[substack]

Charging per-module like github would encourage people to author fewer packages and to lump more functionality into the same package, which goes completely against the ethos of npm and the spirit of tiny abstractions that do one thing well.

The way that npm has structured things, programmers pay once for membership in a commercial tier, where presumably money is already changing hands to work on private code. I think this makes much more sense and won't bias the code itself in a negative direction.

[mts_]

That's a very good point!

I hadn't thought of it from the point of encouraging/incentivizing the authoring of more public packages.

But couldn't the current model then discourage the authoring of public packages, and lead people to start primarily publishing private packages.

I assume whatever reason people are authoring public packages today won't change because they get a paid account. Let's at least hope that's the case.

[thedufer]

Sounds like a big pain to have to pay individually for each person on a team if your company wants to use private modules. We're generally willing to throw money at problems like those private modules solve, but if we have to do it a dozen times it probably isn't going to happen.