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Why GitHub’s pricing model stinks (for us)

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

#71

Post by notimetorelax »

kondro wrote: post #56
notimetorelax wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I learned about GitHub Enterprise I was very happy thinking that we can finally switch to Git (currently we use SVN) only to be saddened by their pricing. We have around 5000 employees, GitHub price for 500 seats is 125,000$, this is incredibly expensive. Judging by their pricing they don't want big companies to be their clients as simple as that. Atlassian for example had a lot of grief with us simply because t…

Have you thought about contacting them and asking for a discount for volume? 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.

I doubt that they will cut the price to 100,000$. Why 100k$ because that's more than we pay for ALL Atlassian tools taken together. GitHub just does not provide that much value to cost that much.

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

#72

Post by imsofuture »

RobAley wrote: post #57
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 don't think he's saying that its too much, its that there is a cheaper option with better financial predictability, and that is why he's not using github. Its more of a heads up to github, paraphrasing : "if you want our business, this is the kind of plan that we like to buy, it solves our pain points, which for us is stability of pricing" or similar.

That's a bit of an abstract point though.

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.

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

#73

Post by lifeisstillgood »

imsofuture wrote: post #72
RobAley wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he's saying that its too much, its that there is a cheaper option with better financial predictability, and that is why he's not using github. Its more of a heads up to github, paraphrasing : "if you want our business, this is the kind of plan that we like to buy, it solves our pain points, which for us is stability of pricing" or similar.

That's a bit of an abstract point though. 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.

Thank you for stating clearly what was bothering me.

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

#74

Post by gm »

ricardobeat wrote: post #41
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…

Lots of assumptions there. The largest cost of operating GitHub is certainly not storage, but the whole server infrastructure and employees. That's what you're paying for. 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?

Your comment's good, it's the children of HN not liking what you said. Nothing to do but move on.

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

#75

Post by gm »

Argorak wrote: post #11
molf wrote: post #8

Agreed, Github does not make sense for small consulting companies. We have hundreds of repositories (way more than the Github top plan) and only 10 employees. We have been hosting our own git server (previously Gitorious and now Gitlab) and haven't looked back. Way more economic than Github enterprise. I guess these days Bitbucket or hosted Gitlab would also be a reasonable alternative.

We solved that by having the client decide on the code hosting. If the client decides for Github, he is expected to create an Organization and pay for the private repos he uses.

What kind of clients do you have? If I asked my clients what code repo to use and then asked them to set up a github org, they laugh me out of their building, probably making some sort of comment that I turned my problem into their problem.

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.

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

#76

Post by Argorak »

gm wrote: post #75
Argorak wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We solved that by having the client decide on the code hosting. If the client decides for Github, he is expected to create an Organization and pay for the private repos he uses.

What kind of clients do you have? If I asked my clients what code repo to use and then asked them to set up a github org, they laugh me out of their building, probably making some sort of comment that I turned my problem into their problem. 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.

Large and small companies, most somehow technology-minded, but not fully.

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.

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

#77

Post by RobAley »

imsofuture wrote: post #72
RobAley wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think he's saying that its too much, its that there is a cheaper option with better financial predictability, and that is why he's not using github. Its more of a heads up to github, paraphrasing : "if you want our business, this is the kind of plan that we like to buy, it solves our pain points, which for us is stability of pricing" or similar.

That's a bit of an abstract point though. 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.

Its not an abstract point. My costs may go up, without my income going up, if I need more repos, which I can't necessarily predict in advance. I then either have to eat the extra cost or go cap in hand to the client because part way through the project or starting the next stage we've restructured the way we're using repos. Maybe we should plan better in advance, but with the other service he is using he doesn't have to.

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

#78

Post by gtaylor »

oellegaard wrote: post #45

I think the GitHub pricing model is excellent - and super cheap. I have multiple accounts and I happily pay for all of them - the value of not having to use a bad interface like bitbucket is far larger than the price for GitHub. 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…

> With a cost of 200$ for 125 repos, it is less than 2$ per client

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.

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

#79

Post by gtaylor »

easytiger wrote: post #68
kaolinite wrote: post #48

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. 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 la…

I think you're missing the point: We could spend extra time doing any number of things ourselves. When it comes down to it, shipping, being productive, and being reasonably efficient are much more important than "just doing it yourself". Especially if you are a tiny-small company, you should not be doing it yourself. You should be battling for success and survival.

Not doing it yourself may mean going with BitBucket for some or all of your private repos, in this case.

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

#80

Post by mcintyre1994 »

sytse wrote: post #60
mcintyre1994 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for replying. 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 p…

Great write-up, thanks. 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 ne…

Yep, it's fair enough that you probably can't compete on that, so strengths are probably a better way to go. The second one especially, that's really cool - and advanced permissions are probably where you want to be to top Bitbucket's team features. I haven't really used CI, but I've seen a few repos on Github using it and it looks like a neat thing to integrate.
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