GitHub is now free for teams

Hi HN, I&#x27;m the CEO of GitHub. Everyone at GitHub is really excited about this announcement, and I&#x27;m happy to answer any questions.<p>We&#x27;ve wanted to make this change for the last 18 months, but needed our Enterprise business to be big enough to enable the free use of GitHub by the rest of the world. I&#x27;m happy to say that it&#x27;s grown dramatically in the last year, and so we&#x27;re able to make GitHub free for teams that don&#x27;t need Enterprise features.<p>We also retained our Team pricing plan for people who need email support (and a couple of other features like code owners).<p>In general we think that every developer on earth should be able to use GitHub for their work, and so it is great to remove price as a barrier.

Great news for everyone bar startups competing with them as it looks like Microsoft is turning their multi-billion acquisition of GitHub into a loss leader to get as many devs using their platform as possible, no doubt to flex seamless integrations into Azure which looks like they&#x27;re executing exceptionally well with their acquisitions &amp; new feature giveaways.<p>From the side-lines it looks like they&#x27;re slowly becoming an unstoppable dominant force, what&#x27;s surprising to me is AWS&#x27;s &#x2F; GCP&#x27;s inaction, they&#x27;re either asleep at the wheel or they don&#x27;t see Microsoft&#x27;s dev mindshare grab as a threat.

This is an awesome change! In case anyone else was wondering, here&#x27;s what you lose by cancelling:<p><pre><code> You are downgrading to GitHub Free After April 15, 2020, ... features and limits will change: Protected branches in private repos Draft PRs in private repos GitHub Pages in private repos (using 1) Wikis in private repos Code owners in private repos Multiple issue assignees in private repos Multiple PR assignees in private repos Code review automatic assignment in private repos Scheduled reminders in private repos Standard support 2,000 minutes for GitHub Actions (currently 3,000) 500MB of storage for packages (currently 2GB)</code></pre>

Well, this is amazing! I never would have thought the Microsoft acquisition would have these kinds of results! Congrats to Nat and the GitHub team (and by extension Microsoft) for making this possible!<p>I wonder whether this is a result of market conditions, or whether GitHub sees this is a first-to-market play of some sort, or whether it&#x27;s something else. I hate to be a cynic given how much good Microsoft + GitHub have been doing lately, but what prevents this change from being rolled back?<p>Congrats again! I love using GitHub and look forward to many happy years shipping code on the platform.

By and far the main difference between &#x27;Team&#x27; ($4&#x2F;person&#x2F;month) and &#x27;Enterprise&#x27; ($21&#x2F;person&#x2F;month) is SSO&#x2F;LDAP [0]. The SSO tax is real [1].<p>[0]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pricing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pricing</a><p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sso.tax&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;sso.tax&#x2F;</a>

Seems like Github is feeling heat from GitLab&#x2F;BitBucket.<p>I guess the calculation here is that the enterprise contracts are where all the money is, and keeping smaller customers on GitHub is worth the price cut?

Google haven&#x27;t built up too much of a user base for GCP&#x27;s Cloud Source Repositories service yet (my speculation), so I wonder if they&#x27;re viewing Gitlab as an acquisition target.<p>TBQH, I don&#x27;t see Gitlab lasting too much longer without an acquisition event of some sort, when facing up against this sort of Microsoft-backed feature funding. And I say this as a bigger user of Gitlab than Github (primarily because of the free private repositories and organisations).

For those wondering &quot;what makes it worth paying now?&quot;, GitHub briefly addresses that:<p><i>Teams who need advanced features (like code owners), enterprise features (like SAML), or personalized support can upgrade to one of our paid plans.</i>

Very few companies can make me feel like part of their journey like Github (Cloudflare also)<p>They understand their target audience more than most of the companies out there. When they are making moves such as this, they explain what was behind it. I find it authentic.

