If Dropbox Used GitHub’s Pricing Plan | Hacker News Reader

If Dropbox Used GitHub’s Pricing Plan

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295 pointsjoshuacc133 comments

Dropbox is targeting a B2C market and started with poor twenty-somethings.

Github, and virtually every other thing that costs more than $20 a month, targets primarily a B2B market. It might be popular with some local poor 20-somethings, but honestly, you're just an infection vector to get your day job on board.

The pricing is designed to extract maximum value out of business customers. If they have 125 simultaneous projects, they officially have More Money Than God. "The price of a residential Internet connection" is not a pricing anchor to them. (Should they need one, they're probably going to be persuaded by "We have 500 man-years of labor in our projects, one man-month costs us $15k, lemme break out Excel for a minute, oh it seems all my options cost pigeon poop.")

I strongly, strongly encourage you to listen to the Mixergy video about Wufoo or talk to anyone who runs a SaaS business if you do not understand where most of the money is likely getting made. That topmost plan which costs $$$$$ prints money, primarily from people who don't need all that it offers and couldn't care less because it costs less than pigeon poop on their scales.

If you don't use Github for your projects because $100 is a lot of money for you that's perfectly fine for Github because it does not make them meaningfully worse off.

I assume that what the poor twenty-somethings actually want is the interface since alternatives like Gitosis and Gitolite are cheap and cheery, but unpopular amongst that crowd. If that is the case however, then I am surprised noone has made a FOSS clone duplicating the interface ideas.

However your argument doesn't explain why there is not even a single private repo free tier. That wouldn't canibalize their B2B tiers at all, while keeping a lot of very small developers happy.

It's very easy to message "Free for OSS, paid for other folks", and it prevents you from having a failure to convert moment when a) you start using Github internally at a job/startup/etc and b) you need to add the second repo. If you then have to go get authorization for a purchase, you might do something stupid like a) migrate or b) cheat, rather than go through the authorization process, because you've got work to do today.

It is much easier to say "Look, you know Github, you like Github. You want to use Github for work? Get them to fork out for it. No, not fork(1). fork($)"

Hypothetically suppose a particular company's advantage is UI/UX. If this is true, that company is in less than zero danger of getting FOSSed.

You are probably correct.

I don't even know why I like GitHub as much as I do. I have decided not to pay them as I can't really justify the amount (Dollars are not cheap in Africa) - so I host my repos on one of my Linodes and have them backed up to S3 every day. This works perfectly well, and I have no problems doing it, yet I feel like I am missing out on not having them tucked away on GitHub.

I suppose the feeling is similar to my feelings of Linux vs OSX. There is nothing (apart from Photoshop) that I cant do just as well on Linux, but I still feel like I am missing out by not being on OSX.

Its probably just that it seems all the "Cool People" are using GitHub.

We love Github, we pay for Github, we host a private instance of Github on our network for which I am sure Github is going to charge us any day, we've even done work for Github.

But we won't host our public code on Github, because then Github has a nonzero chance of ranking higher on Google for "Matasano" than "www.matasano.com".

So I know the feeling.

Wow, though: internal Github one of the all-time no-brainer best purchases we've made.

What's that, you say? We could run something called "gitosis" and not pay thousands of dollars for a prettier UI on fundamentally free software? FIND MY PITCHFORK. LIGHT THE TORCHES. BURN THE HERETIC.

And we don't have more money than god. The pricing dynamics work the same way for software startups as for BigCos. There's another thread going on right now where at least one person made a (facetious, I think) case that developers ought to ask for the '11 MBP upgrade if they have the '10 MBP, because the cost is a rounding error compared to their salary. And nothing Github sells costs more than an MBP.

Genuinely curious: why don't you just make all your apps public on github? Note that you can still explicitly state your license terms so why wouldn't that be a reasonable choice?

I am ashamed of the code in some of the older ones, and I don't trust that certain of my clients to keep to our maintenance contracts in others.

Certainly there are some which I would feel okay about sharing the code. But since there is a non-zero chance of there being security holes in the apps, I think the risk could be too great.

I understand that making the code public could result in patches from other people using it, but I just don't think anyone else would be interested in using for that reason.

gitorious is a pretty good FOSS alternative to github. It doesn't support private repositories at all, but you can host your own server and make it not public (which is what I'm doing for my projects).

That's what I considered doing. And then I thought about the amount of time I'd have to spend setting up and maintaining that server. And what if I wanted to give my friend access to some of my projects. And what if I wanted to give a client read only access to a certain repo. And what about backup and ssh keys and ...

.. and then I realised, github does all this for me, and for $50/m or something for an org account, and that is an absolute no brainer for a working professional. I cannot fathom these complaints about $22/m or what not. If you have enough knowledge to participate on HN and that amount of money is meaningful to you, you're doing something wrong.

