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Comment by LifeIsBio | Hacker News Reader

This is pretty cool. Anyone have thoughts as to _why_ they’re making this move?

My guess is that they're a Big Company that can land Big Contracts now and that subsidizes small teams.

I suspect Microsoft wants to capture as much developer mindshare as possible and then cross-sell Azure. Reducing/eliminating entry costs for commercial grade features helps to do that.

I'll bite: They are shifting profits to CI and service landscape. I paid for 8 seats (previous: $64, now: $32) which gave me 10 000 included CI minutes (now: 3 000). I was just at that limit. Its surprisingly hard to find what the cost per minute is after that, but I guess I can check back in a month and see what my spending ends up at.

I'm sure they have enough info about onboarding and unit economics to see how it will pay off mid to long term.

I'll happily pay for use though, it makes sense and it makes the value addition of github core vs extra more clear.

I think it depends on OS (Linux is $0.008/Minute, but macOS is a lot more - like $0.08): https://github.com/features/actions (scroll to the bottom)

Ok, so that'd cost me USD$56, leading to a higher monthly than previous pricing. So, steering users toward the Action landscape is obviously a better monetization model.

Just got an email from Github. Money quote:

> For more than 99% of customers, these changes have lowered their GitHub bills, in many cases quite dramatically. For a very small number of customers who use a large percentage of the free Actions minutes allotment each month, these changes have the potential to cause your bill to increase by $20-50/month, depending on how much you use Actions in the future. To offset that possibility, we’re adding a free credit of $500 to your organization’s GitHub account for you to use in any way you want.

The fact that they're mirroring Gitlab's offering probably suggests that Gitlab is capturing market share from them. It's probably happening more now, as companies are taking very serious looks at their expenses.

I'm sure GitHub lands a lot more Enterprise customers compared to Gitlab, but for individual users who use organizations to have a separation in repos, and smaller teams, this price change is very convincing to move to GitHub even for teams, now that private repos are free.

GitHub has significant vendor lock-in, so it makes sense to make it free to capture the market before a competitor gets traction.

[Speculation:]

Perhaps they've run the numbers and can figure out that they make enough money from enterprise clients and will make enough more money from the 'marketplace' being a channel for selling github integrations and addons to cover this cost of not trying to monetize through supporting teams.

It also moves a large base from 'customer' with needed support to free users which don't need the same level of support.

What exactly is the lock-in mechanism?

E.g. I have git repos where I use multiple remotes (1 Github, 2 Gitlab..). So git is the same as everwhere.. I never felt locked in. It's not too hard to transfer your repos to another provider.

GitHub is not git.

GitHub has pull requests, actions (mini CI integrations), other fuller integrations running off github hooks.

It's the issues, and pull requests that are the most immediate lock in. Transfer away and you lose your issues and PR history.

But more deeply it's the integrations. Even if it's all theoretically possible through other providers, if you have a working CI system set up to "just work" through GitHub then there's little chance you'll want to migrate to a different provider and have to re-do all that configuration.

Even with a dedicated dev-ops team it's weeks of disruption, not to mention the possibility to get half way through and discover something doesn't work the same way in [Competitor].

If you're up and running with github PRs driving JIRA issues and JIRA issues feeding into GitHub issues. And you have paid github marketplace integrations delivering value, then you're not going to look at a competitor unless that competitor is offering something that GitHub doesn't do.

Up to now the competitors have only differentiated on price as far as I can tell. There's certainly no killer feature of GitLab that people talk about.

> GitHub has significant vendor lock-in

Do they? Unless you're on GitHub Enterprise, migrating is just moving your repos over the weekend, setting up new webhooks, emailing everyone a command to switch their upstream URL, and hoping the new workflow works for you. For teams of <100, this it one of the easier transitions to make.

There are external services that integrate with Github but not Gitlab. (though more and more are also adding Gitlab integration)

How are you gonna migrate issues and actions?

I'm not sure about actions, but GitLab[1] and BitBucket[2] have the ability to import issues.

[1]: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/import/github.html

[2]: https://confluence.atlassian.com/get-started-with-bitbucket/...

Thanks for sharing this, I'm a GitLab community advocate, and wanted to see if you'd like to join our #GitChallenge - You share a review of GitLab vs GitHub (whether positive/negative/neutral), and we send you some swag. More info if you're interested: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/04/14/github-free-for-tea...

Exaclty this. On gitlab you can run your CI runners on anything you like. Basically start docker and forget. Curious how github actions compare.

Update: apperantly github also has self hosted runners

https://help.github.com/en/actions/hosting-your-own-runners/...

Probably to lure in early startups away from GitLab, which has this pricing model (free private repos, pay for required reviews and SSO) for a while now.

For one they have a good budget from Microsoft, secondly GitLab is good competition and thirdly I would assume they see their revenues in project.amangment and CI/CD features (tie in build workers with Azure etc.) and there is more money to make than restricting users (which can be bypassed realticely easily, while more contributors means more build hosts, means larger azure bills)

The cynical thought would be drive usage of Github specific features/integrations to increase lock-in

Extinguishing the competition. It's not even the first time. Remember Internet Explorer?

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