I think GitHub are doing well, but one cannot deny that GitLab has carved out a fantastic niche (on-prem, private instances, OSS, etc) that GitHub doesn&#x27;t compete in. So while I agree GitHub are &quot;the&quot; company to beat, I think GitLab is doing a good job of contrasting.<p>PS - No affiliation with anyone.

I hope developers still default to making their personal repos public after this change. One of the fringe benefits of GitHub is the ability to search across the entire site for uses of obscure, poorly-documented APIs. Defaulting to most repos becoming private would greatly hinder this.

I&#x27;ve not been a big fan of GitHub historically, but the pace of innovation since the MS acquisition is really impressive. I wonder how much of that is MS influence vs just MS funding.

Bit disappointed that this isn&#x27;t an &quot;Everyone Wins&quot; pricing change.<p>The new plan is a downgrade from the old one. For example, it will only include 3000 Github Action minutes. The old plan included 10000. The next plan up would be &gt; 2 * old price.<p>Source: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pricing" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pricing</a> vs <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20200406010552&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;pricing" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20200406010552&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com...</a>

&gt; We’re happy to announce we’re making private repositories with unlimited collaborators available to all GitHub accounts.<p>Huh, I thought github made private repos available to free github accounts a while ago?<p>Looking for historical announcement, aha, it was not with &quot;unlimited collaborators&quot; before.<p>From Jan 2019:<p>&gt; GitHub Free now includes unlimited private repositories. For the first time, developers can use GitHub for their private projects with up to three collaborators per repository for free.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.blog&#x2F;2019-01-07-new-year-new-github&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.blog&#x2F;2019-01-07-new-year-new-github&#x2F;</a><p>So what&#x27;s new is dropping the 3-collaborators-per-repo restriction.<p>I hadn&#x27;t actually realized this restriction was there, apparently I&#x27;ve never used a private github repo in a free account! And the messaging from a year ago stuck in my head as &quot;private repos are free on github now&quot;, I thought they had already done what they did today, oops.<p>Above natfriedman writes:<p>&gt; We&#x27;ve wanted to make this change for the last 18 months,<p>So apparently they had wanted to do this even in Jan 2019 when they did something less than this...

What safe guards are in place to prevent Microsoft from using GitHub to glean competitive intelligence?<p>Just like Facebook used Onavo.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;facebooks-onavo-gives-social-media-firm-inside-peek-at-rivals-users-1502622003" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.wsj.com&#x2F;articles&#x2F;facebooks-onavo-gives-social-me...</a>

This is pretty cool. Anyone have thoughts as to _why_ they’re making this move?

Can you please prioritize stability of your SaaS offering for paying customers? Our dev team and infra gets impacted seemingly every week with github outages, and it especially seems to correlate with delivery of new features. Thanks!

Here&#x27;s a little quiz, which of the three phases are we in now?<p>a) Embrace<p>b) Extend<p>c) Extinguish

One thing to note is I had 3 members, it did not automatically downgrade my seats from 5. So in order to get it down to $12 a month I had to go downgrade my seats from 5 to 3.

This is great and I will most likely take advantage of this new offering, but I cant help but wonder why.<p>&quot;everyone deserves GitHub&quot; is marketing, not a corporate strategy.<p>How does GitHub stand to benefit from this change? How does more non-paying users help the company?<p>I am not trying to be a tinfoil hat jerk here. Life in the age of information has taught us all that (again) &quot;nothing is free&quot;. So what am I paying here?

Bitbucket is in trouble now. With no more paying customer for Git and no support for Mercurial what are they going to do?

The pricing change appears to fall right in line with Gitlab&#x27;s pricing (Free, $4&#x2F;user&#x2F;month, ~$20&#x2F;user&#x2F;month, and super expensive). I haven&#x27;t managed to compare their feature matrices to see if the tiers are closely aligned, but from a glance they look similar.

The way I read the title and heading, it sounded like teams was now free.<p>This messaging is very confusing. Teams is not being made free, you need to pay $4 per user. A better message would be: &quot;we&#x27;re reducing your price to $4pp, and giving you access to more features.&quot;

Hmm, literally the only paid feature left on the Teams plan we&#x27;re using is Draft PRs. I am worried that as it looks like I won&#x27;t need to pay for this service, that I, my team and my code will become the product to monetize at some point in the future.