"And then I thought about the amount of time I'd have to spend setting up and maintaining that server. And what if I wanted to give my friend access to some of my projects. And what if I wanted to give a client read only access to a certain repo. And what about backup and ssh keys and ..."

I already had a server setup with redmine and some other internal services that I needed, so the added overhead for backups and so forth was pretty minimal.

I also want to keep control over any privileged client data and not trust them to "the cloud".

For sharing repos I grant people access to the corresponding redmine project (I have a script set up that make accessing things from there trivial, and redmine has support for private projects).

But yes. $50/month is really very cheap and if I didn't have my privacy concerns with github, and the problem of integrating it with my other services, I would probably use that.

I share your concerns about data security etc, and I didn't make the decision lightly - in fact I used to host my own git repos (raw git, not web sites like gitorious). However, my trust in them grew in time and when genuine rock stars like Aman Gupta joined them (I use his stuff everywhere) I realised their brain trust far exceeded my own. They can probably do a better job than I can of keeping my data safe. And paying them for it helps; I'm just one customer but collectively we keep the lights on over there and I know they take it seriously.

Anyway YMMV but out of all the outsourcing decisions I've had to make recently, github was one of the easiest.

Pricing aside, I love redmine. I use it over GitHub, just because I like it better than GitHub.

You can also want to have your own server, because you don't want to need to trust Github, or because you think that rolling your own is fun and makes you learn.

I assume that what the poor twenty-somethings actually want is the interface since alternatives like Gitosis and Gitolite are cheap and cheery, but unpopular amongst that crowd

Don't forget the network effects. With github it's very easy to contribute code to another project using github.

It's like Facebook vs. $UNPOPULAR_SOCIAL_NETWORK. Sure, you might not like facebook's page layout and $OTHER_NETWORK has a nicer layout, but you can only take to you mum on facebook, so it doesn't matter.

> Sure, you might not like facebook's page layout and $OTHER_NETWORK has a nicer layout, but you can only take to you mum on facebook, so it doesn't matter.

I think that's a pretty strong selling point for $OTHER_NETWORK to be honest.

Not to disregard what you wrote, I just wanted to add that I don't think this post wanted to objectively compare the github and dropbox pricing models.

IMO he just wanted to show how ridiculous (in his opinion) the github model is by applying it to dropbox.

Thanks. I get a lot of crap from people who think I should push back on guests based on their pricing or other decisions. But I prefer to study why people make the decisions they make and how the results turn out.

It's not uncommon for small businesses and contractors to have 30+ repositories, each of which are very small. It doesn't mean they have more money than god, they're being screwed by the pricing model.

We switched to a different host that allows 10 "active" repositories and unlimited archived. In other words, Github is worse off because they are losing business by failing to create a viable plan for all audiences.

Edit: Of course we could purchase their most expensive plan and live happily (but broke). My point was that their pricing model works well for most companies but not for contractors or small businesses with many small projects.

You can literally install a fully private instance of Github on your own network for less than the cost of a laptop per person†. That is the absolute most expensive option Github offers, we took it, and we don't feel remotely "screwed". This whole thread is a perfect illustration of why HN is a terrible place to get pricing advice.

Salary is the gating cost factor for software companies. For things that actually work and actually improve the working day, it is simply not worth dickering over things that cost tiny fractions of what fully loaded headcount costs.

Now, it's absolutely true that not everything that costs $Enterprise/yr really works or improves lives, and you can't go shouldering these costs willy-nilly. But some things clearly are worth it. For a lot of companies, Github is one of those things.

If it's not worth that much for you, Github isn't screwing you. They simply aren't selling to you. Go somewhere else. But think about not hurling epithets at them, just because they aren't catering to people who derive less value from them than their core customers.

† (Depending on how often you refresh laptops; we do it a lot.)

If you are able to do this kind of infrastructure work, there are literally multiple git managers which are free (libre and gratis!) and just as powerful for developers. My employer, OSUOSL, deploys an internal gitolite and we do just fine.

Gitolite only does a tiny fraction of what github offers. The two really aren't directly comparable. Gitolite is purely a code hosting system, github allows you to collaborate, view code with an awesome viewer, make comments and much more.

Now that I think of it, it would actually be pretty easy to write a github-archive tool that would clone a repo, compress it, push to s3, then delete from github using the API. It could even do the reverse, as well.

At first glance it would seem like github is "leaving money on the table". But if Patrick is right then their time is better spent strategizing maximum value from the high end rather than devote time to getting your $10 dollars.

30+ repos in your case would be the Gold plan @ $100.00 a month. How much do you think is fair? If you have 30 client repos per month please tell me you are charging more per client than the $40 dollars it's going to take to host the project in github for a year.

