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Comment by johnthedebs | Hacker News Reader

This is great news, very exciting for people who need a nice place to stash all their private git repos but didn't want to upgrade their GitHub plans for not-that-important projects. Very interesting that they've decided to compete directly too.

I wonder if/how GitHub will respond. I strongly prefer their UI and already have a paid plan, but I find myself shuffling repos within the confines of that plan rather than stomaching the (admittedly not very big) upgrade cost since many of the projects aren't super important. I understand why they do it, but I just don't like that they place an arbitrary restriction on the number of private repos.

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For me and where I work, GitHub's repo restrictions are the one and only cause of us self-hosting a Git server instead of using them. We have around a hundred small, low-traffic repos.

Let's put it this way:

* on GitHub, thanks to our repo count, we would be a $200/mo Platinum account

* on Bitbucket, thanks to our user count, we would be a $0/mo Free account, although we might have to upgrade all the way up to a $10/mo account as we're adding some people.

Needless to say, I will be looking hard at Bitbucket now that they're supporting Git.

> GitHub's repo restrictions

You're talking about the number limit?

thanks to our repo count

I guess this answers your question. I'm a happy Github customer myself (both personally as well as with my company), but it is interesting to see Bitbucket compete with them head-on. I can see quite a lot of small/medium companies move over.

This x100. I love GitHub's user interface but as a poor student couldn't justify them for my private projects (until I found their free student plan), so I used BitBucket.

BitBucket is very good from a pricing and support point of view (and I actually preferred Mercurial before I learnt Git properly) but it's not nearly as polished as GitHub - one thing that springs to mind (it might have been fixed) was it trying to show me a complete diff of Xcode project files when I clicked on a commit causing my browser to crash. Pretty much the main reason I switched.

I'd be really keen to see some real competition in the hosted social-coding space (it's funny, that sentence wouldn't have made sense just a few years ago), and Atlassian has the resources to do it.

Where can I find out about the student plan?

I only found it by Googling in desperation; they don't exactly advertise it (which I guess is fair enough).

https://github.com/edu

I have a similar sentiment. It doesn't feel right to pay for a private repo that you don't use any of the collaborative features.

I wonder if it makes sense for github to have a 'lite' repo that is just straight up storage, no extra features. This would be valuable to me because even though I can set up a bitbucket account and get the free private repos, I just like having everything in one place. I feel like they could even tack on a small amount to the normal subscription fee, or be able to add these on a la carte for an added monthly cost.

Don't get me wrong, I love the collaborative features and UI when I am working on the project with others, but for solo projects and old projects I don't update often this would be great.

Why not just use Dropbox + Git? That's what I do.

Please be aware of the dangers when you do this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3024460

Or heroku. No one says you have to use the app you deploy. just put a dummy rackup file in your homedir.

we'll see how GH responds in the face of competition like this. Now I no longer need to go beyond the $7/month github plan.

I could see GH creating an "unlimited" account for $20/month that allows up to 3mb of files and unlimited repos.

I think an appropriate GH response would be to make a few/all personal (aka 0 collaborators) private repos free.

This is a _stellar_ idea.

I just wonder if there's a bit of a culture-jam here. It'd tempt you to not open up projects as freely, which seems at odds with the ideals of the GH camp.

The public repo thing is a bit odd anyway. Many public projects don't have a license attached to them. So they're not really open source, they're not public domain, they're just publicly viewable but you have no license to use it.

They'd be nuts to do that. They are getting $7/month from me, for a few private repos, and I bet I'm not the only one. If they up the number of private repos, I'll stick with them, rather than porting my inactive ones to bitbucket. But I doubt they'll make them completely free, even though the competition is free.

They have a great business model - free repos for OSS drives users, then they get users to pay a smallish (in absolute terms) cost for private repos. All they need is the million odd developers who use their system for OSS, and they will shake a few bucks out of each somehow. There's no need for them and BB to compete as though they were selling commodity products. Both are competing on getting people used to their interface (by OSS products) and then charging then whatever they think won't cause too much pain.

That said, people with lots of small repos are feeling unnecessary pain from Github's pricing scheme.

The difference is that BitBucket pricing is based on the number of collaborators. Their pricing page makes it seem like you even have to pay to have more than 5 collaborators on a public repo, whereas with github you don't. If I'm reading it right, then Github is still really good for Open Source projects that intend to have more than a handful of collaborators. While BitBucket is a good place to stick your private repos where you have few (or no) contributors.

From https://bitbucket.org/plans :

What is a user?

Someone with read or write access to one of your private repositories.

Nevermind then. Apparently I'm blind.

My company has many very small projects that needed to be archived yet weren't completely closed (possible to re-open for new feature). We started with GitHub but were forced to leave since they didn't have any viable plans - ended up moving to SpringLoops which charges on "active" projects. Basically we can close and re-open as many projects as we'd like as long as < 10 are active.

I agree -- I have too many repos I'd like to keep private to host them on github, but would love to if I could.

I'm currently paying for a prgmr instance just to run gitolite (https://github.com/sitaramc/gitolite) so I could have a private place to store remotes for my repos. I'm planning to move to bitbucket immediately.

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