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Comment by kkowalczyk | Hacker News Reader

If free private repos is the only thing that BitBucket offers over GitHub, then they'll not be in business for long.

You cost them money.

Until your team grows above 5 people, at which point you make them money. The loss-leader is a tried and true business model.

BitBucket has already been in business for a long time, it appears GitHub is not a fan of free private repos. In the early stages that was probably a help because your site looks more active if everyone using it is public, but these days the lack of free private repos is pretty surprising.

Mercurial support is what has helped BitBucket a lot.

I think so, too. I started off with Mercurial (and still prefer it, if I'm working on solo projects) before moving to Git, and by then Bitbucket had already won me over :).

Yes exactly. I've noticed a lot of open-source Python projects use Mercurial on BB - there is still some community segmentation. I would think as people get tired of Google Code remaining static and backwards compared to BB that more Mercurial projects will move to BB from Google. The BB UI was pretty weak compared to Github before today. I'm glad to see this.

I use BB for the free private Git repos but had always planned to switch to paid Github once I actually need collaborators. Now I could see staying with BB when I need to go paid.

It's a different way to price products - they charge per user. So, if your little startup starts growing, they bring in a bit of cash and have opportunities to up-sell with the other products in their line.

If my startup grew past 5 team members, I would personally just move my private repos to GitHub and start paying them. Bitbucket provides a great free service, but I'd probably never pay for it.

You just might reconsider (and that is what bb is banking on), at the end of the day having to police the number of repos you can have is a pain(esp in a startup, where people are seemingly forever going off to hack away on random stuff). Sure bb isnt as pretty--current redraw notwithstanding--but unlimited repos is very handy indeed. just saying. Inline commenting was missed (we moved from gh to bb a few months ago), but i see that has been released too.

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