And if you aren't making money hand over fist with these hundreds of apps people are apparently creating and hosting on github .... make them public. I have 13 repos in github, all public. Most of them are all attempts at commercial products. Nobody gives two peanuts about my code.

Obviously I can't speak to your financial situation, but a year's worth of GitHub Gold is about a man-week of overhead from an entry level person, so if it makes one person 2% faster (or two people 1% faster) then it's worth it.

Do you mean one of these videos?

http://mixergy.com/wufoo-kevin-hale/

http://mixergy.com/wufoo-sold-for-35-mil-heres-the-story-beh...

> The pricing is designed to extract maximum value out of business customers. If they have 125 simultaneous projects, they officially have More Money Than God.

Have you used Git? Perhaps the most natural way to use it is to have each thing that is independently deployed have its own repository. So, where I work, in my one-man department, I have 40 repositories, and that is so low because there are some things that are in one big repository that should logically be separate repositories.

For instance, our internal reporting system is one repository now. Many of the reports in it should be separate repositories. If those were all split out in the way that best fits the way the code is actually related, developed, and deployed, I'd have about 40 more repositories.

I also have a bunch of tools and scripts that are not under source code control, but should be. If I got that stuff organized into logically related projects, I'd have maybe another 40 repositories.

And all of this only needs maybe 300 megabytes of storage. I'm not using Github for work not because we cannot afford $200/month (we could, although we are about as far from "More Money Than God" as you can get), but because no way am I spending $200/month for 300 megabytes of storage.

> So, where I work, in my one-man department, I have 40 repositories, and that is so low because there are some things that are in one big repository that should logically be separate repositories.

In my small (12-person) design agency we have 244 repositories and we have a custom plan with Github just to pay for it. Other than rent and hosting, it's the most expensive thing that we pay for on a monthly basis.

I'd like to just stop using Github for older projects but it's not worth the headache on the off-chance that an old client pops up and needs a five-minute change that we can't then just cap deploy.

I understand the business side of this, of course. We're paying the money, so it must be a good idea for Github. However, we do have the time and inclination to find a cheaper way of doing it, and once we do, will Github's pricing be in their best interest? I guess time will tell.

<i>In my small (12-person) design agency we have 244 repositories and we have a custom plan with Github just to pay for it. Other than rent and hosting, it's the most expensive thing that we pay for on a monthly basis.</i>

And how about wages for 12 employees?

We don't pay our employees monthly.

repositoryhosting.com charges a flat $6/month + $1/gb after the first two.

bitbucket.com charges not based on storage but on the number of people who have access to them (which seems to be a much better proxy to me). Seems a much better system to me.

Anyone considered the possibility that github doesn't have the tooling to charge by disk usage? That would practically require them to add quotas, and tracing information so you could determine (read: audit) where space is used in your repositories.

Strangely enough - as one who works in a midsized enterprise company, I think, sometimes, the approach is almost the opposite. When evaluating these services, a conversation like the following takes place:

  IT Manager: "I'd like to start hosting our repositories on GitHub"
  IT Director: "What's our CapEx/OpEx exposure, our 2011 non-headcount 
               Budget is getting capped at $12 million."
  IT Manager:" Well, the Platinum Plan is $200/month."
  IT Director: Stares for a second at the manager.  "Why are you wasting my time.  
               Just put it on your P-Card and move on."

Seriously - I'm guessing many of of you don't have exposure to how much money all these thousands and thousands of companies pay for incredibly crappy software that does very little, but is the "Safe" Enterprise choice. If GitHub can win those accounts, great - but I'm dubious that at $200/month there is any cost review at all - they could increase their charges by 10x and _still_ not lose more than a couple of enterprise business deals on cost.

I sometimes wonder if Atlassian hurts itself by charging less than $100K for its products, and whether they would be able to pick up the large enterprise deals if they could figure out how to put together $800K RFPs. Their competition certainly does for software that is significantly inferior.

IT Director: "Does it have an SLA?"

IT Manager: "Huh? Never saw one, let me check.... nope. SLA is soo Web 1.0. Look at all these features, and it's cheap!"

IT Director: "Then we can't use it."

IT Manager: "Grumble"

Re: Atlassian: putting together and pushing $800k RFPs through the sales cycle requires hiring sales people and is a distinctly different flavor of business from "monthly billing CC# of pseudo-anonymous customers we never met and at most talked with through email". The second is a favourite of engineer-founded modern startups. No messy customer relations to deal with outside of support contact, selling through data-driven conversion pipelines. Not one of the old-school golf-playing suit wearing dudes around. Basically a "by engineers for engineers" company. Note that I'm not deriding it, I'm just trying to capture its flavor.

I'm not sure about Atlassian, but I wouldn't be surprised if they're like that, given that they behave like one.

