Why GitHub’s pricing model stinks (for us) • Hacker News Board

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

#61

Post by jimrandomh » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 1:12 PM UTC

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…

Agreed, but even worse than that, it makes GitHub's pricing O(n^2) with time. If a project involves creating a repository and then leaving it up when the project's finished or in maintenance, that costs money forever; and if a person creates such projects at a fixed rate, then that gets unreasonably expensive.

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

#62

Post by jimrandomh » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 1:12 PM UTC

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…

Agreed, but even worse than that, it makes GitHub's pricing O(n^2) with time. If a project involves creating a repository and then leaving it up when the project's finished or in maintenance, that costs money forever; and if a person creates such projects at a fixed rate, then that gets unreasonably expensive.

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

#63

Post by duwqihu » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 1:12 PM UTC

ricardobeat wrote: post #50

Here you go: http://beanstalkapp.com/ https://codeplane.com/ http://www.codebasehq.com/ http://projectlocker.com/ https://unfuddle.com/ https://www.assembla.com/ http://gitorious.org/ http://gitlab.org/ good luck :)

335253616173627`1+

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

#64

Post by duwqihu » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 1:12 PM UTC

ricardobeat wrote: post #50

Here you go: http://beanstalkapp.com/ https://codeplane.com/ http://www.codebasehq.com/ http://projectlocker.com/ https://unfuddle.com/ https://www.assembla.com/ http://gitorious.org/ http://gitlab.org/ good luck :)

+4407870826787

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

#65

Post by eloisant » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 1:15 PM UTC

It's very clear that their pricing model stinks. I told it to Scott Chacon once, his answer was something like "yeah, we have to make money too, whatever".

So I give my money to BitBucket.

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

#66

Post by steeve » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 1:17 PM UTC

Or you can just email them and I'm sure you could work something out.

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

#67

Post by diziet » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 1:19 PM UTC

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…

I'd imagine that with 300 developers, a good fraction of them already use git and github for their own projects, and so they would be comfortable with using the interface. Not that SVN is a bad choice -- depending on your company's workflow, familiarity with git and the need for more localized version tracking there are tradeoffs in either solution.

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.

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

#68

Post by easytiger » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 1:21 PM UTC

kaolinite wrote: post #48

easytiger wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

> 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. 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 h…

> 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.

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.

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

#69

Post by LordIllidan » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 1:35 PM UTC

kondro wrote: post #51

LordIllidan wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because the competitor has inferior features.

Github's extra features aren't all that useful to us though - certainly not worth the extra expense.

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.

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

#70

Post by lifeisstillgood » Wed, Feb 13, 2013, 1:57 PM UTC

patio11 wrote: post #25

So from one consultant to another consultant, what do you say when a potential client starts to say "Actually, we don't think we can do this engagement, because $X is too much" where $X is some number in three digits?

I have to agree with this - yes, the limitations are frustrating (talking to a guy with 25 repos.) but I am not in the business of finding cheap ways to deal with a pretty core piece of useful functionality when its barely the cost of my home internet.