way; the overhead would be there either way, as long as that original repo was being used to do the work of two sub-projects.

_pmf_ 14y ago

Using the number of repositories for pricing is a ridiculous metric in many ways and for many reasons. What is the rationale behind it? Transparency?

stuartmemo 14y ago
How so? What would you use instead?

derefr 14y ago

I use both: I stick my private repos up on Bitbucket (where I don't need to show them to anyone, and thus pay nothing), and my public repos on Github (where I don't need to hide them from anyone, and thus pay nothing.) And I don't miss Github's collaborative features in my private repos because I'm not collaborating in those :) Bitbucket is literally just "a place to push my repo where it'll be safe" for me[1]; Github is "a place where I can collaborate with others." And you know what? You can even use both for a single project. Push your public branches to Github, accept patches, then base a private product on the result [just some extra non-pushed-to-public branches] and work on that in Bitbucket. For example, you could have, say, the Chromium codebase on Github, and then Chrome on Bitbucket. [1] Well, okay, Bitbucket is also pretty good for doing deploys from: you can CNAME git.yourcompany.com to them, set up some Deploy Keys and Deploy Hooks, and it'll feel just like you had your own internal repo server for your deploy server to talk to.

why-el 14y ago
Yep, this is exactly what I do. Though I will start collaborating on a private project beginning June and I am not sure how Bitbucket fares in that regard? Any experience with that?
- Hates_ 14y ago
  I'm collaborating on some projects on Bitbucket and it has pretty much everything you need. It doesn't have some of the nice little touches that Github has like autocomplete emoji etc, but nothing that wouldn't make me miss Github if I had to move over to it 100% for private repos.

patio11 14y ago

So from one consultant to another consultant, what do you say when a potential client starts to say "Actually, we don't think we can do this engagement, because $X is too much" where $X is some number in three digits?

orangethirty 14y ago
Exactly. They can just create a new account for each new client for peanuts. No client is going to bark for an extra $20 for the github account.
RobAley 14y ago
I don't think he's saying that its too much, its that there is a cheaper option with better financial predictability, and that is why he's not using github. Its more of a heads up to github, paraphrasing : "if you want our business, this is the kind of plan that we like to buy, it solves our pain points, which for us is stability of pricing" or similar.
- imsofuture 14y ago
  That's a bit of an abstract point though. I don't know how many private repos I will be using in a year, so I pay for what I'm currently using. It may go up or down, and my plan will be adjusted accordingly. If the problem isn't the on-my-credit-card-statement cost for the service that you'd use, and is instead a philosophical disagreement with how the cost is calculated... that's just a little bonkers.
  - lifeisstillgood 14y ago
    Thank you for stating clearly what was bothering me.
  - RobAley 14y ago
    Its not an abstract point. My costs may go up, without my income going up, if I need more repos, which I can't necessarily predict in advance. I then either have to eat the extra cost or go cap in hand to the client because part way through the project or starting the next stage we've restructured the way we're using repos. Maybe we should plan better in advance, but with the other service he is using he doesn't have to.

molukk 14y ago

We've also been discussing this recently where I work. Our problem is that the small wordpress projects quickly eat up the repo quota. The price isn't a problem, but their largest plan only gives 125 repos, which we'll reach relatively quick at this rate. Enterprise is not an option, as we're not really interested in hosting and maintaining it ourselves. They do however say "If you need a plan larger than Platinum, contact us for details about our larger business plans." Does anyone have any details about what their larger business plans consist of? Most likely we'll eventually migrate to Bitbucket.

kondro 14y ago
Just contact them. They aren't going to bite you or bill you because you enquire about a bigger plan?

alexyoung 14y ago

I'm in a similar position. I'm a freelancer, and I have quite a few clients for various Ruby/iOS/Node projects. I need more private repositories, but the jump to Gold is too much for my business. The issue is largely down to older clients that I only occasionally do maintenance work for. I've got about 15 of these, and they cut into my private repo count. Of course, it's easy to dump repositories on a server, which I have done in some cases, but I find my clients often like GitHub's interface. I've also put a few onto Bitbucket to give myself a bit of breathing room, this works well when projects are effectively 'archived' and have little client involvement but are still running. I'm thinking about using GitLab, but I'm wondering about the amount of effort it'd take to maintain it. Cost for GitHub/Bitbucket vs. time to maintain another web application? Hmm...

