Why GitHub’s pricing model stinks (for us)
lostechies.com
lostechies.com
I think what really rankles is that it fires up my developer edge-case sense. Wait, so you mean I can have one repository of 100MB, but if I have two of 50MB that costs more? Bits are bits, so why are you punishing one particular factoring of my data vs another? That's like charging for S3 per top-level directory, or for iTunes by album. I feel like charging per repository makes you feel bad about making more repositories, which can often lead to feeling bad about good decisions.
Also, realistically, a cost per developer is so miniscule compared to the overall cost of that developer. The proportional cost per project is much higher, particularly if it's some skunkworks side-project and you're the one trying to explain why you should double how much you're paying github so that you can have a live coffee consumption dashboard for the break room.
It might be irrational, but it's the truth - we associate costs together in buckets, and Github is associating itself with the wrong bucket.
You're paying for Github, and it's not priced by bits stored.
When you split a project into two subprojects that are fairly equal in scope, each one will likely get just about half of the number of tickets/wiki articles/forks made that the original would have. So making a new repo isn't adding overhead for Github in any marginal way; the overhead would be there either way, as long as that original repo was being used to do the work of two sub-projects.
Github is creating value with their ecosystem, which is great for them, and, since the code is all in Git, not a complete lock-in if you choose to move.
Otherwise, just put your repos in any online storage service, it's much cheaper, but then you don't get Github :)
edit: downvotes? care to explain?
And I don't miss Github's collaborative features in my private repos because I'm not collaborating in those :) Bitbucket is literally just "a place to push my repo where it'll be safe" for me[1]; Github is "a place where I can collaborate with others."
And you know what? You can even use both for a single project. Push your public branches to Github, accept patches, then base a private product on the result [just some extra non-pushed-to-public branches] and work on that in Bitbucket. For example, you could have, say, the Chromium codebase on Github, and then Chrome on Bitbucket.
[1] Well, okay, Bitbucket is also pretty good for doing deploys from: you can CNAME git.yourcompany.com to them, set up some Deploy Keys and Deploy Hooks, and it'll feel just like you had your own internal repo server for your deploy server to talk to.
Maybe you have tech-savvy clients who care about source control. Mine only care that I do what I said I'd do when I said I'd do it.
The ploy is easy: if they set up the org, they have full control over it, even in the case that everything goes downhill and all of us get hit by a bus. Most people nowadays have seen a tech project going downhill with the freelancer leaving with the keys for the castle.
No technological argument. At all.
I don't know how many private repos I will be using in a year, so I pay for what I'm currently using. It may go up or down, and my plan will be adjusted accordingly.
If the problem isn't the on-my-credit-card-statement cost for the service that you'd use, and is instead a philosophical disagreement with how the cost is calculated... that's just a little bonkers.
I agree that a per seat pricing model is better because it is more predictable and relates to the value a company gets. We plan to use such a model on GitLab.com http://blog.gitlab.com/pricing/
Also, if you self-install GitLab it is completely free (MIT license).
"A startup with 30 repos and a team of two is completely free." Same with them.
"A professional plan with 60 repos and 5 collaborators is $9 per month." 5 collaborators is free with them.
"A business plan 150 repos and 10 collaborators is $72 per month." BitBucket supports teams on all plans. That plan would be $10, although I will admit I haven't used their teams feature so you may have superior functionality there.
Self-hosted sounds great though, that's a really cool move.
We want to make sure that the pricing only increases in small steps. If you add one more user you should never go from $25 to $50.
We also have a free issue tracker, you don't have to pay for it. Jira prices are 4 times more expensive than BitBucket prices.
And of course there is the option to go self hosted easily in the future.
What do you think we can improve in the pricing of GitLab.com?
Your idea of only increasing in small steps is interesting, and I can see why you'd do it like that. I imagine $1/user fully scaling is probably impossible - it's probably unfair to compete when Atlassian might even be running Bitbucket at a loss and you presumably have no other major products under the same company. I can see how you'd be better value in some way at certain boundaries in price points - but I'm not convinced you'd ever become cheaper. I haven't drawn the graph, but if you used the full 25-50 jump, going from 25-50 users eventually, thats a $75 increase on your service. I see where you're coming from, but the scalar of 3x per user is probably too high for them jumps to become significant.
Fair enough, Bitbucket does have a free one, but I haven't used Jira which is obviously more powerful. You may well be better there.
And again, allowing self hosting is a really cool move. I'd definitely consider it because I think the cost, even with Bitbucket, would soon become significant compared to the one time cost of a server.
