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Comment by leishman | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand why Github hasn't solved this problem with pricing updates. My understanding is they are getting hammered with LLM generated code growing their traffic by over an order of magnitude. So why not rate limit non-paying users and charge for whatever scarce resource is being consumed that is causing them to constantly fall-over? This seems like a basic economics problem.

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Because any price at all will immediately cause users to shift to another platform, and GitHub's value is that it is _the_ place to put your code on the internet.

And another platform will suffer the same thing and charge probably even more?

I wonder how much network effects help here.

There's a lot of consumer surplus with the features GitHub offers. I'm sure they can have better pricing tiers to capture the surplus without losing too many users.

The network effects isn’t that much, and like what we see with Steam, you want to be where the audience is.

More realistically, MAU or something is a metric/OKR. It’s easy to imagine why a business wouldn’t want to cap that.

And the audience you want are users who will never, ever pay to get access. If GitHub starts throttling free users, they throttle the audience you're talking about far, far harder than you.

The audience will go away to somewhere you aren't. Then what?

Someone did a study that suggested the network effect is logarithmic in nature, but if that’s true it means something with 95% market share is 3 times “better” for having everyone there. Not 20 or two orders of magnitude better but not nothing.

Please could you link to the study if you can find it. The definition of "better" seems quite critical here, as well as whether it's specific to code hosting websites. A messaging platform is pretty useless if I'm the only user, but Github would still be useful to me without anyone else having an account.

> The network effects isn’t that much

There are people in this thread that have said their biggest reason for not moving away is the network effect.

The network effect is 90% of the substance.

No one needs github for git itself, nor even for web front-end to git, nor even for hosted/managed someone else's problem web front-end to git, nor even all of that for free.

Weird. For me it's in Actions, Issues, and other integrations / workflows / add-ons that aren't that easily replaced.

And they can keep training their own models off of the code, and on private repos too.

AI makes investors/shareholders go brrr.

Being the _the_ place for open source is what let them dominate the enterprise. Now that they dominate the enterprise, it'd make financial sense to put hard limits on the free tier. It's cynical but it would be foolish to lose that cash machine. It'd open them up for a competitor to slowly build up good will in open source then take them on in enterprise, but right now they are risking losing it all.

Big enterprises are on a different github deployment, so I doubt they are affected by this

Enterprise Cloud was indeed affected by this (as of this morning)

lol

In my experience, we were typically affected just like everyone else. Maybe a public company with its market cap in the billions isn't big enough.

Self host an infrastructure like real billion dollar companies.

Having worked at places with GitHub Enterprise, that isn’t much of an improvement. You could host something else, but almost everything in this space isn’t great at scale.

Im definitely not referring to GHE. Im talking about real self-hosting infra. It wasnt that long ago that this was possible, and cheaper and more reliable. It's a pay me now or pay me later argument. Everyone now is complaining about the pay me later part of these 'deals'

I don't know how true that is nowadays, I think if you sign up to Enterprise Cloud you're in the same spot as everyone else

(maybe F500 people have their colocated box, but I have the impression that those are the "first class" seats (very expensive but _very few_) whereas enterprise cloud is the "business class" (loooooots of seats making a lot of money)

except the big enterprise I work at was for sure affected by this today haha

> Big enterprises are on a different github deployment, so I doubt they are affected by this

Depends, some of them use GH Enterprise but many (surprisingly) don't.

Increasing prices are a sure way to enshittification. It will push people away from github. Many such previous examples

I thought "the diff viewer doesn't show files this large" was supposed to be that limit?

Haha people have put up with a LOT of price rises the past 5 years in many industries, validating many company's pricing strategy, over and over

uh, isn't its value that some of us pay them money to have a service?

They'll shift to another platform and then that platform will:

- Phase 1: Implode even harder than GitHub under the onslaught of LLM generated code

- Phase 2: ???

- Phase 3: Profit!

Nobody wants users they can't monetize and hosting LLM output for free isn't monetizable. It's not even valuable as training data.

The people with the spreadsheets have determined the value of this loss leader to be too enormous to shut it off.

Value is that it holds so much code.

The loss leader for their code hosting service or the loss leader for their AI subscriptions?

