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It becomes worth it with scale. A VPS costs more than $5 but you can host a very large number of repos, a dormant repo takes no resources but disk space to host, its only activity that consumes resources, which is less than $5-$10 worth

Maybe. You would either have to buy and colocate physical servers and pack the hell of them or develop something on AWS or GCP that aggressively scales down to zero.

Anyway, how are you going to pay engineer salaries and 24/7 support staff on a $5-10/mo product? Not to mention, you'd be hosting someone's critical infrastructure so they will have a meltdown when you inevitably make a mistake. How long are you willing to burn money before you've reached a scale where it's profitable?

It's paradoxical how all the money in tech goes to the most useless things that are a net drain on society (social media, ad tech, etc.) and we're willing to pay less for the most important things than we would for a cup of coffee.

At the prices people are willing to pay for SCM, it really has to be a complement to some other product you're offering or part of an integrated suite. It's most likely a dead end on its own.

I guess you could do it... but why? There are a thousand ways to make more money with fewer headaches. I wouldn't get into this business myself and I wouldn't fund someone else either.

All of the git hosting providers offer repo hosting for literally free. $10/month is easily enough to host a repo.

I can assure you that they are not hosting for free because the cost is zero and goodwill pays the bills. Read the TOS and privacy policy. If they’re not monetizing the data in their custody then it’s just more overhead that has to be covered by paying customers, which makes the business even more difficult.

Yes, you can host a repository for less than $10, but that’s not the question, is it? Can you host it cheaply enough that a customer paying $10 is a viable and worthwhile business? Can you do it for $5 all in with infrastructure, staff, and general and administrative costs? You won’t have much for a marketing budget so you’ll have to offer those free accounts with some features for viral network growth. Oh, and you’ll have to offer better uptime than GitHub. Still sound like a good idea?

Anyone can re-create the hosting part of GitHub. This is not the difficult nor the expensive part.

It's the actions. The compute to run them isn't cheap at scale nor is the amount of auditing you need to do for security and compliance if you want enterprise/government customers.

I don't think people asking for github alternatives are expecting unlimited actions for $5/month. It would be acceptable if they charged credits on top or let you host the runner on your own machine.

You can absolutely build a solution that works for that range, you just have to pick your tech stack for efficiency and not rapid development.

CI will be the tricky one, but I am pretty sure it can work if you keep the limits low, or price it based on usage.

Why not do it then? Seems you would have plenty of customers judging by this thread and the others today asking about alternatives.

Because I don't have the money to start it.

I can't do it in my spare time, because then the company I work for will own it. And I can't just not be employed, because I have bills to pay.

I would love to run a small software company making products individuals can afford.

You can get decent ones for $6 from Contabo VPS https://contabo.com/en-us/vps/

Good points. I guess I keep just wanting 'you are the product' / enshitification / free tier capture to not be the dominant business model of our time. You're right that a YC VC would likely not funds this. There are many alternative business models though. (edit: https://sourcehut.org seems promising if very barebones and oldschool)

> The best parts of Github that make it worth using in the first place all come down to the size of the network

Not intrinsically, only as a side-effect of economies of scale. At least for me. The 'social' features make it more compelling and explain its widespread adoption and thus economies of scale, but not what made github worth using for me at least. It Just Worked (TM) to unite all the work we used to do in the good ol' days via repos, patches, tickets, mailing lists, IRC, build servers, and host servers.

I don't need my own VPS running 24/7, I said maybe 100 mins of CI a month, even if I'm pushing and building while others are commenting and PRing multiple times a day, it's going to still take a fraction of that VPS capacity.

Same. Currently, I'm spending $10/mo on a VPS from OVH to host Forgejo. I have hourly backups to an rsync.net account I was already paying for. It's not the most efficient way to do things, but Forgejo is actually pretty nice and I have data sovereignty.