[Sephr]

If you need to give Epic Games special treatment just because they have a huge amount of outside collaborators, then your pricing model is broken.

It would be more fair to charge $9/mo per organization member + $1/mo per active outside collaborator (somewhat similar to AWS CodeCommit) than to charge for every single active and inactive member and collaborator equally. Maybe throw in a 50% bulk discount for active outside collaborators over 1000.

This is not a "unique situation", it's how many organizations use GitHub (just on a smaller scale than Epic Games). As giovannibajo1 puts it[1], this change is very unfair to software houses. Giving Epic Games special treatment is only avoiding the issue.

If 5% of Epic Game's 90664 collaborators are active for a given month, then with my proposed pricing model it would now cost them ($9/organization member + ~$2766)/mo, instead of >$800k/mo. No special deals needed, and everyone (presumably) is happy.

This proposed pricing model also scales well for software houses that have have many active outside collaborators. For example, a company with 20 employees and 50% of 100 outside collaborators active in any given month would be charged $230/mo. With 50 employees and 50% of 500 outside collaborators active, it would be $700/mo.

This should also work well for large companies. 200 employees + 30% of 4000 outside contributors active = $2900/mo.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11673352

[lucasnemeth]

Business are free to close deals with clients in their own terms whenever is lucrative for them. Almost every single company will have "unfair" treatment for big corporations... That way they can get big paying clients. clients that could possibly host their own solutions... It might be that Epic Games in the old business model, with so many users, was not profitable for github, but they are open to negotiate a middle term. It's just business. It is fair.

I think github is on their own right and if you have a case where you think you would be able to negotiate with them, you can send them an email as well... If not, go search another company that have a better cost/benefit for your use case.

[pavs]

Special deals can be made for special cases, it happens all the time. We have a service related business with official pricing, but always bend over backwards when we want to retain long term customers or big paying customers by giving them price cuts and other concessions that we wouldn't normally do to any of our other regular clients.

Not sure why the topic of fairness even comes to the discussion, this is a business not a charity.

[DCKing]

> If you need to give Epic Games special treatment just because they have a huge amount of outside collaborators, then your pricing model is broken.

This is an unfair thing to say. Exceptions to otherwise simple rules does not at all mean that the simple rules are "broken".

It is also an unfair thing to say since he clearly says that not only is Epic Games getting this treatment, so is everyone in a similar situation. Furthermore, it has always been possible to negotiate special pricing for special cases. Just send them a message. That is how sales works at almost every company.

[cortesoft]

Do you understand how businesses work? Almost every company I work for has different terms for lots of customers. They negotiate a deal with a customer, and sign a contract. Every customer might pay different amounts.

That is just how business-to-business deals work.

[spraak]

Ho but they can give to consultancies too