Hi Nat, finally MS responded to the Gitlab threat. Recently Gitlab has announced that they would be making a bunch of products free.<p>&quot;We&#x27;re open sourcing rich functionality across Plan, Create, Verify, Package, Release, Configure, and Defend.&quot;<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.gitlab.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;03&#x2F;30&#x2F;new-features-to-core&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;about.gitlab.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;2020&#x2F;03&#x2F;30&#x2F;new-features-to-cor...</a><p>It&#x27;s good to see that MS has joined the party.<p>Are there any plans to make GitHub itself available for self-hosting? I am not sure but the go-to place for open source software cannot be closed source.<p>Cheers,<p>Tarun

Thank in large part to GitLab for pushing the market forward on affordable collaborative development.<p>We moved across when GH did their pricing changed. Free CI&#x2F;CD well before &quot;actions&quot;. Never looked back.

Microsoft could run all of Github free and still make money by integrating with Github and Azure so tightly that it is so easy to run code in Azure if you use Github<p>But it’s probably just completion in the space

My legacy silver org plan (20 private repos) only shows a migration plan to teams at $4&#x2F;user, is there something I&#x27;m missing? The new free tier seems effectively the same or better.

This isn’t really surprising. Microsoft has had a free equivalent for years with Azure Devops (formerly known as Visual Studio Team Service). Azure Devops has hosted build and deployment orchestration with either hosted build servers or local build servers using local agents. It also has private Nuget repositories, project planning, bug tracking etc.<p>Azure Devops deployment tools are (were? It’s been a couple of years) just as good for deploying to <i>AWS</i> as AWS’s own tools.

That&#x27;s awesome, I feel like many companies increase prices over time trying to squeeze more revenue, but that usually requires monopoly power.<p>I remember from economics that in an idealized, efficient, large market, the price of a product should tend towards the marginal cost of production. In the case of SaaS, that&#x27;s almost $0 (server costs being fairly low), so SaaS products ideally should all get cheaper over time. Good to see theory matching real-world here.

If you&#x27;re like us and your entire Github usecase now fits within this free tier, it seems like you&#x27;ll have to manually downgrade for it to take effect.<p>&gt; We’re also reducing the price of our paid Team plan from $9 per user&#x2F;month to $4 per user&#x2F;month, effective immediately. Existing customers will have their bills automatically reduced going forward.<p>I don&#x27;t mind this - we&#x27;ll likely stay on the paid plan anyways at that price point. But there you are.

Would it be fair to explain this move as a &quot;user retention&quot; tactic. Perhaps it becomes a more difficult decision for teams to close out their paid accounts, even amidst an economic downturn, when the fees are removed.<p>One could argue some MSFT acquisitions have been focused on acquiring large swaths of exisiting users moreso than acquiring revenue streams or work product. Github could have been one such acquisition.

I&#x27;m confused about the &quot;Collaborators for private repositories&quot; feature. The Free plan shows an &quot;unlimited&quot; number of collaborators but each of the paid plans show &quot;Up to org size&quot;. What does &quot;Up to org size&quot; mean? Which organization are you talking about? Does this mean that the free plans have more functionality?

Sounds like Microsoft is creating a new branch attempting to replicate the Atlassian business model. First get developers hooked on GitHub, then build GitHub integrations into enterprise software, then let developers make the sale to their own employers (primarily because developers like the little green activity boxes).

Compare this with Microsoft’s other notable purchase of recent years, LinkedIn.<p>At LinkedIn they are tightening all of the screws and extracting cash from all comers.<p>What is different about GitHub?<p>My guess is GitLab.<p>This is an old strategy for Microsoft. They used to call it Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

I&#x27;d much rather they threw in more LFS storage on my $7 plan. But I suppose they know that already if they&#x27;re moving towards a more &quot;freemium&quot; model. First hit is free, and then pay through the nose for LFS.

