Github: Free micro plan for a month | Hacker News Reader

Github: Free micro plan for a month

github.com

79 pointsbradly40 comments

I really wish Github charged by users and disk space only, and quit with the private repo count limit added on top of that.

We wanted to use Github at the (small) company I work for, but we have tons of tiny, low-traffic repos. Since Github limits repo count, regardless of how low-resource they are, we flat out cannot use them, period.

Bitbucket has the right idea - number of repos is completely meaningless. Make it unlimited and charge only by meaningful metrics, like user count. Unfortunately, their shift to that plan came too late for us, as we put in the effort of self-hosting. Still, there's that special something Github has that Bitbucket lacks, and we would still consider migrating to Github if only they dropped the arbitrary repo count limit.

Just had that conversation... Everybody charges per repo and that's pointless. Charge for disk space and let us have unlimited repos. I would sign up for monthly plan then.

Github wants to price discriminate between serious users who can afford to pay more, and casual users. Projects with a high development budget (e.g. complex software projects) don't necessarily use more disk space than someone's personal website, so disk space isn't a good way of price discriminating.

On the other hand, organizations with a high dev tool budget are probably more likely, on average, to have more private repos. So it's in Github's best interest to charge by repo count, until they figure out a better way of discriminating between customers.

I'd like github to differentiate between private and public repos more, to make the private repo feel more secure. Now I have to look twice to make sure the repo is private. I would also like to have a way to say - this repo can NEVER be made public, and neither can forks.

Charging by users seems like the most obvious discriminator between casual and large budget, not number of repos.

I for one would buy a micro plan if its only limit was 1 collaborator, but for now I will stick to bitbucket (kiln is free for 1 collaborator in case anyone didn't know through the student and startup edition).

I asked Tom from github about this when I met him. Apparently they hear it a lot. He had two responses. The first was that they didn't want to commoditize their service, which they thought competing on disk space would do. The second is that they limiting private repos made people upgrade, and provided most of their revenue.

I really don't like the response. git encourages a repo-per project, but github discourages it with their plans. This impedance mismatch means I don't use github for private hosting, only for open source projects, where there is no such mismatch.

... so it's a 30 day free trial?

I love GitHub (and am a happy micro plan subscriber), but this deal just seems... well... kinda yawn.

The deal seems yawn because as micro-plan subscribers, we're not able to take benefit of it!

If I hadn't a micro plan already, I would definitely give it a try.

So would I, and I did! Sweet nectar baby.

Or maybe we're just testing out a new feature we just built that might be a bit bigger than 30-days free micro before we start pushing it out more.

You never know.

You never know.

Exactly, so I might as well be committing to signing up for a paid plan.

EDIT: Not trying to be snarky, I'm a ridiculously happy micro subscriber, just don't see the real appeal of this...

The obvious guess would be coupon codes (?).

Looks like there's a CSS bug on /account/billing - the coupon rows probably shouldn't change background colour on hover.

Agreed. Bitbucket offers unlimited private (and pubilc as well) repos for up to 5 committers. Github is great for public repos though. It would be great if github offered one free private repo (up to x committers) as well.

Github, you can do better ! It feels like we're being offered to test drive a free trial deal which ought to exist anyway.

Really? We're going to complain about something that's free? Oh yeah, it's the Internet.

I don't remember pressing an 'Add Complaint' button. It's my opinion and we can agree to disagree.

I disagree. I guess we can't agree to disagree as to whether or not we can agree to disagree.

As a neutral observer (who did not downmod you, btw), your post did come across as oh-so-slightly whiney. I pay for Github. I don't care that they are offering Micro free.

What would be awesome is if they sent you a subscriber-only shirt after every 12 paid months or something, though. I don't actually use private repositories; I pay for the micro plan just to show my support :)

its more of a commentary on the account plans that github has. compare it to pretty much every other github competitor, and they almost unilaterally provide at least one free private repo.

Given that github is already completely free for public repositories, I think they already have a suitable test drive offering.

