Introducing unlimited private repositories

A small comparison:

Team | Cost Before | Cost Now

1 repo, 5 users | $25 | $25

1 repo, 10 users | $25 | $70

11 repos, 5 users | $50 | $25

11 repos, 10 users | $50 | $70

5 repos, 50 users | $25 | $430

50 repos, 5 users | $100 | $25

50 repos, 50 users | $100 | $430

I'm not sure how common are organizations with few users and large number of repose - I guess software houses that keep old projects (for maintenance and future requests from clients) fall into this category, but who else?

The other case where it becomes cheaper is personal accounts.

In all the other cases - it just looks like a raise of prices.

We have a tons of repositories, most are currently on BItbucket, because GitHub was to expensive. Only our largest projects are on GitHub. Our team is maybe 8 developers, depending on consultants, interns and other temporary employments, but we have 20 - 30 repos.

I think for small companies that do all development in-house, having large number of repos, and few developer is a pretty normal.

The way I look at it, GitHub is moving to a model where they assume that the number of employees is more indicative to the amount you can afford to pay, compared to previously where having a large number of repos meant you could pay more.

It will certainly help attract smaller businesses to GitHub.

Except that now GitHub is 9x more expensive than BitBucket (and for a team under 5 developers, GitHub is $25 vs. BitBucket's $0).

Well, 7x, but yes, GitHub is more expensive. $70 for 10 developers is still really cheap. Personally I prefer the GitHub interface and $60 is still within the range of even smaller companies.

It's a bigger difference, especially as BB is $200 for unlimited users and unlimited repos. For that money, you can get 25 users on GH. 25 users on BB is $25. So on average it is ~8x difference, which then grows beyond 25 collaborators.

Bitbucket is terrible though, so what does it matter?

Respectfully disagree. I find the commit pages and issues pages to be much more clean and informative on bitbucket, in particular the commit pages with the "subway graphs". The closest thing I've found on github is the "Network graph", which is really hard to use (you have to mouse-over each commit dot to see the commit message, etc)

Bitbucket is awesome. Their bug tracker is much better... plus Hipchat for free! Do you seriously spend money on Slack ;)

Slack hasn't had the downtime issues HipChat has had this year.

*yet

Downtime for HC is nothing new. They had the same problems last year which caused me to switch to Slack.

Can you clarify? Why is Bitbucket "terrible"?

He probably means in terms of general usability. This is the reason why I don't use bitbucket at all, and I'm happy to give some money to github in exchange for their service.

Bitbucket's issue tracker is such a pain to work with. I remember being redirected to a new page whenever I had to create a new tag. Then I'd loose the content of the issue I had started to write, something like that.

you are doing it wrong. If you want issue management you will buy Jira from the same company which is superior to github. Bitbucket is one tool of many for Atlassian.

Isn't that the problem, though? GitHub has one Issue tracker that is "good enough" for most projects I've worked on, and gets better over time because GitHub dog foods it (even if they don't always see some of the large open projects issues with it). Bitbucket has two Issue trackers, a "sort of useful" minimalist one that is worse than GitHub's and an upsell to Jira which is maximalist overkill for any project I've worked on. Atlassian doesn't have much incentive to make Bitbucket's issue tracker any better than it's current "almost decent" because it wants to upsell Jira. You can pretty much assume that Atlassian only works in Jira themselves.

(Similarly, VS Team Services has only one issue tracker and I'd rather use that than both of Atlassian's offerings, even though it's almost equally maximalist with Jira, mostly because they clearly dog food it and don't try to upsell into it from a worse system that nobody wants to use.)

I've never said I'm a fan of Jira. I also think it is overkill for all the little projects I've been working on. As other mentioned before here: Maybe look into gitlab.com ... they dogfood their project and the bugtracker is pretty good. https://about.gitlab.com/2016/05/11/git-repository-pricing/

I've found github better for open source projects, and bitbucket better for businesses. Github only just recently introduced the idea that one 'deploy key' could be used on more than one repo(!), for example, not to mention that deploy keys had full write access.

