No, Github is a business.
BitBucket is offering free private accounts as a loss leader, not out of the kindness of their hearts. This is their strategy for competing with GitHub.
A $7/month subscription for private github repos is well worth it.
I can't think of any piece of software I use regularly that doesn't cross the "worth at least $7 bucks" boundary.
That's what I am getting at. $7 a month is not all that expensive, you're right - but I am only getting 5 private repositories for that $7 a month.
It just doesn't make sense to use github for private work when you have a lot of repositories.
In fact, you are putting more burden on yourself for little value. It takes 15 minutes to walk the client through how to pay for and manage a github organization. I do it with all of my clients. It is an opportunity to teach/coach and give them a sense of ownership which is how it should be.
Our only limit is then the amount of people we hire, which is far more reasonable in my eyes.
If we were working on a small number of projects, then it would absolutely not be a problem to work with Github - it's when you have a lot of tiny projects that it becomes prohibitively expensive to work with.
Fair enough, that's how Github wants to price their service - I guess its catered more to actual startups (who have a few large core projects) rather than businesses like ours.
I think Github's plans are comparable to Bitbucket - it's just the starting tier is a bit more pricey - and, honestly, $7 or $12/mo doesn't make that much difference.
Sure these projects are not too big, and the team isn't too big either, but if hosted with Github, we'd be looking at soaring costs per month, or join repos together.
And no offense but Bitbucket is still a clunky mess that lacks the most critical feature: integration with almost every open source project.
If you work for customers (say as a freelance developer) and need to create a repo each time you win a new project, the $7 plan is useless.
For me github (and git) is like iPhone, a place for the "cool kids", and bitbucket for the rest of us :) Mostly because some github/git/iPhone/Mac enthusiasts are rather loud and fanboy-like - this destroys git experience for me. I prefer calm mercurial/linux enviroment :)
What? You mean Github (which hosts the Linux kernel repository) and runs git (written by Linus Torvalds) is not linux-like?
>> No, Github is a business.
Both comments are a bit silly. Atlassian (BitBucket's creator) is one of the more successful revenue "startups" while GitHub has hardly acted like a business to date.