GitHub adds Organizations | Hacker News Reader

GitHub adds Organizations

github.com

223 pointskneath45 comments

These guys are great. They keep innovating even while they are in the drivers seat in their field. Thats the way to do it.

Kinda reminds me of how WoW evolved over time to have better guild features. Perhaps the engineering resources weren't available to implement them, but more likely they learned what their audience wanted from watching their audience actually use the system.

FYI, WoW has a grand total of around 30 engineers working on the game doing development. The majority of headcount is support and ops (~4000).

I would gather that there are a huge number of Testers as well?

A lot of testing is put on the actual users; WoW has "public test realms" that they use for betas.

Interesting! I guess the motivation to test comes from seeing what advantages you can wring out of upcoming changes, and/or ensuring opponents don't receive advantages over you.

Some really competitive users do want to get used to new raid encounters, but a lot of users just do it because they are anxious to try out new content.

We have been testing this feature for a few months now at Shopify and it seriously takes GitHub to the next level. Really amazing and kudos to the team.

Out of interest, can anyone remember what the prices were for the Large, Mega and Giga plans ?

I can think of a situation where a small start-up is on Medium, and switching up to the next level at $100 per month is looking quite dear. Would be good to have a comparison with the old prices.

Edit: Found it via Google Cache:

Large $50/mo Large 50 Private Repositories 25 Private Collaborators Unlimited public repositories Unlimited public collaborators

Mega $100/mo 125 Private Repositories 60 Private Collaborators Unlimited public repositories Unlimited public collaborators

Giga $200/mo 300 Private Repositories 100 Private Collaborators Unlimited public repositories Unlimited public collaborators

Looks like they still have the large plan in the system, just not listed. https://github.com/signup/large

biggest question is whether there's a price point missing - $100 for lowest-priced organization support is pretty high.

I think a $50 plan would be perfect. It's hard to justify the $80 jump from the medium plan for a small company that doesn't need a lot of the features (teams and permissions, for example), but would like the convenience of allowing everyone to administer the organization.

That being said, it looks like a great addition to the site, and I think charging extra is definitely warranted--I just wish there were a better priced plan to bridge the gap between $22 and $100.

This is exactly how I feel. The new features look great; we'd be happy to pay extra for them. But with less than 10 developers, we're too small to make full use of them. $78 extra/month is too high a price for the benefit we'd gain.

So true. A price point is definitely missing there. I'm thinking something in the $35-$40 range.

It is very high, but fortunately this creates an incentive for other firms to enter the space with creative, competitive offerings.

On the other hand, $1200 per year for any company that is making money is fairly minimal. Github isn't in the business of trying to compete with a $20/month slice with nightly s3 backups and ssh, which is the bargain basement way to do lots of private repos.

So far github has been able to offer value beyond simple git hosting, so the question is whether it can do this for orgs.

Agreed, I'd love to use organizations but paying for 50 repos is just outright crazy. We have a 12 person dev team, and 10 repos. Can't justify 100mo just for that. Will need to stick with unfuddle for now.

Chris/Tom: please provide a lower priced entry for organizations.

I don't want to be rude and I am making some assumptions here (also no knowledge or experience of running a company). But if you have 12 people dev, assuming they are being paid for their work and not working pro-bono. Assuming its a company. You are probably spending somewhere around 600k - 750k per year on these developers. Surely 100/month is not too much?

Like I said, I am making some assumptions. Maybe I am missing something.

It's a question of opportunity cost. Are the new features worth $100/month as opposed to the old way of paying $10-20/month?

Some people will say yes. Some people will say no.

It's a little silly to say "Well, you're spending 600k-750k a year, you can afford it." They can also afford a bouncy castle.

The right question is--does this provide enough value to justify the cost? For the parent, no, it doesn't.

I don't follow the logic here or the bouncy castle analogy. A private repo adds more direct value to a company that has 12 devs than a bouncy castle (ok maybe indirectly it might make them happy and more productive, but its stretching a bit).

I understand the question of whether it provides value, and it would be sufficient argument if you are company with lets say ~50k/yr on expenses. But when you are spending (assumptions of course) 600k-750k JUST employing your dev team, I just don't see how this $1100/year is too much; esp when the cost is associated with a core aspect of your business.

We are not talking about renting a water cooler here.

> A private repo adds more direct value

They already have private repos. The new features are permissions and a dashboard. Those particular features might be nice to haves, but for many small or midsized dev teams are not "a core aspect of [their] business."

It's not unreasonable to look at the new offerings ad say "I'm not going to pay 5x for a dashboard and better permissions."

You're right, 100 isn't too much, but it seems wasteful. We dont need 50 repos.

Drew hit the nail on the head. Couldnt have said it better.

Solved! http://github.com/blog/675-organizations-for-small-businesse...

I think it's better to start high and appear generous and in touch with your customers when you release at a new-lowest-price based on a careful gauge of customer reaction.

In other words: yeah, definitely, but I think we should stay tuned.

There's definitely room for a bronze package there.

especially as there is NO warning during the conversion process that the price will rise so dramatically. This really sucks. I just planned to upgrade to a small or medium plan but now I dont think I will, I'll probably just keep using our private gitosys setup for private repos and github for just open source. 100$/month is a LOT for just repo hosting, I can have a dedicated server with backups for that much.

Our small and medium plans are unchanged, the only price increase was for organization plans. Existing business plan customers have also been grandfathered in, they don't have to upgrade if they don't want to.

