GitHub Enterprise is now free through Microsoft for Startups
github.blog
github.blog
So it's not really free.
How does this compare with Gitlab and Bitbucket offerings for small teams?
I know Bitbucket has a one-time payment option for their self-hosted version of $10 for 10 users. Pretty hard to beat that, unless you're adamant you need it hosted for you.
That requirement is a pretty substantial difference.
(disclosure: I work for MS)
Random screenshot I was able to find on their help page. Seems to be that the pricing for github enterprise is around $21/month/user.
https://help.github.com/assets/images/help/organizations/sta...
Would be nice if you could have, say, 5 users and extend the 2 years by not using all $1k monthly credits, adding users as you grow.
But if I had to guess, $1000 is probably in the 95th+ percentile of spending for teams <20 (or any sufficiently small group) -> thus this is letting startups spend on Github resources without worrying about running out of credits for two years
That's kind of extremist, isn't it?
Plenty of startups are bootstrapped, one or two people, and can survive just fine using basic tooling. The free offerings from Gitlab and Bitbucket (which include private repos) are just fine for a lot of startups.
Not all startups are your VC backed unicorns.
> This is very generous of MS/GH to offer
Is it? It's really just an attempt to lock you into a proprietary system that you cannot export your data out of nor easily move off of down the road.
If you’re not making enough in 2 years to pay for basic biz expenses, you’re a hobby and you shouldn’t expect enterprise features (SSO for example) for free in perpetuity.
I also find that second position extremist.
The GH API covers a lot of what `git` doesn't. GH's strategy has never been lock-in. They provide a good service that's constantly improving. (I'm sure other services have advantages and I'm in no way going to claim that GH is the best in class, but I am continually happy with GH and with its continued improvement.)
From MS's side, of course it's a lock-in strategy. The whole "MS for Startups" thing is a way to attract small companies to their platform and keep them there until they've grown to a point that switching away is more work than it's worth. Adding GH Enterprise to the offering just makes it more attractive.
> Designed for: "Funded: Product Market Fit"
> The qualified offer is designed to help companies that are focused on growth, so it’s less applicable for consultancies and small businesses.
It's not designed for smaller bootstrapped businesses and other scenarios that would involve 5 users for extended periods of time
the entire enterprise feature set seems uncharacteristically less polished in some places, the UX is confusing throughout and things you'd think you could do in the enterprise dashboard being elsewhere in the organization settings
VC backed? Ya, you'd probably just pay someone else to handle it - it's not your money after all...
Bootstrapping with a friend as a side gig until you have something viable... you're probably going to go with the free/cheapest option possible - scaling up as necessary and not a second before.
Running your own infrastructure doesn’t cost nothing.
That's not what the Github page says.
> [..] we’re announcing that GitHub Enterprise is now included in Microsoft for Startups, a free program [..]
Am I reading in the wrong place? Or just reading it wrong?
They're giving select startups $1,000 monthly in free credits used to pay for GitHub Enterprise. That $1,000 isn't in addition to GH Enterprise being free.
It's unknown, but seems implied, if you can apply unused credits to their CI/CD and other offerings.
Sort of like their free Student offering which includes Azure, and others to get students hooked on using GitHub & Company products.
Is there a feeling that B2C isn’t a “real” business? Or maybe because B2B startups are more likely to be acquired by larger companies, thus absorbing Microsoft’s stack?
I’m not entirely sure what “validated equivalent” entails, but I take it to mean they’re interested in VC-funded companies, not bootstrapp{ed,ing}, angel-funded, or crowd-funded companies
Your acquisition hypothesis seems quite likely to me; it would be naïve to believe that Microsoft would offer such value out of the kindness of their hearts.
I don’t want to sound bitter: If one has a business that qualifies and is okay with adopting a Microsoft stack, it seems like a great value. However, let’s not give MSFT too many PR creds for being a selfless charitable organization who is ‘looking out for the little girl’ in business, because they’re simply not. They’re a for-profit corporation.
Validated equivalent means that you don't necessarily need to be a company on the fundraising path in order to make it into the program.
So if a self-funded company comes to us and shows they have sales traction, then we can take them to our field sales team, make a target list of companies, and get them intro'd to the right accounts to close deals.
No, this is not out of the goodness of our hearts (although I do know my team has good hearts also :).
The point of the program is to get companies on Azure (a strong platform from a technical perspective), and the best way to keep companies on Azure is to provide value via technology and sales.
If you're closing more deals with us, you will have to consume more Azure in order to service those deals.
Win, meet win.
