Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why GitHub’s pricing model stinks (for us)

lostechies.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 90 posts

Re: Why GitHub’s pricing model stinks (for us)

#31

Post by Cthulhu_ »

alexyoung wrote: post #29

I'm in a similar position. I'm a freelancer, and I have quite a few clients for various Ruby/iOS/Node projects. I need more private repositories, but the jump to Gold is too much for my business. 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…

> 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.

Re: Why GitHub’s pricing model stinks (for us)

#32

Post by joshuakarjala »

RyanZAG wrote: post #19
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BitBucket's pricing is at $1/seat/month in the worst case though (assuming you match one of their intervals there). But yep I agree, Github is surely significantly more profitable than BitBucket.

Definitely agreed - I use BitBucket to store some private projects, which also means I don't pay them anything (yet). Seems not terribly profitable - I keep a backup elsewhere assuming Bitbucket will go down eventually from lack of funds!

I wouldn't worry so much about that.

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.

Re: Why GitHub’s pricing model stinks (for us)

#33

Post by easytiger »

kaolinite wrote: post #20
easytiger wrote: post #4

I really do not get the big deal. 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…

Because it's more work to do. Instead of setting that up, you could be working on your product. The company I work for does the same - code is all hosted locally, emails were (until recently) hosted locally, document sharing too. It was cheap but every so often there'd be a problem and it'd go down for 15-30 minutes, which would cost a few £1000 in lost productivity.

If you are of a significant size you will want to have a release or build engineer anyway who will normall be the person who takes ownership of these things. If not then it will be your office unix guy.

I'm also not a fan of quantifying productivity lost in ££. When someone has a bowl movement do you chart that against company productivity?

Re: Why GitHub’s pricing model stinks (for us)

#34

Post by LordIllidan »

TamDenholm wrote: post #3

I think the reason its priced like that is its far more profitable than any other way. Developers like loads of repo's for their many side projects etc. 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.

Why should we pay 200$ a month though when there's a competitor with a far better plan?

Re: Why GitHub’s pricing model stinks (for us)

#36

Post by ericb »

The only reason I have a bitbucket account is because github's pricing model is so bad. I even wanted to pay for a small account, but 5 or even 10 repos is nothing compared to my number of repos.

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.

Re: Why GitHub’s pricing model stinks (for us)

#37

Post by mqzaidi »

sgentle wrote: post #14

I agree and I wish I'd written this article myself. One of the great things about git compared to the version control systems of yesteryear is that it's lightweight enough and (with Github) discoverable enough to make many small repos a viable development pattern. I never liked the old giant-repo-for-all-the-code system, although I understand it's still popular at Google and many other large shops. I think what reall…

This is precisely the reason why we switched from github to unfuddle. Why should my developers start rationing for repos and start putting everything in one large repository, just so that we don't hit the limit with github. For example, we use node.js heavily, and I would like create npm modules that can be shared across repos, and put them in a repo of their own (so npm can install them). Github's pricing forces me not to do this, and discourages code reuse.

Re: Why GitHub’s pricing model stinks (for us)

#38

Post by why-el »

derefr wrote: post #24

I use both: I stick my private repos up on Bitbucket (where I don't need to show them to anyone, and thus pay nothing), and my public repos on Github (where I don't need to hide them from anyone, and thus pay nothing.) 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]; Githu…

Yep, this is exactly what I do. Though I will start collaborating on a private project beginning June and I am not sure how Bitbucket fares in that regard? Any experience with that?

Re: Why GitHub’s pricing model stinks (for us)

#39

Post by craftman »

crooy wrote: post #22
diziet wrote: post #2

Github does have per seat pricing (for their enterprise product, which is meant to be hosted locally): https://enterprise.github.com/pricing - it costs $21/seat/month. With their per repo pricing I'd imagine they are more likely to earn more revenue per user, since so many developers will end up having many old pet projects in private repos sitting there.

The Github enterprise version is unrealistically expensive. 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 l…

Fully agree with you. I use a private git repo on my own cloud server (west europe based).

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.

Post reply on HN