Why not just add a rule such as: "Non paying customers can only upload X commits per day"

X doesn't even need to be that low. It could be 100 or 200. Just something that slows down the agents that spam them with commits/pushes.

It's easy from an armchair to say things like they should just get more capacity, or they should segregate free repos onto other servers. But maybe they are doing what you're thinking, and with that churn they get mistakes that cause outages, esp dealing with legacy systems. I've been there (not at GitHub or MSFT).

They do not need to make any technical changes. They could make the change overnight: $1 per repo per month (or whatever). This would stop the aggressive growth that they clearly cannot handle anyway.

The question is: are they willing to compromise growth for QoS. So far the answer is a resounding: "no". They are deliberately sacrificing the experience of existing users to gain new ones.

There are tons of existing free users, they'd be sacrificing those too. And yeah they don't want to sacrifice growth either, so the remaining is an engineering question.

No way I pay $1/repo/month. No way I pay $1/repo/year. I still host and maintain my old code on GitHub, but any free tier pricing update and I jump ship immediately.

I would migrate my 246 repositories before paying even a cent.

Microsoft executives have an incentive to pretend that AI is great and scaling it has no problems

I recently analyzed my commit history.

Last month, I made more commits than my entire 2025 combined.

How much more value did those commits create than in 2025?

But that discards my point, which is that you should probably have been prevented from pushing all those to github unless you were paying them for it, but you weren't because the executives running github can't admit that AI is bad for their platform.

  How much more value did those commits create than in 2025?

We have 2x fewer developers now than in 2025. Yet, the amount of features and bug fixes we're pushing is something like 5x.

So probably 10x more value is my guess for my entire team.

If you mean translating that into revenue, I'm not sure. Our product is better than ever with features a much bigger team couldn't dream of building before. Stability has also been better with fewer bugs, issues, downtime. When there are bugs, it gets fixed far quicker than before.

So.. you fired your devs and replaced them with AI?

Some of them left. Some of them moved to different teams. We just never replaced them on the team.

So more accurately, we placed developers who left the team with humans using more tokens.

And even if my loc were equal vs before, my personal projects used to have massive commits with the text "asdfasd"

> My understanding is they are getting hammered with LLM generated code growing their traffic by over an order of magnitude

Seems presumptuous to assume a root case while the incident is still ongoing, no?

https://github.blog/news-insights/company-news/an-update-on-...

They’ve been having issues for a while.

they've been complaining about LLM generated code and the related traffic for months now, this specific incident might not be caused by it but the general trend is

Their problem is partly scale, but also that they are making a ton of use of AI tools, which is undermining the quality of their software. The latter can't be fixed with a price increase, they need to pull their heads out of the AI groupthink for that.

>So why not rate limit non-paying users and charge for whatever scarce resource is being consumed that is causing them to constantly fall-over?

I think it behooves them for the public presentation of their issues to too much load. If they implemented load shedding and still had issues the follow-up questions would be less comfortable.

They also sell the machinery to produce the slop (through OpenAI at least).

If they make it harder to push slop on github, people might treat it as an incentive to generate less slop. Less tokens sold. Bad. Very bad.

The github paying customers are not going to move away.

Plus, it's probably genuinely hard to scale. And they can't throw compute at the problem - all compute is already going to the LLMs.

Ah yes, sloponomics.

I don't understand why Github hasn't solved this problem with vibe coded updates.

I have wondered the same thing. Even a small fee like $50 a year would get rid of a lot of AI slop that justs eats up resources.

I would gladly pay that fee if it means Github is reliable for paying customers.

Private personal repos used to be paid. Maybe they should bring that back.

I remember! I think they changed that like 10 years ago? I thought BitBucket had done something not long before and assumed GitHub was just keeping up with a competitor.

I think it came right after Microsoft bought them cause they could afford it now

they want that code (from private repos) to train the models

They would benefit from a HackerNews-esque karma system.

That is essentially your number of followers. Pretty hard to have a system that cannot be gamed. I think followers are probably loosely correlated with tech ecosystem impact in some capacity, but the second there is an incentive to accumulate them, well...

I can't wait for the "please like and subscribe" popups on all software I use.

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