I don't understand the price argument. I happily pay more than that for services core to my workflow, and I'm not even a company, this is just for contracts I pick up every 2-3 months.

If this expense is too much for a business you are not bringing in enough cash. 45 minutes of my time pays for 1 month, it's nothing compared to the value I get from it.

I see a lot of mentions about collaborator limits, so I though I'd mention something. GitHub does not limit private collaborators. The posted limits are soft limits, and they're there to protect themselves from users that simply seek to abuse the service to use it as a shared file host, for illegal activity, etc.

The collab limits aren't soft, they're just not strictly enforced right now. We may start enforcing them at any time.

please don't kill the golden goose

Yep, github price are pretty high. Even the most basic plan, which I use for my own purpose, kind of cost a lot. I think it's something like 12/month for a couple of meg and 3 repositories with 1 collaborator.

I think it's a way to encourage open source.. while thinking that if you're a business, you can easily afford the 100$.

$5 is a lot?

edit: it's actually $7, but still

$12 / month gets you 10 repositories / 5 collaborators. I guess it's subjective but that seems pretty cheap to me.

I'd rather pay and know that the service is being run as a viable business because that gives me confidence it's going to continue existing.

The Micro (smallest) plan is actually $7/month for 5 repos and 1 collaborator. It's not cheap given that you could host an infinite number of git repos with an infinite number of collaborators on any shared host, but that's not the point.

GitHub is pretty. GitHub doesn't require you to ask for SSH keys to add someone as a collaborator. GitHub lets you comment on lines of commits. GitHub lets you host blogs/websites with GitHub pages. Etc.

Everyone's always comparing GitHub's prices to inferior products. GitHub saves you time and effort, and since most developers are highly-paid, it doesn't need to save very much time to be well worth it.

And if you do see it as too expensive, maybe you're not their target customer. If your time is only worth $10/hour, and GitHub only saves you 15 minutes per month, it's not worth it to you pay them $7/month. The solution isn't to complain about their prices though--it's to accept that it's not worth it and switch to one of those cheaper substitutes.

Well, maybe you are right about the fact that I don't use github for the good reasons. Mainly, I don't blog, host website and I don't comments on my own line of code. I mean, I'm a bit weird to use github to host my git repository. Now that I think of it, I might try to email posterious my git repository and blog on github.

I've used github before for school and yes, I was paid 0$/hour to work on those projects. Even with the "micro" package, we couldn't even be three students because only one collaborator was allowed. It's relative.. but 7$/month (~30$ for the semestry) for ~15 meg seems over priced for me.

All I'm saying is that the micro package isn't "that" micro and that you should pay for what you use. And thinking I'm not their "target" is wrong because there is more chance for me to use github later for real projects if I have used it during my university time.

But maybe you are right and I should switch to cheaper substitutes. I know lot of my colleague are doing it and more and more people on internet blog about them switching from github to other "cheaper" alternatives. In my opinion, it's way better for github to reduce their prices then to see users leave for alternatives.

How is github expensive if github is FREE!?

All you would have to do is open source your projects, and pay a big fat $0 per month. Just .gitignore your sensitive data files like database credentials, api keys, etc. If you are using something like capistrano to deploy, all you would have to do is upload these files to your server, then hook a function onto the deploy action that symlinks the sensitive files back into place.

You can't possibly complain about FREE now can you?

P.S. I love github (and pay 7 big ones a month even though I don't really have a job and am running out of money like its nobody's business)

only public repository are free. School project can hardly be public since that would be called cheating.

Here you go: http://support.github.com/discussions/accounts/709-student-a...

FWIW - isn't it kind of backwards that public code encourages cheating? Shouldn't we all be working together anyway? I have learned nearly everything I know from studying, and copy/pasting code from people better than me. What a shame =(

I think the problem is that assignments are usually don't have much variation in the end code, meaning someone stands to gain just by being able to copy public code. If the assignments were more open ended it could allow that type of class collaboration and in the end everyone could learn more.

Once again, thinking of it as ~15 megs is wrong. It's not about the 15MB you're taking up on their servers; it's about all the special stuff they put on top of it--the very nice web interface, post-receive hooks so you can find out when your friends push, and everything else.

Though you as a student are in an interesting situation (price-sensitive now but likely to be well-off once you graduate) that I think they should serve better, just from a business perspective if for no other reason.

They should really do something where if you sign up with a .edu email and promise you're a student, you can get, say 5 private repos and 5 collaborators for free/cheap.

Actually, it looks like they sort of do. If you search http://support.github.com for "student" you'll find a bunch of requests for them. One of their support guys explaining it:

>We'll give you repos for classwork where you're not allowed to share your code until the class is over. We just ask for some background... what school, classes, projects, etc."

They should make that a little better-known, though.

I actually had a big bar across the top earlier saying "Student? Get in touch."

Oh, that's one of the tips? http://github.com/blog/658-github-tips

I wish they'd put a list of those up at github.com/tips or the like.

> Even with the "micro" package, we couldn't even be three students because only one collaborator was allowed.

Why did you use private repositories for school work?

After writing an article comparing private DVCS hosting (http://journal.uggedal.com/private-dvcs-hosting) I moved to http://www.codebasehq.com/

Businesses such as mine can easily afford 100/mo but that doesn't mean we'll waste money buying way more than we need (50 repos is 3x what we'll use). I like the user/permission management part a lot. Just not the entry plan and price point.

Great to see Github being proactive

http://support.github.com/discussions/accounts/717-i-need-a-...

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