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Comment by the_trapper

8 years ago

I'm also optimistic they'll revamp GitHub's pricing structure. Their current price of $7 a month is absolutely absurd for individual developers. I can get a pretty decent VPS for $2 a month cheaper. Considering that most of their competitors give small teams free private repos, their price should be half of that. I understand that they have a lot of open source projects to subsidize and all, but I highly doubt a lot of individual developers are biting at that price.

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the_trapper

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hobofan  8 years ago

> Considering that most of their competitors give small teams free private repos, their price should be half of that.

Why would you lower your price if people are still paying for it and you are the market leader? Also at $7 per month it is among the cheapest tools for a professional developer.

dragonwriter  8 years ago

> I'm also optimistic they'll revamp GitHub's pricing structure.

Well, it's Microsoft, so more complex tiering and tie in to MSDN should be on the road map.

> Their current price of $7 a month is absolutely absurd for individual developers.

How so?

> I can get a pretty decent VPS for $2 a month cheaper.

Perhaps, so what? That's an unrelated service.

> Considering that most of their competitors give small teams free private repos, their price should be half of that.

Their competitors do that to build a user base and mind share in the face of GitHub’s huge advantage in network effects.

gkya  8 years ago

I don't understand why a solo dev needs to host his private repos somewhere. You can just keep it on your machine, and have it backed up with the rest of your data. And given git is distributed, you should be able to work with teams w/o requiring Github.

  • the_trapper  8 years ago

    It's a convenience thing for me. As a hobbyist solo dev it'd be nice to have a place to work on code across different devices in private and then open it up when I feel the code is mature enough and the time is right to put it out there under an open source license.

    Right now I use VSTS for private repos, but it'd be nice to be on GitHub were the vast majority of open source projects are hosted.

  • matthewmacleod  8 years ago

    This completely misses the forest for the trees.

    I currently pay for GitHub, personally. This has the following benefits:

    - Easy to collaborate with other people if I want to invite them to my projects.

    - Web-based code hosting, meaning I can access my code from anywhere regardless of whether I have access to my own machine or not.

    - A web interface! This is quite useful for browsing code or sharing particular snippets with others.

    - Integration with third-party tools. Almost literally every code-related service that offers integration will integrate with GitHub – things like CI servers etc. for example. This means basically zero-effort setup for many other tools.

    The cost to me is basically a rounding error, and the utility is great.

  • ctjj  8 years ago

    I can only speak for myself, but I like hosting private repos on GitHub because I like using issues & milestones to track my progress