P.S: On the side, I run a community for profit-driven entrepreneurs who have not raised venture: http://inflectioncommunity.com
The funding thing is a bit restrictive (speaking as a currently-bootstrapping founder), but I understand that it would be very challenging filtering out scammers and not-serious users otherwise. It's easy to put up a nice-looking website and then spend the (pretty generous) credits on unrelated work.
I don't think anything here is especially nefarious, given how public they are about the restrictions and goals. Think of it as closer to an accelerator than a charity, if it helps frame the program better in your mind.
I even created a community for these types of companies http://inflectioncommunity.com
Maybe that wasn't clear from the language, but the thought is that we can only really introduce you to sales leads once you've figured out product market fit.
If you don't have product market fit and a sales rep starts introducing you to leads, it's not going to end well for anyone.
It's not really about scammers (I can't remember an internal conversation that centered around people scamming the program), more about making sure it's going to be useful partnership.
We are focused on B2B companies (for now) because those are the companies we can best support.
Microsoft has a vast partner network, enterprise field sales team, and marketplace, where mostly B2B customers interact.
We decided to leverage that network for startups in order to push sales their way (hence the $1BN in sales pipeline we are pushing in 2020 to startups), in addition to the other technology benefits (Azure, Dynamics, Office 365, Power Platform, Github, etc).
Eventually we will come up with a focused solution for B2C businesses, but for now, we realize our limitations and are focused on where we can best be helpful!
Info in BIO if you have any questions!!
This looks like it is free as in price, but not free forever and not free of red tape.
I do have a huge amount of frustration with GL's open core system where it seems they use a dartboard for deciding what level to make open source, or ultra-enterprise $$$$, and their issue tracker is the definition of chaos, but nothing's perfect, I guess.
A lot of words to say that I agree with you: short of your team/company already being locked into the GH world, I can't imagine going back to GH
I also like the Azure Portal web panel. Powershell in the browser is fun to play with on simulations of clusters.
If some start up is working on some novel ML algorithms, that has some nice demos out in the public showcasing their work, I wonder if these bigger companies would take a peek at the source code and use some ideas from the algos for their ml products. This would prevent start-up from expanding into other areas.
Does that happen when you use AWS or Azure? Enterprise is a completely different ball game, be it Microsoft, Google or Amazon.
The amount of value they will get by peeking will be insignificant as compared to the reputation loss they will suffer from enterprise customers.
GitHub's CLI is a move to get people off the open source solution by obfuscation.
"Open source" is often used to appear more "friendly" to outsiders. Something can be open source and still be used to lock people into a particular environment. Case in point: Chromium, Android, etc.
The "hub" project they have (which I haven't heard of anyone using) is like that yes.
The CLI is not https://github.com/cli/cli From their own docs: "While both tools bring GitHub to the terminal, hub behaves as a proxy to git and gh is a standalone tool."
This offering is specifically for Enterprise Cloud, which they host.
The FAQs for Microsoft for Startups [1] list the following requirements:
- You must be engaged in development of a software-based product or service that will form a core piece of you current or intended business - this software must be owned, not licensed.
- You cannot have received more than $10,000 of free Azure in the past.
- Your headquarters must reside in the countries covered by our Azure global infrastructure.
- You must be a privately held company.
- You must operate a public website on your own domain.
- Your contact email address domain must match your public website.
- Your funding information must be verifiable.
The FAQs also add that:
> The qualified offer is designed to help companies that are focused on growth, so it’s less applicable for consultancies and small businesses. If you are a small business or consultancy you can get started with a free trial.
[1]: https://startups.microsoft.com/en-us/benefits/#faq
Note also that Microsoft’s new offer is for GitHub Enterprise Cloud, not self-hosted GitHub Enterprise. GitLab is probably your best bet for a self-hosted GitHub alternative. [2]
For OSS, I really like Github, and honestly even moreso since the Microsoft purchase, since there has been some actual progress.
For non-OSS though, I favour Azure DevOps over Github (despite the silly name) - they have a very generous free plan that includes pricing repos and build time on Windows, Linux and MacOS build agents. The CI/CD side of it really is fantastic - I've used Travis, Appveyor, GitLab and Jenkins, but Azure DevOps is just so much more capable.
With Microsoft buying Github, I'm actually kind of worried about what is going going to happen with Azure DevOps - it really is a great platform, and I hope Microsoft don't end up replacing it with Github...
On GitLab, you can decide to download all your data anytime and put it into a selfhosted GitLab instance.
Why would I want to give that up and put my balls into the hands of Microsoft?
People disagreeing with you and/or opposing the free offerings of a company known for embrace/extend/extinguish does not mean they're astroturfing.
It's ok, you just work there. No need to get angry.
Also, while I have you, could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines too: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for others to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...