We are reaching out to customers that are in unique situations such as the one you're mentioning here. If you have questions about how the pricing changes affect you, please don’t hesitate to contact support@github.com.
It would be more fair to charge $9/mo per organization member + $1/mo per active outside collaborator (somewhat similar to AWS CodeCommit) than to charge for every single active and inactive member and collaborator equally. Maybe throw in a 50% bulk discount for active outside collaborators over 1000.
This is not a "unique situation", it's how many organizations use GitHub (just on a smaller scale than Epic Games). As giovannibajo1 puts it[1], this change is very unfair to software houses. Giving Epic Games special treatment is only avoiding the issue.
If 5% of Epic Game's 90664 collaborators are active for a given month, then with my proposed pricing model it would now cost them ($9/organization member + ~$2766)/mo, instead of >$800k/mo. No special deals needed, and everyone (presumably) is happy.
This proposed pricing model also scales well for software houses that have have many active outside collaborators. For example, a company with 20 employees and 50% of 100 outside collaborators active in any given month would be charged $230/mo. With 50 employees and 50% of 500 outside collaborators active, it would be $700/mo.
This should also work well for large companies. 200 employees + 30% of 4000 outside contributors active = $2900/mo.
I think github is on their own right and if you have a case where you think you would be able to negotiate with them, you can send them an email as well... If not, go search another company that have a better cost/benefit for your use case.
Not sure why the topic of fairness even comes to the discussion, this is a business not a charity.
This is an unfair thing to say. Exceptions to otherwise simple rules does not at all mean that the simple rules are "broken".
It is also an unfair thing to say since he clearly says that not only is Epic Games getting this treatment, so is everyone in a similar situation. Furthermore, it has always been possible to negotiate special pricing for special cases. Just send them a message. That is how sales works at almost every company.
That is just how business-to-business deals work.
We get the freedom to create more repositories for the price of having to actively kick any inactive user out to save cost.
PS: Please make it like Slack. Don't pay for inactive users that doesn't commit anything that month.
Gotcha.
Epic's example is just silly, but nevertheless the world is not black and white. I guess there should be a large number of organizations with multiple CI/CD agents each using distinct credentials for each target. Or examples of software houses requiring client access to issue tracker/wiki.
I guess GitHub analysed their data and made the best decision, but this really does not seem geared toward Enterprise in traditional sense of the word.
Some $vendors (just using familiar terms here) somewhat cover the gray areas pricing $x per unit, where unit is e.g. 2 users or 5 repos, whichever is higher.