Cthulhu_ 14y ago
> Cost for GitHub/Bitbucket vs. time to maintain another web application? Hmm... Both Github's and Bitbucket's prices max out at $200 a month; if you're a freelancer, that's worth about 2 - 4 hours of your time per month. That amount is easily spent on hosting/managing your own repositories. If you can avoid spending 2 - 4 hours a month on repositories, go for those. $200 is nothing if you're running a business.
- guan 14y ago
  If you bill 160 hours per week and work maybe 200 hours, that’s still 1.5 to 2 percent of your time. I would call that non-trivial and worth at least looking into.
  - mcintyre1994 14y ago
    Not sure what point you're trying to make, but there's only 168 hours in a week.
    - guan 14y ago
      Sorry, I meant per month.

pjmlp 14y ago

What happened to just have a server rack in place? We never use such public hosts.

ericb 14y ago

The only reason I have a bitbucket account is because github's pricing model is so bad. I even wanted to pay for a small account, but 5 or even 10 repos is nothing compared to my number of repos. In business cases like this, a bad tradeoff is being made. There may be some amount of money that their repo based pricing might make them over a per-user model. If they leave that money on the table though, they'd shrink what is left for their competitors and make themselves harder to disrupt. They would also get a greater pool of accounts that may grow to paid-status.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

oellegaard 14y ago

I think the GitHub pricing model is excellent - and super cheap. I have multiple accounts and I happily pay for all of them - the value of not having to use a bad interface like bitbucket is far larger than the price for GitHub. With a cost of 200$ for 125 repos, it is less than 2$ per client - if thats a problem, I think you should rethink your business plan. Keep in mind, nothing prevents you from removing clients you didn't work on for e.g. 6 months and put them on a NAS (although I would not do that myself)

gtaylor 14y ago
> With a cost of 200$ for 125 repos, it is less than 2$ per client Something that I keep seeing go un-mentioned is that all GitHub users are not software consultants in the traditional sense. For those that have an actual product and own their code, this breaks down very quickly. For example, at Pathwright, we have a growing number of private repositories that are various components of our platform, marketing sites, one-off static sites we do to for various things, and etc. We have butted up against our limit several times now, though only a few of our many repositories see regular activity. GitHub is making excellent profit from us, given that we are under ten employees, and the vast majority of our activity is in 2-3 repos at most. The point of the article is that their model doesn't make complete sense for everyone. I think this is a very valid point. He also [correctly] concedes that the BitBucket model doesn't work for everyone. In other words, this is a subjective piece that is billing itself as subjective. It is meant to provoke thought about pricing models without declaring one way the "best" way.

largesse 14y ago

You're a consultant and variable overhead of $20 to $100 a month is unmanageable??

ricardobeat 14y ago

Here you go: http://beanstalkapp.com/ http://beanstalkapp.com/ https://codeplane.com/ https://codeplane.com/ http://www.codebasehq.com/ http://www.codebasehq.com/ http://projectlocker.com/ http://projectlocker.com/ https://unfuddle.com/ https://unfuddle.com/ https://www.assembla.com/ https://www.assembla.com/ http://gitorious.org/ http://gitorious.org/ http://gitlab.org/ http://gitlab.org/ good luck :)

duwqihu 14y ago
335253616173627`1+
duwqihu 14y ago
+4407870826787

analog 14y ago

Github costs just over $1 per repo per month. If the projects you're consulting on generate less revenue than this you've got bigger problems than Github's pricing.

eloisant 14y ago

It's very clear that their pricing model stinks. I told it to Scott Chacon once, his answer was something like "yeah, we have to make money too, whatever". So I give my money to BitBucket.

steeve 14y ago

Or you can just email them and I'm sure you could work something out.