We're trying to fundamentally change how people write, collaborate, and discover code and the sooner people stop thinking of us as just a repo depository, the better, because we've never been about that.

Ask yourself what kind of markup we'd have to charge on storage space and still be able to grow our business when most of the repos we host are less than 1 MB.

We charge what we do because it makes money. Money that allows us to continue hiring really talented people that are all focused on building an even better service.

Doing things like including private repos with our free plan would eat into our margins and only satisfy the people that are likely to never convert to a paid plan. Frankly, I think being able to use all of the tools we provide for the price of a pint of Guinness every month is a damn good deal.

I laughed at the article, but you have a really good point. If you have 30 projects and only want a place to put your code, you're far better off just using a private server, which you undoubtedly already have. If you have a development culture that is well-modeled by how GitHub approaches collaboration, that's where you'll see a lot of added value over a private server.

I think the tough part is that GitHub's innovations in collaboration are primarily a huge win for open source. GitHub makes discovery of these projects so much easier, connects disparate people across communities (and countries!), and provides a unified technical stack and process "stack" for those people to contribute (same bug trackers, same "send me a pull request" approach, same wiki). That's something that's a pretty big deal for OSS.

Most of those issues aren't as big a deal for a business in my experience - most businesses either don't have such problems (discovery) or have their own solutions (process). But hey - you guys have got customers, you're hiring like crazy, and I love your stack personally; I'm certainly not judging! Just offering my perspective on why some folks might not buy in to the collaboration stuff from a business point of view.

I'm a happy GitHub customer and your service is worth every penny. Keep building awesome stuff!

Storage is cheap, I think archival for private projects would appease most people.

More private repos with the paid plans would definitely keep me paying and might convince others to pay.

It's just extremely frustrating to not be a Github customer because the pricing model is completely unworkable.

The little company I work at would love to host our repos on Github and pay for a plan appropriate for our level of use. But according to Github pricing, we're "Platinum" solely because of our repo count, even though our level of traffic and space usage is tiny.

It's hard to say that it's "wrong", because clearly things are working well for Github, but those of us who have been intentionally left out don't have to be happy about it.

Nerds are so cheap it's ridiculous.

Let's look at the standard plans for smaller teams - it maxes at $22/month for 20 private repos and 10 collaborators. Not bad.

On the business side the max is 125 repos for $200/month.

Even in the midwest a full time dev costs say at least $4,000 a month. Assuming you have a team of 10-20 devs, that is what $40,000 - $80,000 a month.

So, at the high end to keep your team of 10-20 devs happy it costs you an extra $200 a month on top of the $40k+ you are spending in salary and so forth. Drop in the bucket.

And if you're an indie dev and you can't afford $22/month for awesome code hosting for all your projects, you are the kind of cheapskate that you might as well look elsewhere. Also, there are a TON of options out there like bitbucket, assembla, and so on if you want "cheaper" hosting.

Seriously, you could put out a crappy android app that makes you $100 a month in a weekend and that pays for your github hosting.

Why complain?

This is what the internet does.

I've grown up with a price point of $0.

Well you're just going to have to un-grow out of that delusion because in the real world absolutely nothing is free.

Wrong.

The vast majority of the world is free. Friendships are free. Families are free. Nature is free (in Canada, much of it is). Not really the free you're looking for?

Feel free to walk around on public property and enjoy your right to free speech (talking to people is free). Local libraries have free books and free internet, the news is free (CBC), although I'll grant you that these are run by the government but if you're living a near $0 life you're probably not paying a lot of taxes. Running for MP (federal government) here isn't quite free but the $500 you get back at the end unless you don't fill in some forms properly. Facebook is free, Google is free, Hacker News is free... Although these are ad-supported. There's a whole world of free stuff available through .torrent but I'll admit most of that others would like not to be free. How about free music? Jamendo? Wrong sort of free? How about buskers or my neighbours that play guitar and classical music on their balcony (they're actually pretty good).

Oh, you mean other stuff? A $0 price point isn't far off of where many internet services are headed. EC2 is incredibly cheap. Compare that to what a server cost even ten years ago. Name your backbone service: it's aiming for free and making it up in volume.

The $0 price point is not a delusion.

> Families are free.

Ha. Hahaha. Hahahahaha.

Haha. Ok ok, children cost $166k in Canada to raise: http://www.ccsd.ca/factsheets/family/

It is possible to have a family that doesn't cost you money. Having kids is expensive...

"Family" is a bad example. True.

Family costs you money/time because relationships are a two way street. You help people and they help you.

You might not pay in dollars all the time, but you're always paying.

Friendships are a two way street. So is family. You can not hold up your end of the "deal", but see how long that lasts.

Talking to people costs time (something we all have a limited supply of).