In all honesty, I might be being completely unfair. I'm comparing Bitbucket alone and it's main options. You have teams, Bitbucket does, but yours could well be better - maybe Atlassian's Confluence is a fairer comparison. Same with issue tracking, Bitbucket does have it, but maybe you compare better with Jira. If you would say your service compares fairly to Bitbucket, though, I don't really know how you can improve it short of cutting the $3/user/month, which I imagine isn't a reasonable request. If that's not going to happen, which I'd expect is the case, the way you scale is probably fairest.
I would say to look at the business package and what you're offering though - if it competes with Confluence you're priced fairly, but if it competes with Bitbucket's standard team features, I think that's significantly overpriced.
I guess that "might even be running Bitbucket at a loss" makes it hard to compete with Bitbucket on price. And Bitbucket is a good product and Atlassian is a great company. I don't think GitLab should be compared with Confluence.
Maybe I'll switch GitLab to a simple plan based pricing model and compete on its strengths: 1) Advanced permissions 2) Can run your own server for free if you ever need to 3) CI server integration with GitLab CI (coming soon)
What do you think?
Many of your users are not price sensitive, at all, and they have a very different definition of what a "small increment" is as compared to you. For example, for a company which has 10 full-time devs, anything under $1,000 rounds to zero. If you tell them "Good news! Instead of asking for an extra $25 we ask only for an extra $5" you're telling them something which is not valuable to them at all, and it might actually be negatively valuable for them. (For example, if it causes you to make the app most responsive to the needs of people who think $25 is a lot of money instead of companies with 10+ employees.)
With a cost of 200$ for 125 repos, it is less than 2$ per client - if thats a problem, I think you should rethink your business plan. Keep in mind, nothing prevents you from removing clients you didn't work on for e.g. 6 months and put them on a NAS (although I would not do that myself)
Something that I keep seeing go un-mentioned is that all GitHub users are not software consultants in the traditional sense. For those that have an actual product and own their code, this breaks down very quickly.
For example, at Pathwright, we have a growing number of private repositories that are various components of our platform, marketing sites, one-off static sites we do to for various things, and etc. We have butted up against our limit several times now, though only a few of our many repositories see regular activity. GitHub is making excellent profit from us, given that we are under ten employees, and the vast majority of our activity is in 2-3 repos at most.
The point of the article is that their model doesn't make complete sense for everyone. I think this is a very valid point. He also [correctly] concedes that the BitBucket model doesn't work for everyone.
In other words, this is a subjective piece that is billing itself as subjective. It is meant to provoke thought about pricing models without declaring one way the "best" way.
Just set up ssh on your own server and voilà... free unlimited repos.
sure you miss out on some tools. But what's more important... repo storage/usage/access/privacy or a pretty graph of your commits? Perhaps catting a ssh key to the end of a text file is a bit too much complexity for a company who claim to be selling themselves as expert software solutions developers.
And if you do want all that, it does exist and is available to install on your own host.
All for £20 a month. Not even hard to set up multisite replication etc.
I'm also not a fan of quantifying productivity lost in ££. When someone has a bowl movement do you chart that against company productivity?
We have a sysadmin who looks after the servers. However, bad things can happen. If he was able to spend all his time working on these problems, they wouldn't occur, but he has other responsibilities too. Should we hire someone else? No! It's cheaper and more reliable to outsource these responsibilities to a team working 100% of the time on it.
> I'm also not a fan of quantifying productivity lost in ££. When someone has a bowl movement do you chart that against company productivity?
I don't understand your point. There's a big difference between going to get coffee, go to the toilet, etc - which is normal, expected and accounted for - and having large parts of the company unable to work because particular services are down.
Well if he did a good job it would be adequately mitigated. This isn't 1997. It is trivial and cheap to set up reliable redundant systems. Outages happen. But not very often if you have done your job half right. Hopefully so rarely that you decay to near zero.
> and having large parts of the company unable to work because particular services are down.
If it was real time critical yes. But tis a distributed VC we are talking about. Just wait 15 minutes to push and spin your build to the customer. It isnt the end of the world.
Not doing it yourself may mean going with BitBucket for some or all of your private repos, in this case.
Just a note though, if you're a consulting company and cant afford $200 a month for the 125 repo's, you should be charging more.
And yes, I do know that rates should be increased and that even 200$ a month are a drop in the bucket to some startups - but not to all startups, especially non US-based ones.
In business cases like this, a bad tradeoff is being made. There may be some amount of money that their repo based pricing might make them over a per-user model. If they leave that money on the table though, they'd shrink what is left for their competitors and make themselves harder to disrupt. They would also get a greater pool of accounts that may grow to paid-status.
