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>Github is just greedy.

No, Github is a business.

BitBucket is offering free private accounts as a loss leader, not out of the kindness of their hearts. This is their strategy for competing with GitHub.

A $7/month subscription for private github repos is well worth it.

GitHub's loss leader is providing ad-free hosting for millions lines of open source software. That's not only a good business decision, but one that benefits everyone. I happily pay $12/month for GitHub because nearly all the open-source projects I develop with are on there and I don't want to bother operating two accounts.
7$ a month for 5 private repos is not worth it all. I acknowledge that Github is a business but I am not about to pay a lot of money for hosting all my repositories, when I can do the same on Bitbucket for free. And when the team grows enough that I'd have to pay Bitbucket, I'll do so willingly.
If you consider $7 (or $12) a month a lot of money for software then you're probably not in the target audience for any (SaaS) software product. A lot of people are willing to pay some money for a SaaS product even when there are free alternatives.

I can't think of any piece of software I use regularly that doesn't cross the "worth at least $7 bucks" boundary.

But it's not just $7. We are a small consulting company, with a lot of git repositories. Our total costs would be more in the range of $50 a month.

That's what I am getting at. $7 a month is not all that expensive, you're right - but I am only getting 5 private repositories for that $7 a month.

It just doesn't make sense to use github for private work when you have a lot of repositories.

If you have each client take on the $ burden, then you don't have this problem. You've may have convinced yourself that by absorbing the cost, you are doing your client a great service.

In fact, you are putting more burden on yourself for little value. It takes 15 minutes to walk the client through how to pay for and manage a github organization. I do it with all of my clients. It is an opportunity to teach/coach and give them a sense of ownership which is how it should be.

You make a good point in that this could be absorbed as an implicit cost of a client project - but tell me again, why would we do this, when we can simply use BitBucket and create as many repositories as we like, without any problems whatsoever?

Our only limit is then the amount of people we hire, which is far more reasonable in my eyes.

If we were working on a small number of projects, then it would absolutely not be a problem to work with Github - it's when you have a lot of tiny projects that it becomes prohibitively expensive to work with.

Fair enough, that's how Github wants to price their service - I guess its catered more to actual startups (who have a few large core projects) rather than businesses like ours.

How much repositories do you have?

I think Github's plans are comparable to Bitbucket - it's just the starting tier is a bit more pricey - and, honestly, $7 or $12/mo doesn't make that much difference.

Over 20, and rapidly increasing - we create a repo for each new project. (consultancy)

Sure these projects are not too big, and the team isn't too big either, but if hosted with Github, we'd be looking at soaring costs per month, or join repos together.

This shouldn't be a problem...see: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4633886
It's worth it to me.... I pay for 10 private repos, and GitHub is one of my favorite tools. I don't like free services.
You're certainly able to pay for BitBucket, it's just that they don't require you to pay until you reach a team of 6 people. You can pay $10 a month to BitBucket and be able to have a team of 10 if you'd like, even if it's just yourself.
Are you mad ? $7 a month is nothing for something that you are going to use countless times whilst developing your product.

And no offense but Bitbucket is still a clunky mess that lacks the most critical feature: integration with almost every open source project.

Could you elaborate on "integration with almost every open source project" ? I don't get it.

For me github (and git) is like iPhone, a place for the "cool kids", and bitbucket for the rest of us :) Mostly because some github/git/iPhone/Mac enthusiasts are rather loud and fanboy-like - this destroys git experience for me. I prefer calm mercurial/linux enviroment :)

> mercurial/linux environment

What? You mean Github (which hosts the Linux kernel repository) and runs git (written by Linus Torvalds) is not linux-like?

That's cool if you have ONE product, and that's it.

If you work for customers (say as a freelance developer) and need to create a repo each time you win a new project, the $7 plan is useless.

Exactly, this was the point we were trying to make. In our case, we're a small team (<5), and have a lot of such projects - making our monthly cost closer to 30 to 50 a month. Compared to Bitbucket's cost of $0 for our case, it's definitely a no-brainer.
> Github is just greedy.

>> No, Github is a business.

Both comments are a bit silly. Atlassian (BitBucket's creator) is one of the more successful revenue "startups" while GitHub has hardly acted like a business to date.

Atlassian is not Bitbucket's creator, they bought it a couple of years ago.
$7 is not a problem, just 5 private repos is. One can quickly run out of those
I would not call Github greedy, they obviously have their own business plan but I find bitbucket interface more intuitive to use than Github.
I think it is really unfair to call Github greedy - they provide a valuable service and charge, in my opinion, a very reasonable price for it.

I'm actually considering moving to bitbucket - I have a lot of small private repos, and free vs $22/month makes a lot of sense. It's not that $22 is a "lot" of money - when you just have a bunch of small stuff on the side and don't make a ton of money off it, $22 here and $10 there starts to add up.

But I don't think Github is greedy - I'm just not their target market, and that's fine.

I wrote them an Android client and got a t-shirt as well!

https://bitbucket.org/saibotd/bitbeaker