Nature and public property? Really? Do you also not pay taxes in Canada? Free speech isn't free, it costs (and continues to cost) lives (and, again, tax for government, judiciary...)

It doesn't sound like you've ever actually run an EC2 cluster either. It's 10 cent/hour for a large instance (2 ECU, 7.5GB RAM) which is close to 900 dollars a year per machine. This is not even close to free.

Films and music have never been free, you just haven't been paying for them. There's a difference.

Just because you don't pay for something doesn't mean it's free. Some of the people can scrounge some of the time, but all of the people can't scrounge all of the time.

The problem is the cost per repo... Some people would rather have a lot of small repos to hold all their random stuff, instead of trying to stuff them into a larger repo to save money.

I have personal projects at home that I've started and don't want to release yet. (Maybe not ever.) I'd love to put them on someone else's machine as a backup. But at those prices, it's not worth it.

Even as a business, there's probably a lot of little utilities that could have their own repos, but they don't get modified much, so they don't really need them. Github isn't an option for that scenario.

As for 'Why complain?'? Because money doesn't really grow on trees. Rich people get rich by spending their money wisely.

So buy a $10/month 256MB VPS with 80g of diskspace and go nuts.

RepositoryHosting.com, $6/month, unlimited repos, 2GB and $1 extra per GB

xp-dev.com $5/month 2GB

Try $15 a YEAR and 10-15 gigs disk space if you can set up your own git repository and web front end. See some low cost VPS hosting providers at http://www.lowendbox.com/

And no backups :) Just saying, having a low end VPS is not exactly the perfect solution

Well you have backups of the repositories on the local machine.

So really in this case it shouldn't matter.

A small personal project without collaboration does not really get much value out of GitHub anyway. If you want a backup just rsync it somewhere.

Except that I'm a creature of habit, and I like GitHub... If one of my repos is there, I want them all there. I don't want to have to think about which host I put it on.

Fair enough, but you're asking GitHub to substantially undercut their bottom line by orienting towards individual private repos rather than business private repos. If people keep complaining loudly enough maybe they'll make some adjustments, but I wouldn't hold your breath.

You like github, you just don't want to pay them?

I like GitHub, and I am currently paying them, but I would rather their pricing structure match my needs.

If I had 5 massive repos, the price is perfectly fine. If I have 1 massive repo and 4 small ones, the price is out of whack. Especially since their cost is out of whack in that first scenario.

>I have personal projects at home that I've started and don't want to release yet. (Maybe not ever.)

Who cares if someone sees it? Are you planning on selling it?

"As for 'Why complain?'? Because money doesn't really grow on trees. Rich people get rich by spending their money wisely."

Complaining and spending money wisely are independent activities; you can do either one without doing the other.

I've long since given up on this one, but the reason I care is my open source work is on GitHub and my business work is on GitHub. I can't justify the cost for my private, personal projects. git encourages you to create repositories for everything. GitHub effectively penalizes you for having a lot of repositories.

As an example, I have a repo for just about every project in every class I did in grad school. I don't want to make that public because other students shouldn't access it. We can argue whether I need to save it at all, but disk space is cheap, so why not archive it? I easily have 50+ personal, private repositories. Well more than my business account. And as such, they're not on GitHub.

Ideally I'd have a common place for everything. Ideally I'd pay for "active" projects or for disk space. But that's not how it works and it's not likely to ever change. And the pricing just doesn't scale for personal accounts.

What I end up doing is putting my "active" projects on github and anything that I'm archiving on like bitbucket or assmbla or just zip it up and put it on S3 or Dropbox.

If I found myself with more than say 5 active projects, I probably need to focus more or charge more.

I don't do any consulting, so charging more wouldn't be an option. I've resorted to just running gitauth on a prgmr server. It works, but it'd be nicer to have everything in one location.

Even if it's not the intention of the github creators, I think this is secretly one of the biggest strength of github. The reason is because it encourages you to publish incomplete or less than perfect code. How many times have you heard "yea I definitely plan to open source that project... I just need to clean up the code a bit" and since programmers are never happy with their code they never release. This coupled with the existence of project pages means that you can easily pick out the 'finished product' code from the 'how the hell do i solve this small problem' code

Sure, but there are tons of valid use cases for personal projects. config files and school projects come to mind (just digging through my repositories). Mind you, the other part that's weird here is there's no requirement that the project be open source, it just needs to be public. It's kinda scary how many "open" projects there are on GitHub with no license attached.

I never really thought about the obvious license issue, that's a good point. It would be awesome if github could add a simple check box that allowed people to choose from various licenses (maybe even a quick questionare that helps you choose the license that fits your needs best)

If you're not going to be actively developing it, or sharing it with anyone, why on earth would you want it up on github anyway? Their value-add is collaboration, as a sole developer on a personal project I can't think of anything useful they bring to the table.

