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Github, I always comment this here, and will continue to do so as I know you monitor these threads.

Please let us have unlimited private repositories for single user repos.

I'm a freelancer and would like to use Github for both personal (which I can open source) and commercial (I can't share the source) projects.

Currently your pricing scheme is borked. I can 7$ a month for only 5 repositories. That's insanely expensive for such a small repository with MINIMAL traffic in an out.

Remember: I'm the only one commiting code here, it's a freelance gig.

Should you offer this feature of free private repositories, you'll become my sole off-site code backup. BitBucket offers free unlimited with a limit of 5 contributors per repo. If they can do it, why can't you?

10 comments

"Github, I always comment this here, and will continue to do so as I know you monitor these threads."

If this is the case, you should not need to continue commenting, since it is likely that they have already seen your previous comments.

You should contact Github directly - https://github.com/contact - instead of posting off-topic screeds on Hacker News.

> I can 7$ a month for only 5 repositories. That's insanely expensive for such a small repository with MINIMAL traffic in an out.

I understand your plight, I've asked GitHub similar questions before and they were very gracious.

But the simple fact is, and let's talk frankly as developers here, customers are overhead. Most of the time I really enjoy working with my customers, and we get along great, but at the end of the day if the checks stop coming I'm going to stop working for them.

You see, you're thinking about this from a "but it's only 200KB of text files sitting on S3, why does it cost so much?"

But GitHub sees your proposal as another customer relationship to maintain. Customer relationships are expensive and require investment. They require support staff to answer emails. They require expensive on-call devops to be paged in the middle of the night when some random fileserver (maybe even the one with your minimally trafficked repos) stops responding. GitHub's business model isn't eyeballs, it's dollars, and your proposal doesn't bring them dollars.

So much about this doesn't make sense to me. What features does Github offer that make you want to use it over, good example, BitBucket? Why do you feel you deserve those features for free? Why in particular do you feel you deserve to use those features for free to do your own paying work? Come to think of it, what kind of freelancing are you doing where $7/mo is a notable expense?

Really, help me, I want to understand— but you sound like a crazy person.

I have about 50 repositories. It would cost me a lot per month to host it on Github. Why do I want to use Github? Because I'm transitioning from C# (MVC3) work to Ruby on Rails work.

Heroku only integrates well with Github (for some stupid reason) and I would prefer to host it on Github for my comfort.

I'm located in Bolivia. I do not charge 4000$ per project. My cost of living is lower, hence, my rates are lower than most first world country programmers. There's your reason why I can't afford Github's ridiculous prices.

So, assuming you mean 50 private repos, on Github that's $100 or $2/repo/mo.

I understand cost of living differences, but what are you charging that $2/mo makes an impact?

And if finances are really that tight, how do you get away with using Heroku?

What are you doing with Heroku that only works with Github? I simply push code up to Heroku directly from my local machine. What does Github have to do with it?

Please consider that in first-world countries, $7 a month is quite reasonable. Pricing something so that it's affordable to everyone, everywhere, is a hard problem. Also consider that they have to pay US-based developers and services to keep it all running, so they're going to have to charge US prices.

I think his point is that $7/month is reasonable. What's hard to understand is why you could privately host a project the size of jQuery or Rails for $7/month, but his 50 projects that are orders of magnitude smaller and less active would cost much more.

Why do the personal repositories have to be private?

what sort of github/heroku integration are you thinking of?

maybe you should try to learn what decentralized means.

Maybe you should think twice (three times even!) before posting these trite smart-ass comments. This isn't /r/programming.

Have you thought about getting work from clients in other countries? I think for most of us the Github rates are ridiculously low rather than ridiculously high.

$7 a month sounds like a lot for storing a few kilobytes of files. Especially given that he could get 5 GB of storage free on Google Drive or a similar service.

The silly thing here is that Github's pricing for private repos doesn't take into account bandwidth use or repo size. After all, those are the costs to Github, not number of repos. It would be like a grocery store charging you a flat fee for 5 items, without bothering to inquire about what those items were.

Considering the challenges they have keeping everything online and stable for the number of repositories they already host, I don't really want them to be the free private backup service for every developer in the world. Maybe they don't want to be either. They don't seem to have a customer acquisition problem -- what's the benefit to Github in doing what you ask?

Why not switch to BitBucket? It does what you want at your price point (free).

Disclaimer: I work for Atlassian and we run BitBucket.

do you always post this too? :P

I'm more genuinely interested in why Bitbucket isn't an option for the OP. If he hadn't brought up Bitbucket in the first place I wouldn't have asked.

If you meant the disclaimer, then yes - just being honest about who feeds me :)

It is an option for the OP, he just likes github more :O. But you guys sure have pair programming down :P

We tend to run out of private repos on our organisation gold plan, but have a little ruby script which can pull down some of the older projects (and their wikis), zip them up, archive them to S3 and then remove the repo on Github.

It can also do the reverse, pull the archives down, create a new private repo and push everything back up.

It works quite well, and certainly solved the problem of hitting that ceiling.

Would you mind publishing this? We run into this issue too.

It's definitely my intention to. At the moment it's a bit of a hodge-podge, but it's definitely on my to-do list to release it as a properly packaged (and tested) rubygem.

You should consider using git-annex with an S3 remote.

http://git-annex.branchable.com/tips/using_Amazon_S3/

I'd understand if you were wanting to host private side projects, but you're using Github to help you make money. That's very unreasonable, especially when you can claim these costs as tax deductions.

Charging 7$/month for 5 repositories is even _more_ unreasonable.

Wow, some people. You think you should get all the value of using Github and give nothing back to the community through public repositories? What would your response be to a customer that demands you work for free, telling you to recoup the costs from your other customers?

So don't use Github?

Host your own, go to BitBucket or pay. Github sets their prices so they can make money, I'm sure if they could work the revenues they'd do a cheaper plan, but as they've yet to do it (despite BitBucket offering unlimited private repos) I'd assume they favour making money over being popular.

Bitbucket gives unlimited private repos.

Take a look at gitlab, an open-source Github-like web app [1]. It's free [2] [3].

[1] http://gitlab.org/

[2] You have to have somewhere to host it, and that hardware, power and bandwidth cost money. If you already have a server of some sort -- like a cheap Xen VPS, or an older machine that you use as a Linux server that runs 24/7 stuffed in a closet in your house -- you can treat that part as a sunk cost, since you would have bought it regardless of your adoption of Gitlab.

[3] You have to go through the trouble of setting it up and keeping it up-to-date yourself. Saying it's "free" assumes the time you spend creating and maintaining the installation doesn't cost you anything.