If you can't afford to start paying after 2 years, it's time to give up or pivot. This is very generous of MS/GH to offer until you've got traction.
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.