Seems like Bitbucket was acquired by Atlassian for two reasons:
1. Free DCVS hosting as a free perk to existing customers, with tight integration to existing Atlassian products.
2. Free DCVS hosting to non-customers, with the hopes of converting some to the Atlassian suite.
We (a dutch 'embedded' software company of about 300 developers) currently use SVN for our version control. We use some tool, of which I forgot the name, to simplify managing repositories and permissions. This costs us a couple of hours per year in maintenance and support, and the tool cost somewhere around 1500 euro. Hours go for around 80 euro's here, so lets say 3.000 euro TCO per year.
For us having code in the cloud (read within reach of the US government) is not an option, our customers will not allow it. I believe our insurance will not even allow that. Also we need to have Ldap/Active Directory integration; Ldap is the only way we can effectively manage authorisation between a large amount of services.
Looking at all the alternatives, Atlassian Stash, Gitstack, etc. Github is by far the most expensive(75.000 per year). Right now, we have decided that setting up a Gitblit server ourselves, will be the most cost effective.
There is no way I can convince my boss that using Github will save us 60.000 euro per year.
Github make full sense for open source projects, with easy forking and pull requests. However, I dont see any advantage to take a private repo, even worst at the price they propose, and hosted in a complex legal context.
Their enterprise pricing is probably designed for under a 100 employees.
No one is going to make you commit to a contract or bite your hand off if you ask them if they can go cheaper.
Where do you think the largest cost in an app like this comes from? Especially the onsite installed version? It's in support of the users.
Just name your budget to them and see if they meet it or not. Simple as a couple of emails. Maybe it could be $40k for 500 users… who knows?
> Where do you think the largest cost in an app like this comes from? Especially the onsite installed version? It's in support of the users.
Absolutely agree with that, this is the reason why we prefer unlimited licenses. I work at research facility and every year we have thousands of newcomers who stay here for several months and then leave, we simply cannot take on us management of their accounts.
However, even if you're counting 60.000 euro per year, it's not really such a large number when you consider that you have 300 developers. Saving on average 7~ hours per developer per year in work efficiency would more than make up for the fees, but the costs of switching over and perhaps picking up a new version control is also something to consider.
We all want things to be cheaper, but sometimes you need to rationalise things off and realise whilst they emotionally look expensive, they're actually really not when you work out what the cost is to you in terms of work to cover it.
Put it this way, if you go to BitBucket (they're great as well! Highly recommended!) you'll save money, but lose the headline features of GH. For you this may or may not be a big problem. If you go down the self-hosted route (super valid!) then you've got a specific amount of admin time that needs to be put in per month by either a dev or sysadmin and that's more than likely to either cost the as much or more than GHs pricing.
Pricing is hard, but GitHub is pricing where GitHub needs it's prices to be.
The issue is largely down to older clients that I only occasionally do maintenance work for. I've got about 15 of these, and they cut into my private repo count. Of course, it's easy to dump repositories on a server, which I have done in some cases, but I find my clients often like GitHub's interface. I've also put a few onto Bitbucket to give myself a bit of breathing room, this works well when projects are effectively 'archived' and have little client involvement but are still running.
I'm thinking about using GitLab, but I'm wondering about the amount of effort it'd take to maintain it. Cost for GitHub/Bitbucket vs. time to maintain another web application? Hmm...
Both Github's and Bitbucket's prices max out at $200 a month; if you're a freelancer, that's worth about 2 - 4 hours of your time per month. That amount is easily spent on hosting/managing your own repositories. If you can avoid spending 2 - 4 hours a month on repositories, go for those.
$200 is nothing if you're running a business.
The price isn't a problem, but their largest plan only gives 125 repos, which we'll reach relatively quick at this rate. Enterprise is not an option, as we're not really interested in hosting and maintaining it ourselves.
They do however say "If you need a plan larger than Platinum, contact us for details about our larger business plans." Does anyone have any details about what their larger business plans consist of?
Most likely we'll eventually migrate to Bitbucket.
If you are small shop with private repos, bitbucket does everything github does for free
If you are small-med+ shop you can pay per user and you should really be considering a more enterprise level of project management other than "issues and wiki docs"
First you'll have the money to pay Atlassian for all their tools, and second you will discover you can't live with out them once you have them and will rarely, if ever, visit the bitbucket page for a project (which is a "Good Thing" imo)
So I give my money to BitBucket.
We never use such public hosts.