"a common place for everything" for me is ~/code, which is included in my automated daily backups.

Browsing through their Web interface and peace of mind that it's in another archived location.

You're missing the small contractors with 20+ repos, any of which may need to be opened and edited at any given time. Why should they pay $100/month when they really only need 2-3 active repositories and consume a fraction of the filespace?

I'm not saying they can't, I'm saying the model doesn't fit this type of user. Of course they can find another provider (we did), but I think Github needs more models to fit the different types of companies.

Do what I do, factor in the cost of Github hosting into the costs for your clients. The marginal cost for an extra repo on Github is $5/month on a business plan or $2 a month for the smaller plans. As part of the contract for each of my projects, I note that there is a $100 maintenance fee per year to keep the project in an active state, and that any project that becomes archived will have a $250 fee to reinstate as active. So every month I send a letter and invoice to all my clients who haven't had work on a specific project done in the past year to bill them for the maintenance fee or give them the option of archiving the project. I actually have a few clients who pay the fee every year even though I haven't done work on a project in several years, because it's worth it to them to have it available immediately if they need something done in the future.

$48,000/yr isn't a fully loaded developer in the midwest. Mark that number up 30%. And that's not a senior developer salary. Now move to California or NYC. Fully loaded, FTEs can approach 200k.

Calling people who can't afford $22/month 'cheapskates' is very snobby of you. I can't afford $22/month, and it's not because I spend it on luxuries.

>Seriously, you could put out a crappy android app that makes you $100 a month in a weekend and that pays for your github hosting.

Yes? And should I test it against what, my six year old Nokia phone? Besides, some of us prefer to use lesser code hosts than pushing crap onto people just to make a few cheap bucks.

I agree with you that people shouldn't complain. Personally, I just took on Amazon's offer of a free EC2 microinstance for a year and use it both as a dev platform as well as my git repositories hosting.

What about using something like Bitbucket with the git-hg bridge?

Because that means relying on three pieces of software instead of one, which will definitively bring more problems. I'd use a bridge for moving to another system, but not as a fixed component of my daily work.

for a self proclaimed person named "programminggeek", you should know that we're not cheap, its just the cost vs effort. I could easily spend half a day installing git on a server backing up to s3 regularly or actually storing git repositories on s3. The cost of gihub has to be cheaper than the effort for me to do the equivalent.

I think people are misinterpreting the frustration with Github's pricing.

It's not that people have a problem paying $22 for 20 repos, it's that the 21st repo costs $23 per month!

Github's pricing structure has friction in this area. Without a controlled experiment it's impossible to determine whether this pricing model is best for Github or not.

Imagine if when you bought toothpaste there were two options, a small travel-size tube for $1 or a crate full of 500 full size tubes for $250. Or imagine if a restaurant served ice cream at $0.25 for a spoonful and then your next option was a full gallon.

The friction occurs b/c people don't like wasting money, and the pricing model Github has chosen feels like unused repos are costing money but not being put to use.

In other words, there is a nonlinear relationship between money spent and usefulness gained per dollar, which makes it difficult for people to maximize utility over. This is friction and it probably has mixed results. I think the most important thing to note is that we don't know whether it helps or hurts Github's business to do things this way. Assertions that it does one vs the other are only speculation.

See, that's the problem in thinking. People go, "Hmm, 10 repos cost $12, so that's $1.20 per repo. But if I have 11 repos, it costs me $22, it costs me $22 so it's $2 per repo, what a ripoff!" Or conversely how you stated it, "$1.20 per repo for the first 10, then $10 for the 11th, and the next 9 are free."

If they restated it that it costs $2 per repo, but if you order in bulk you get a discount, people would be happier. So even if they always paid $22, they'd be thrilled because the "real" prices would be 11 for $2 each all the way down to 20 for $1.10 each!

I don't mind GitHub pricing, but I wish it had a "Archive" option for the private repo, for those projects that aren't active anymore but still want to keep the repo on GitHub just in case. And of course the archived repos wouldn't count towards your total repo unless they are reactivated.

agreed, but I just put 'archived' git repos in, ironically, dropbox, and delete the private repo on github.

Have you considered suggesting it to github?

I suggested that very thing. Several times over the years. I suggested it to the CodaSet guys, too. Apparently there's enough of a market without this to not warrant adding the new pricing option.

Codebase(HQ) allows archived projects (until your diskspace runs out). However, putting your open repositories there does not have the same network effect as putting them on Github.

Why don't you just call one repo "Archive" and put all your old stuff in there.

This is why https://codeplane.com/ was created. 2GB worth of private repos for $9/month.

See http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2674417 for the discussion of Codeplane on HN.

Are you the owner? How does your product differ from RepositoryHosting.com ?

It's called "Software as a Service" for a reason. Hint: it's not "Data storage as a Service".