I'm new to DVCS, and I recently setup a Bitbucket account which offers free unlimited space and repositories. Github does seem to be far more popular, though. What makes Github better and worth paying for?

I haven't used bitbucket much, but things like the Compare view make Github really nice:

https://github.com/rails/rails/compare/v3.0.2...3-0-stable

Github Pages are really useful. Maintaining a project site is really easy when you can just create a gh-pages branch and push to it to update your site.

Also, network effects are undeniably part of the appeal. I'm much more likely to hack on a project or library if I can fork it on Github. It makes for a nice workflow.

It's more a matter of git vs. mercurial than Github vs. Bitbucket.

Hm, I guess I disagree — http://hg-git.github.com We have a ton of mercurial users on GitHub using hg every day.

Sure, I totally agree. But going the other way is much less practical/pleasant. hg-git is one of the things Github has going for it.

I don't know anything about the guys behind Bitbucket. I have used a ton of software (not to mention config files!) that GitHub puts out as open source. So I support them.

Oh, and the interface is gorgeous, BitBucket's feels really tacky. There aren't many outages, and an outage has yet to actually affect me.

Just really happy with GitHub in general.

GitHub is popular for the free open-source hosting, which offers limitless free repositories. The only catch is that anyone can view them.

When you pay GitHub money, then you get non-public repositories.

"Black Friday. Cyber Monday. But have you heard of Octocat Wednesday? Probably not because I just made that up. Lucky for you we're also making up the prices around here for the next week."

Their copy-writing is first rate.

Considering i could keep my private repo from the beta until i accidentally deleted it (empty repo) this is a good deal for us that do not use github enough to warrant paying monthly but does appreciate it. I just made my self 5 private empty repoes named private1-5. I can just rename them and put them to use when i need them and most likely they will persist (or just become public?) when the free month runs out. Not that i wouldn't want to pay GitHub for their awesome service but when you're a unemployed student with bills to pay i'd rather have food on my table one more day than private repos.

Should probably add that i would pay for a plan if i needed private repos, but this is nice since i get stuff i don't need and don't have to pay for. Freebies are awesome :-)

Check out gitosis. It's a little bit of a pain to get set up correctly, but once you've done that, adding new repositories is a breeze.

School projects tend to be proliferous and need to be private, which doesn't mesh well with GitHub. I'm mostly just paying them for a micro plan because I think the service is cool.

gitolite is a much-improved fork of gitosis, "backed" by Fedora for use in their repos, and IMO is much easier and nicer to setup to configure.

Ah, thanks. We just restructured our servers in my house, so I need to move gitosis over to a different machine anyway. Might as well try out gitolite instead.

Gitolite has very easy to follow instructions to get it up and running. (Hosted at Github!) Also interesting is that VPS account + Gitolite is cheaper (perhaps more practical for smallish businesses - if you're only interested in hosting git repos) than a Github account.

Hmm that is quite smart yeah. The smallest Linode VPS accounts are actually quite cheap yeah.. I see they have removed their smallest instance though. But i guess any other good VPS host will work. Hosting git repoes does not exactly take a lot of oompfh.

Ah cool, combining that with those free one year EC2 instances would get you free and secure git hosting for a year. Don't you just love free offers?

In the comments on the blog they noted that they will lock the repositories when the trial expires.

Aha, so much for my plan then eh? Was just counting on what i experienced having a account from whenever the beta started. :-) Clever move by them.

Weird, somehow there are two thread about this, even though the submitted URLs appear identical. Didn't think that was supposed to be possible.

Anyway, cross-posting from the other thread:

> This is brilliant. Get tons of people who current just use GitHub for public repos to put up some private ones, then in a month send them an email saying "start paying, or we'll take away your private repos". People are lazy, so a lot of people once they've already put the repos up won't want to move them.

Inertia was working against them; this gets it working for them.

If you need a git server for your company, why not set up Gitorious?

The initial setup can be quite challenging, but I found this guide to be quite useful: http://cjohansen.no/en/ruby/setting_up_gitorious_on_your_own...

I have been on the fence about getting a private account. I'm now officially sold.

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