It is weird, isn’t it? GitHub was the first SaaS I ever subscribed to out of my own pocket. Spotify was the next one.

My guess is they built a very expensive system for the kind of scale they support. It's all RoR and sharded mysql right? Considering how dynamic it is, the resources to power that must be mind boggling.

The weird part is that they were actually profitable before they started taking funding. [1][2]

[1]: https://signalvnoise.com/posts/2486-bootstrapped-profitable-... [2]: https://a16z.com/2012/07/09/software-eats-software-developme...

Plus they have very large private enterprise instances of github.

Does it matter? Twitter isn't profitable, Youtube isn't profitable. Nothing in capitalism is really profitable, or it sometimes seems. Most wealth is just ownership of speculative profit or return. But if you have profit, you're doing something wrong because you ought to be re-investing that to create more future speculative profit.

Anyway, they likely could have remained unprofitable for a long time instead of doing this.