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.