Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by bsnape 3695 days ago
This has almost quadrupled our monthly cost ($850 vs $2914). We have ~300 users which will have to be reduced massively to save costs - perhaps with non-engineers sharing accounts or having no access at all. I'm not sure if charging per user is really in the spirit of open collaboration that GitHub champions.

I slo wonder if charging per user rather than per repo will also discourage the creation of open-source repos from orgs? There's no longer a (reduced) cost benefit after all, even if that was a minor influence compared with the other benefits of open-sourcing your code.
3 comments
odonnellryan 3695 days ago
You have 300 employees and an extra $6/mo/em is going to break you? How much do you spend on toilet paper? :)
link
bsnape 3695 days ago
Haha we probably spend a lot on toilet paper as we have ~5k employees (FTSE 100 company) but that isn't the point I was trying to make :-) it doesn't matter how big or rich you are - if costs for a thing increase by x3.5 it's probably going to have an impact. I'm no enterprise-lover and we spend tons of money on crap with annoys me but I'm not in a position to change that.

We are not a "technology company" (and unfortunately I'm not the CTO!) so we will have to report upwards that costs will be increasing x3.5. Their reaction will probably be to ask us to investigate alternatives.

It looks like smaller companies/startups will benefit much more from this change which is fair enough to charge the big boys more really.

I'm not asking anyone to get their violins out but it makes me a little sad that we may have to move away from GitHub. On the flip side, GitLab has been looking great lately!

link
smackfu 3695 days ago
Doesn't say they are employees.
link
odonnellryan 3695 days ago
So it's an open source project?

I guess it can be a NFP that has closed-source repos. But why?

link
Xylakant 3695 days ago
Doesn't have to be OS. It could be a commercial product that grants access to the source.
link
odonnellryan 3695 days ago
It's possible, but that's a weird requirement (weird you'd want all your clients on the same repo, anyway) and you'd be able to circumvent this and come out pretty swell on the other side if that money is really worth it to you.
link
Xylakant 3695 days ago
Why would they not use the same repo? It can easily be a standard product - look at the example further downthread of the unreal engine: All clients get access to the code. 2 private repos and 90657 users.

That's an extreme example, but we also have a single repo that a lot of collaborators get access to.

link
Etheryte 3695 days ago
If you already invest into this monthly, why don't you just have GitLab on premise?
link
bsnape 3695 days ago
We like to use hosted services rather than host them on-prem where possible (AWS, Artifactory, Slack, GitHub).

For the size of our company we have relatively few engineers. Not hosting things ourselves increases our productivity and we can concentrate on our own products :-)

link
CameronBanga 3695 days ago
GitLab has a hosted solution, take a look at that. We love them, and they making moving over from GitHub easy.
link
WillAbides 3695 days ago
> This has almost quadrupled our monthly cost ($850 vs $2914)

Has it really? Existing orgs aren't being forced to change, and on top of that they say they will give at least 12 months notice if they decide to force existing orgs into new pricing.

link
bsnape 3695 days ago
Sorry, yes, will change in 12 months time. I'm sure they will force the new pricing structure then (and that's cool).

Billing screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/k1F0BxA.png

link