Many of you are missing the point. It's not as much about the actual cost but about the model of charging per repo rather than data usage (or both options). This model is not cost effective for small businesses and contractors who have many small projects.

For example, my company has two full time devs and a few contractors for small projects. We have accumulated over 30 projects and that number will continue to grow. It's not uncommon for an older project to be re-opened after a period of inactivity for new features or fixes. It's not cost effective to shell out $100/month. We've moved to Springloops which allows 10 active repos and unlimited archived for $15/month.

Just make your small projects public, and with a proper copyright. It's incredibly hard to get someone to pay attention to you and your code even if you want them to. Nobody will notice one way or another.

GitHub is the Library of Alexandria, not a safety deposit box.

This is why BitBucket's price plan makes more sense.

Totally agree and they also have free unlimited plans for academia and students :)

http://github.com/edu has information about educational plans, including small free ones for students.

The GH edu account bumps you to a micro account. While it's nice to finally get the private repos, that still doesn't really beat BB.

I was just responding to the perceived lack of support for students.

And that's reason #1 we don't use Github. Assembla lets us host all of our git, SVN and Mercurial repos for free.. currently we have 32 and counting, no issues ever, without paying a single penny.

Maybe, but GitHub's pricing model encourages sharing, and that's a good thing. Think of how many repositories might've been private and not benefited thousands of people.

Granted, the prices might be steep/strange, but I see no problem in charging for things that people don't want to share on a social code sharing site.

How much sharing actually goes on? (And just because somebody impulse clones a repo doesn't actually mean there's meaningful sharing going on.)

Sharing doesn't necessarily mean someone cloning or contributing to your project. I find github useful because it lets me read other people's code both for evaluating potential co-workers and getting better at my craft.

I've learned a lot from reading other people's code and I still think it's one of the best ways to learn new languages and techniques.

Even with some of my more obscure projects on Github (like a ZNC module that sends IRC notifications to my phone via Notifo) have garnered some observers, forks, and pull requests with features or improvements that I probably never would have gotten if it had either been on my own repo hosting.

Well, anyone GitHub's pricing model has driven over to Assembla isn't sharing.

While I agree in some cases it's a good thing, but for projects that you do for clients, privacy is paramount

Isn't there some value in paying for a service that you use and value?

I just made the same tradeoff yesterday.

I'd love to use Github and all, Github's cool. But I can't justify paying that much for private repositories. Even with all of the annoying junk on the site, Assembla's free plan won hands down.

The crucial difference is that in the case of github, their business is github.

In the case of Assembla, their business is consulting and the site is a loss leader for that division.

This quite effectively explains both the pricing and feature set differences.

You get what you pay for.

I guess I always saw github as more of a flickr for code than a private repo hosting service for hobbyists.

I'd still like a good way to back up my private solo-project repositories off-site using git, but I suppose DropBox works pretty well for that?

Flickr costs 24.95/year for a pro account, giving you unlimited storage, sets, collections, stats and no ads. So I don't think the analogy really works.

How about providing a github like interface on top of dropbox? Has anybody done this? The best thing about this will be that 2GB of storage is free from dropbox which is quite sufficient for most of the needs.

Man, I totally would love it if my company would let us use github for our source control. Unfortunately, we are strictly not allowed to store anything outside of the company servers for security reasons and I'm reasonably sure the local github service cost would necessitate making a successful case that we should transition the entire company to it. Which involves not just proving that github is a better source control management suite, but that the git model is superior to the centrally managed, monolithic perforce model we use.

I started by converting a team to git.

Then, after they settled in and started to get it, I made repositories available from the outside (only ssh, still only selected people).

When more and more people learned that it _is_ possible to work in a train/plane/at a customer site and still use a decent toolset, they wanted in.

I hosted gitorious (with decent backups, a redmine next to it) on an old server.

In the end management gave in to peer pressure - and the price point was - erm - attractive. It's the official toolset now.

To be fair, the markets of Dropbox and Github are dramatically different. In fact I'd say that the Github pricing model is quite better in terms of adjusting the price to the demand. As I've read in some other comment here in HN, if you don't use Github because $100 is a lot of money to spend in your project, then you probably shouldn't be using Github. Still, they offer great and FREE micro accounts for students (I have one) and the support is great.

Academic research is one more data point. Sometimes you have faculty and students from multiple institutions. It's not so much the cost that's the problem, rather the paperwork to bill it to various grants over the lifetime of a project. In many ways, it's simpler for one of the leaders to just pay for it personally.

I personally prefer doing public development, but this has been cited by a number of colleagues as a reason not to host at github.

Have you looked at github's academic pricing?

https://github.com/edu

So as a post-doc/researcher... Do I click Student, Teacher or Administrator?

