[pjhyett]

We're trying to fundamentally change how people write, collaborate, and discover code and the sooner people stop thinking of us as just a repo depository, the better, because we've never been about that.

Ask yourself what kind of markup we'd have to charge on storage space and still be able to grow our business when most of the repos we host are less than 1 MB.

We charge what we do because it makes money. Money that allows us to continue hiring really talented people that are all focused on building an even better service.

Doing things like including private repos with our free plan would eat into our margins and only satisfy the people that are likely to never convert to a paid plan. Frankly, I think being able to use all of the tools we provide for the price of a pint of Guinness every month is a damn good deal.

[carbonica]

I laughed at the article, but you have a really good point. If you have 30 projects and only want a place to put your code, you're far better off just using a private server, which you undoubtedly already have. If you have a development culture that is well-modeled by how GitHub approaches collaboration, that's where you'll see a lot of added value over a private server.

I think the tough part is that GitHub's innovations in collaboration are primarily a huge win for open source. GitHub makes discovery of these projects so much easier, connects disparate people across communities (and countries!), and provides a unified technical stack and process "stack" for those people to contribute (same bug trackers, same "send me a pull request" approach, same wiki). That's something that's a pretty big deal for OSS.

Most of those issues aren't as big a deal for a business in my experience - most businesses either don't have such problems (discovery) or have their own solutions (process). But hey - you guys have got customers, you're hiring like crazy, and I love your stack personally; I'm certainly not judging! Just offering my perspective on why some folks might not buy in to the collaboration stuff from a business point of view.

[Legion]

It's just extremely frustrating to not be a Github customer because the pricing model is completely unworkable.

The little company I work at would love to host our repos on Github and pay for a plan appropriate for our level of use. But according to Github pricing, we're "Platinum" solely because of our repo count, even though our level of traffic and space usage is tiny.

It's hard to say that it's "wrong", because clearly things are working well for Github, but those of us who have been intentionally left out don't have to be happy about it.

[programminggeek]

I'm a happy GitHub customer and your service is worth every penny. Keep building awesome stuff!

[aquinn]

More private repos with the paid plans would definitely keep me paying and might convince others to pay.

[Kudos]

Storage is cheap, I think archival for private projects would appease most people.