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Comment by noahbp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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

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'

GitHub Enterprise means two things:

- The cloud-hosted service presumably on slightly different infra,

- The self-hosted version of GitHub that runs on hardware you own.

The second definitely counts as "real" self-hosting.

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

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)

> 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.

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

lol

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

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.

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.

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?

> 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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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