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Comment by sillysaurus | Hacker News Reader

it's probably a bad business decision for github not to get a bit more aggressive on pricing for [free private repositories]...

Yes. If Github offered just one free private repo, then I would move to them in a heartbeat.

Github is still Github, after all. ("Second resume" etc.) Unfortunately current circumstances prevent me from open-sourcing a certain small segment of my codebase, and... well... Bitbucket is free, and I'm living on Ramen while trying not to worry about my dwindling savings account. So it's a pretty clear-cut choice for me.

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I would prefer if they would tie their pricing to the size of a repository or the number of collaborators, but not the number of repos. I have a paid account that I would like to dump a lot of old projects that I hardly ever change. I would have to upgrade to "large" and even that one wouldn't fit all the projects. Right now the solution is to either not host it with them or use something like Bitbucket.

definitely. hobbyists tend to run to "lots of small repos with low activity on any given one", but the net resource usage is the same as or lower than "a few big repos". per-repo pricing is more a "pay not to be inconvenienced" than "pay for your use of our resources" thing.

For the many-small-repo scenario, I use this technique to host multiple projects under one Github private repository:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1384325/in-git-is-there-a...

Instead of creating a repo per project, I create a orphan branch within a shared repo for that project. The benefit of this approach is that you can always cleanly export the commits into its own repository without altering SHA ids. The con is that you have to pick separate branch names for each project (e.g. proj1-master, proj2-master).

Personally I'm more bummed about a 1 collaborator limit on the $7/mo plan.

Where is this "1 collaborator limit"? GitHub has unlimited collaborators on all repositories, private or public.

there used to be a limit to the number of collaborators, but it was lifted a few months ago.

Cool! I never noticed.

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