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Announcing unlimited free private repos

blog.github.com

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Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#311

Post by opencl »

geezerjay wrote: post #295
moritzplassnig wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When GitHub's financials got leaked in 2016, GitHub's personal accounts accounted for 12.5% of their revenue. GitHub Enterprise was 50%, their organization (= business) accounts were the remaining 37.5% [1]. It's fair to say that the personal accounts are irrelevant from a revenue perspective. [1] https://medium.com/@moritzplassnig/github-is-doing-much-bett... (disclaimer: I wrote the article but the data is by Bloom…

> It's fair to say that the personal accounts are irrelevant from a revenue perspective. Your assertion can only make sense if you also believe that a 12% paycut is irrelevant to your income.

12% of Github's income is ~0.001% of Microsoft's income.

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#312

Post by apetresc »

So, when I go to downgrade my Pro account to the Free tier, it warns me:

> You will no longer have access to unlimited collaborators or advanced code review tools in private repositories. > You will still have access to unlimited private repositories.

So it seems some functionality beyond just unlimited collaborators that is tied to the Pro account - but the blog post makes no mention of what these "advanced code review tools" could be. Anyone know?

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#313

Post by config_yml »

StavrosK wrote: post #96
balls187 wrote: post #38

This is a smart move. Gives developers who have small indy projects a reason to use Github rather than a competitor (I know I use gitlab precisely because it's free for my private one-off repos).

My move to Gitlab was basically "come for the free repos, stay for the rest of the amazing features". I will not be moving off it, and my new repos will keep being on Gitlab.

I actually switched back to GitHub yesterday, because it‘s still better integrated in the overal tool landscape (eg Heroku). So I just pulled the trigger on a $7 subscription for private repos. And today the good news of free private repos arrived :)

Edit: typo

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#314

Post by nindalf »

nambit wrote: post #245
moritzplassnig wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When GitHub's financials got leaked in 2016, GitHub's personal accounts accounted for 12.5% of their revenue. GitHub Enterprise was 50%, their organization (= business) accounts were the remaining 37.5% [1]. It's fair to say that the personal accounts are irrelevant from a revenue perspective. [1] https://medium.com/@moritzplassnig/github-is-doing-much-bett... (disclaimer: I wrote the article but the data is by Bloom…

12.5% is still a significant percent of revenue.

Significant... but the main threat to the other 87.5% is that developers try out Gitlab or other alternatives for their personal projects. These developers find that Gitlab is pretty good, and don't push their companies to pay for Github. Whereas if every developer starts out using Github exclusively for personal projects, it becomes the default choice when they start work.

With this change, Github foregoes a little revenue in exchange for securing the vast majority of their revenue.

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#315

Post by ergothus »

fharding wrote: post #309
iambateman wrote: post #190

A lot of people are concerned about the “what if they make me the product since I’m no longer paying.” A few reasons I don’t think that will happen: - private, single contributor repos tend to be pretty small. it costs Github very little to service a single account. - Github is a growing social network for developers. Getting young engineers on the platform for free will pay off handsomely when they join a team and a…

> Getting young engineers on the platform for free will pay off handsomely when they join a team and automatically assume Github is their code storage tool of choice. Github student pack was already a thing. https://education.github.com/pack

Not everyone looking to have a repo today and joining a team tomorrow where it will pay off for Github is a student. Being able to pay doesn't mean the same as willing to do so, particularly if they've not used github yet and have no idea if it will be worthwhile.

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#316

Post by smaps »

fharding wrote: post #309
iambateman wrote: post #190

A lot of people are concerned about the “what if they make me the product since I’m no longer paying.” A few reasons I don’t think that will happen: - private, single contributor repos tend to be pretty small. it costs Github very little to service a single account. - Github is a growing social network for developers. Getting young engineers on the platform for free will pay off handsomely when they join a team and a…

> Getting young engineers on the platform for free will pay off handsomely when they join a team and automatically assume Github is their code storage tool of choice. Github student pack was already a thing. https://education.github.com/pack

Not every young developer is a student. If Github had offered free private repos a couple of years ago I'd probably be using it instead of Gitlab.

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#317

Post by nevi-me »

Good timing! I have a private Gitlab instance, but yesterday I was wondering whether to go for a paid GH account so I can host a private repo there.

I intend on sharing the code when ready, but wanted issues history to be on GH without needing to migrate anything.

This decision saves me $7 a month

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#318

Post by malchow »

jmuhlich wrote: post #91
stupidcar wrote: post #60

One of the best uses of GitHub is being able to search for some obscure framework method name or enum constant, and find examples of working code that uses it. This has saved my life many times when trying to figure out how to configure Java frameworks to interact with each other. When searching for this kind of code, you have to wade through an awful lot of repos containing half-baked personal projects, experiments,…

Honest question: how do you make github search work for you? It often fails to find stuff that I know exists in a given repo. Nothing fancy, even single-word full symbol names.

https://sourcegraph.com ?

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#319

Post by vips7L »

petetnt wrote: post #215
vips7L wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same, especially the free built-in CI.

GitHub also has a free built-in* CI service via Azure Pipelines. How does that compare to the GitLab offerings? https://github.com/marketplace/azure-pipelines * in marketplace, limitations apply

It seems to be on par at a quick glance. I however still don't think I'll be switching back.

Re: Announcing unlimited free private repos

#320

Post by giobox »

geezerjay wrote: post #295
moritzplassnig wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When GitHub's financials got leaked in 2016, GitHub's personal accounts accounted for 12.5% of their revenue. GitHub Enterprise was 50%, their organization (= business) accounts were the remaining 37.5% [1]. It's fair to say that the personal accounts are irrelevant from a revenue perspective. [1] https://medium.com/@moritzplassnig/github-is-doing-much-bett... (disclaimer: I wrote the article but the data is by Bloom…

> It's fair to say that the personal accounts are irrelevant from a revenue perspective. Your assertion can only make sense if you also believe that a 12% paycut is irrelevant to your income.

If I’m reading the revenue chart correctly, 12.5 percent of their revenue was approximately 11 million dollars in 2016. At Microsoft, who is even going to notice that...

There’s surely a goodwill factor and wider strategic benefits here beyond the relatively small amount of revenue - these individuals enjoying the free private repos will in many cases likely be future candidates for customers for the enterprise offerings etc, or one day find themselves involved in discussions regarding managed VCS for a larger org. Given Microsoft’s current strategy to win over developers, this seems like a pretty sensible move, and the price (for Microsoft) very low. Strategically this seems not entirely different to the free accounts AWS throw at university students. Once you have someone hooked on your free offerings, you can start locking them into the wider platform (Azure) much more easily. Again, pretty much the AWS playbook.

Also, let’s not forget the 12.5 percent figure comes from 2016, a year which saw some pretty significant changes to GitHub’s offerings, such as unlimited personal repositories for paying users among other things. Prior to this you had to pay more to get more private repos. The number today may be somewhat different - I know my github spend went down following that change.

Also, 12.5 percent of revenues - comparisons to a 12 percent pay cut are pretty misleading.

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