This is great news! I&#x27;ve always had my repositories spread across GitHub, gitlab, and bitbucket depending on what size group or features I needed but this helps centralize everything to GitHub. That is probably their goal!

However, looks like the Actions minutes included in the Team plan have dropped from 10K to 3K, so if you&#x27;re currently paying for a team plan and using Actions your costs might not decrease, or might increase a bit

Ouch. Just paid for a yearly pro license at the end of March.

Note: the minimum of 5 seats is removed so if you&#x27;re using less than that then you&#x27;ll have to manually remove those seats to avoid being billed.

This is great news. I can now move some of my projects from BitBucket to GitHub.<p>However, I wish GitHub supported GitHub Pages for private repositories for free as well.

Actions, Packages, Sponsors, free unlimited private repos, this...Microsoft&#x27;s GitHub acquisition has turned out really great so far in my view.

Great to hear that! One last thing that would make Github a better alternative to Gitlab for teams is the self-hosted runners for organizations IMO.

Is it 4$&#x2F;user on top of the minimum 20$ (which includes 5 users) ? Because my billing still says 20$&#x2F;month and I have less than 5 users.

Does “for teams” also apply to paid personal accounts?

This is really great news. I&#x27;ve been happy paying for GitHub for years and it was already great value but this makes it even better.

Well, hosting &quot;open-source&quot; software on a commercial platform does create something of a cognitive dissonance, doesn&#x27;t it?

I wonder if this will lead to more closed source software being written. I don&#x27;t mean by MS specifically, but overall.

This announce is not clear to me, as to what really changed. Can I have protected branch in my private repository now?

Are you grandfathered into the 10,000 free Action minutes for paid Teams? 10k -&gt; 3k drop is pretty substantial.

I just realized I&#x27;ve been paying for Github pro for like a year for absolutely no reason at all.

Thanks. I&#x27;m not surprised by this. I know this isn&#x27;t a &quot;mainstream&quot; opinion, but I was fairly happy when MS brought GitHub. I think that the Nadella MS is much more streamlined than the old &quot;Enemy of the State&quot; version that got our undies in a bunch, back in the last century.

Yeah, I just checked my email, and I remember reading this. This is pretty cool.

They are commoditizing their complement. So what&#x27;s their core business?

First you win the developers.<p>Then you get the apps.<p>Then you win the consumers.<p>How long to the next Microsoft Phone?<p>Wouldn’t want to be Google.

Does anyone remember the arbitrary actions GitHub has taken in the past few months and all the &quot;maybe it&#x27;s time to start leaving GitHub if you want to avoid getting your repositories permanently deleted?&quot;<p>Or is HN just as susceptible to the narrow news horizon?

Nice, now you can share all your secrets with Microsoft, for free.

What do you think will be the response of GitLab?

Many comments are saying that Microsoft is doing this move to help cross-selling Azure. I don&#x27;t see many users of free tier willing to spend money on Azure.

Good on MS &#x2F; Github for doing this.

Finally &amp; thank you, I oughta say!

what is the font for the text in the upper left that says &quot;The GitHub Blog&quot;? Looks cool.

What&#x27;s the catch?

Amazing - thank you!

I am very thankful to have GitHub on this planet

wtf i love microsoft, now.

yeet

437 comments, 6 from Nat Friedman. That seems a little weird for an AMA discussion.

So it will be free until the competition dies, and then it will be expensive?<p>Like... everything MSFT and GOOG have ever done?<p>Great.

Probably not very smart to use this feature, since your so-called &quot;private&quot; repository is an exploit or a leaking employee away from becoming public.<p>Instead, use a self-hosted Gitlab instance or similar, preferably with an external firewall preventing outbound and non-team inbound connections if feasible.

To think that John Mayer predicted this in his song _Daughters_ 17 years ago:<p>[Individuals] become [small teams] who turn into [big enterprises] &#x2F; So [GitHub] be good to your [individuals], too