I don't know if you remember back when service providers would put customers' entire dataset on a single set of spinning platters. The drive would of course die and the customer would get super pissed off when the provider would say "You were supposed to keep a backup..." So now providers like GitHub and GitLab are basically super-redundant storage, network, and application providers, who also happen to run Git.
If you store 50GB in AWS S3 (US-East-2), download 1000GB, do 100 PUT operations and 1000 GET operations, the cost is $89.68 per month.
Considering that GitHub isn't just providing you with storage, but a complete Git LFS solution plus storage, plus traffic that you can just use and not think about, I think it's worth the expense. But then again I probably wouldn't store binary blobs in Git.
The number you're citing is basically entirely bandwidth, which has two main problems.
One is that amazon has an enormous markup on bandwidth, compared to their other products.
The other is that GitHub does not actually let you download each file 20x in a month and "not think about" it. 50GB of space for a month only gets you 50GB of bandwidth.
If Amazon didn't explicitly ban people from using Lightsail bandwidth with other services, you could put together an all-AWS package that has 150GB of high quality S3 storage and enough bandwidth to download it 2-3x per $5 (minimum order quantity 2). For a service like B2 you could store 250GB twice (each copy having its own cross-server RAID) and download it once for $5. At digitalocean $5 will get you 250GB of probably-redundant data with 1TB of bandwidth, though it eventually tapers off toward 167GB/$5.
Just be thankful you are not on Gitlab. We pay $60/year for 10GB.
I need the data for my team, so we pay, but I use it as an excuse to force the team to clean up data every so often. As a game company we need large repos. It was either Gitlab or Azure DevOps.
Nowadays games assets are just crazily huge. AAA games tends to ship at 50G. Now think about the raw assets size and saving all the intermediate revisions.
It's quite easy to burn 1000G of storage on GitHub/GitLab (again, don't forget all the revisions). That puts just the storage cost at $6000/year. At this price point, it's really worth hosting on your own.
As Danieru mentioned they are forcing ppl to manually do cleanups, that probably indicates the storage costs are even higher which worth manual interventions.
An I happy paying 6 dollars a year for a single gigabyte: I'd rather pay less.
Edit: I pay attention to costs, and repo size is the sort of thing which has a. Habit of growing. All else being equal I'd prefer my team receive the money. A dollar I can give to my team/employees feels good, a dollar paying for over priced storage feels bad.
Doesn't that also apply to, say, GitLab paying their team? The pricing for a highly-available service isn't as cheap as it could be but it doesn't seem terribly far off of S3's pricing.
I know that a small game studio must have a tight budget — and yours looks like a really interesting project (just subscribed) — but it seemed like an awfully strong objection to what I would have assumed would be a small fraction of your total expenses.
It's good for GitLab to pay their teams, but that stops being a justification to pay them more once the profit margin for a service gets high enough.
> it doesn't seem terribly far off of S3's pricing
GitHub's offering is close to S3 but only because AWS charges so much for bandwidth. The storage portion is less than a quarter of the equivalent bill.
If you store 50GB in AWS S3 (US-East-2), download 1000GB, do 100 PUT operations and 1000 GET operations, the cost is $89.68 per month.
Considering that GitHub isn't just providing you with storage, but a complete Git LFS solution plus storage, plus traffic that you can just use and not think about, I think it's worth the expense. But then again I probably wouldn't store binary blobs in Git.