[frederickcook]

this is an active project, and can the team really not afford to pay Github something like $5 per month per repo?

This is the OP's complaint: once you're over 20 private repositories, you're paying $100/month. He wants stupid-simple, hosted, private git repositories, and lots of them. He probably ran a bunch of numbers on servers, storage, and bandwidth, and found that he run a simple, low-cost hosted git solution (without all the fancy web features) at a fraction the cost.

There was an opportunity in the market to make a simple, low-cost competitor to github, and he built it. Kudos.