For businesses looking to be cost effective, remember there is www.projectlocker.com

Not as sexy as GitHub but it has Trac (or Agilo Trac) and a choice of GIT/SVN. Unlimited projects, but it has disk space limits and user limits that differentiate the levels (similar to dropbox.) Cost structure is here:

https://projectlocker.com/signup/startup

There is no public visibility on projectlocker.com, thus it is best for teams that don't want their stuff public (which actually most companies.)

Disclaimer: I have used PL as a paying customer for 4 years at the Equity level (<30 users, <30GB of repos) and am a very happy with it. I haven't noticed it go down in all that time.

Funny article, but it misses the fact that GitHub's pricing is less about code separation, and more about access management.

There's nothing stopping a customer from cramming several projects into a single Git repository. You could theoretically take advantage of GitHub's "unlimited" storage for cheap this way. The problem is, you need separate repositories if you want to manage access for different collaborators.

Folders aren't expensive, but access management can be. Github understands this, which is why their Business plans, which are differentiated by having finer-grained access control features, are more expensive.

Any big reason not to have an archive repo, with tars of your archived projects?

You still have git for your tars, and thus all your versions. It seems like a fine idea, to me.

To archive a project, tar its project directory, copy it in to an archive repo on github, commit and push it, and remove the directory locally.

To unarchive a project, pull and untar the project in its own directory. When done, tar it back up into the archive repo, commit, and push.

I don't actually understand why anyone pays for github when it's so trivial to set up a central git repository on a $10/month VPS and you can have unlimited repositories.

Surely developers aren't that desperate for a nice UI for their git repos?! I assume that there are a bunch of web based repo browsing tools you could install for free if you were that hell bent on looking at your code in a web browser

I love the ease of UI. I like a graphical way to look through logs and diffs and Github does this better than anyone else. Beyond that, if I want a nice web based alternative, I would have to maintain it which I hate doing. Really, $7 is not a bad deal for letting them be the sys admins.

All that said, I am a cheap bastard. I have all public projects on a free Github account and a couple nonfree ones on my hosting account. I don't have a pretty front end, just the default gitweb. It is ugly, not as easy to use, but it works for my personal projects. If I ever needed it for a non-personal project, Github is much better since I will need to code, not maintain my own repos.

It's a simple price segmenting. No one says the axis of projects makes financial sense on the expense side. It makes sense in distinguishing the type of customer.

Ironically it's nicely illustrated by the employee/owner of a web agency complaining in the comments. Obviously it worked and Github managed to extract more value from a larger customer.

When using git every library/dependency is a separate repo. So 125 private repos limit for $200 is only enough for 3-4 real life projects, or one really big project.

I don't get the problems that people have with Github's pricing.

I can have all the private repos I want by creating repositories on my computer. Git is decentralized. Putting it in a central location is centralized. :)

But seriously, I can have as many private repositories as I want - all I need is a server with SSH support.

What I want is the user interface for adding comments and collaboration on my private repos that I get for public repos. If I find that valuable to me, I'll pay it. If it's a "toy" project that I'll never touch, a local repo and a backup of my computer is all I need - I don't need others to have that code.

Would work great for me. I store everything on dropbox in one giant lump truecrypt file...

Not really a fair comparison. GitHub is aimed at open source development, and is doing quite well at that. So for github you want your data to be visible to everyone in the world.

Imagine if someone thought a blogging software was like a diary in days gone by. "You mean everyone can see what I write in my diary?! How terrible!"

Acutally, github is aimed at making money proving awesome code hosting. They host open source stuff because it is a GREAT way to acquire new paid customers. It's the freemium model done really well.

github is still a business and at the end of the day they need to make money.

Yeah! What a bunch of dickbags.

What if Western Digital used Dropbox's pricing plan?

I know this is pretty much a joke, but never underestimate the ability of people to do ridiculous things.

I've personally witnessed individuals with email Inboxes with over 50,000 items in them -- total size 30GB. No use of folders, no meaningful search capability.

http://www.syncany.org/ will kill you all

Actually, "all your files are visible to everyone" isn't a restriction at all if you're using crypto.

Likewise, it's funny to think that you could encrypt your git repositories and use github public hosting for private projects. I wonder if someone already did, but I guess github wouldn't care (if you're doing this, you wouldn't be paying for the service anyway).

I suspect that most of GitHub's features are useless if the files you are uploading are encrypted.

Seriously, are diffs of encrypted files going to be meaningful?

Actually, what I was saying amounts to using github as an agnostic data store, and doing the actual work on the clients. So, yeah, most of the usefulness of github goes away and you can just use pretty much any file hosting service.

I expected this to be a post on how Dropbox is too expensive.

Also, putting my grumpy hat on, what's with all the cheapskate whining? "Give me more, I want it FREE!"... bleh.

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