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Comment by giovannibajo1 | Hacker News Reader

Even for software houses, it's VERY problematic as we add customers to projects as external collaborators and we're going to get billed for that forever, even if most customers have very light usage, and even for non active projects.

I was thrilled by this news but it's going to be completely unaffordable for us. We have 29 users and 51 external collaborators. We have recently upgraded to the Platinum plan ($2460/yr), but switching to the new user plan would raise the bill beyond affordable for us ($8k+ per year).

I think it is a big mistake to bill for external collaborators, it completely screws software houses that need this model to use GitHub.

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I keep my eye on Microsoft's Visual Studio Team Services. It has a bit of a clunky name and aimed more at enterprises but I think at some point they will position it as a competitor to GitHub. It's free for the first five developers, and no charge for "stakeholder" user accounts.

https://www.visualstudio.com/pricing/visual-studio-team-serv...

So 29 users would be $182/m (check my maths) and you'd pay nothing for the external collaborators (assuming they fit the "stakeholder" role ... no need access to the code).

Yes, your math is correct, verified with their pricing calculator https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?servic...

Thank you for posting this!

If you no longer want/need the social aspects of GitHub, you can just move to GitLab. Much more affordable and you can self host it yourself. We have an on premise GitLab installation. Besides the rare upgrade, it's pretty hands off. And it's costing us $0 in licensing fees for over 60 users ;-)

I started using gitlab.com for that reason, but I will not stay there because it is too slow, to the point it is very annoying.

I'm sorry GitLab.com is slow, we're working to improve the speed in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42 and https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/1

I looked at GitLab, it seems to come off second best in terms of features [1].

[1] https://www.visualstudio.com/get-started/overview-of-get-sta...

Hard to argue with free though, if that's what you're looking for.

I've always found VSTS to be at the same time expensive, bloated and missing essential functionality. I think the mentality of .NET / Microsoft developers is strange. By following Microsoft's lead, wherever that may take you, you're missing out and you don't even know what :-P

I'm a PM on VSTS. If you're willing to share what we're missing and what's bloated, I'd love to hear it. mattc@xbox.com or a reply here would be much appreciated. Thanks!

What features are you missing in GitLab?

Any company that has a sysadmin should simply host their own GitLab.

alternative, written in go and using way less moving components and resources is https://gogs.io It's lighter but also lighter in features than Gitlab.

> Besides the rare upgrade, it's pretty hands off

rare upgrade? They release every 4 weeks and often the update is absolutely mandatory due to various RCE vulnerabilities. Github would need to become much more expensive before it would be cheaper to use in-house gitlab.

We self-host GitLab as well for ~20 users and are very happy with it.

We install every incremental update, which GitLab publishes very frequently -- weekly or several times a month. They are always seamless. The GitLab team is working so hard.

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/CHANGELO...

Thanks tedmiston!

Company I work at uses VSTS and we're happy with it. It's actually a much larger product than just code hosting, as it also includes loads of other things like Agile Planning tools, Build system (which is now much simpler than the crazy old TFS XAML based TeamBuild. Although you only get an allocation of build "minutes" every month) and Release Management (OctopusDeploy style system). You can do cool things around PRs, like enforcing that certain users, or groups of users must approve to be mergable, or that a certain build off that branch must succeed to be mergeable. All this stuff is possibe obviously in GitHub, it's just a bit more integrated. Worth checking out

It feels to me like there needs to be a distinction between users and developers now they've changed their pricing model, with developers getting full git access, and users getting read-only source viewing through a browser, issues, and wikis. That way agencies can add customers for collaboration without having thousands of users to pay for.

great idea

we're in the same situation. I'm looking at at least a tenfold increase. All of a sudden self hosting a gitlab instance looks cost-efficient.

At those price points you don't have a sales rep and individual pricing?

Would billing your customers for Github access be a solution?

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