User management - more important for a business - is much nicer on BitBucket, and was the specific reason why we shifted. And it will continue to be nicer, until they infect BitBucket with the same user management mess that blights Jira/Confluence. :)

A lack of search across a repo is pretty annoying.

https://bitbucket.org/site/master/issues/2874/ability-to-sea...

Integration with Jira is nice though.

Dunno, we've had downtime every month for months.

Its slow as heck.

The UI is clunky.

The 'projects' made it hard to find anything and broke bookmarks.

... but the downtime is the killer. Last week was the last one.

page load time is the big killer for me

Bitbucket is ok for private repos. I think private repos are relatively secure there because Atlassian has much of reputation to loose if there is a security breach. Another plus for Bitbucket is the integration with Jira and other Atlassians tools. Beside that plus points I will rather go to GitLab.com (more features, better UI and integration with 3rd party) but my trust in private repos is lower there than on Bitbucket. I wished we could measure security somehow for private repos between Bitbucket, GitHub and Gitlab.com

How could we convince you that at GitLab we take security very seriously?

Make a dedicated site on gitlab.com about security (make it bold) and about private repos. Some buzzwords: Countermeasures, security tracking, rate limiting, DDoS attacks, Backups... what do you do to ensure security, privacy or that nothing is lost? It's a littlebit in the dark. I would love to see comparisons between gitlab, bitbucket and github if possible (but I'm guessing that's not easy) or I would love to see somehow you take that extremely seriously for gitlab.com. I only have this gut feeling (I cannot exactly say why) that bitbucket and github feel more secure for private repos than gitlab because their business is dependent on security of hosting private repos. On gitlab.com the hosted private repos are a bonus and not the business of gitlab (because the real business is selling gitlab enterprise software and their support).

Just ask yourself and imagine this: You have a new start up company based on very valuable closed source but you entirely do not want to host my own gitlab etc. server. Which service would you use? I'm guessing it is bitbucket or github because they are offering "premium" private repos and have a good reputation (at least I do not know that a private repo there was once disclosed).

Thanks for your input. I've added more security information on our website https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/bb7deced...

We try to achieve a good reputation by taking security seriously every day and being responsive to disclosures.

Creating a Security page on the site to explain your infosec policies would go a long way. I like that we're able to view previous disclosures [1] and active security issues [2], but I had to dig a bit to find them. Surface those.

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/vulnerability-acknowledgements/

[2] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues?label_name%5B...

Sorry for the late reply, we've been busy releasing https://about.gitlab.com/2016/05/11/git-repository-pricing/

Anyway, I've added most information to https://about.gitlab.com/disclosure/ with https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/commit/eab7e345...

That page is linked from https://about.gitlab.com/contact/

Awesome, thanks for the quick response.

All those sites are secure. Actually, between the three, GitHub has had the most vulnerabilities reported, like that one time someone got administration privileges over the entire website... yet people still trust them somehow.

If you're working on government contracted stuff or something like that, where you need perfect and utter secrecy, you could self-host a GitLab instance. Which is $0, compared to GitHub Enterprise.

Really? I guess entire Atlassian suite is awesome. Bitbucket for SCM, Jira, Wiki and all that make it a perfect combo.

But oh so expensive. If you're already paying for Jira and maybe Confluence, the new pricing model for GitHub shouldn't be much of a problem.

Jira, HipChat and Confluence are really nice tools, but pricing seems to just snowball.

Even for software houses, it's VERY problematic as we add customers to projects as external collaborators and we're going to get billed for that forever, even if most customers have very light usage, and even for non active projects.

I was thrilled by this news but it's going to be completely unaffordable for us. We have 29 users and 51 external collaborators. We have recently upgraded to the Platinum plan ($2460/yr), but switching to the new user plan would raise the bill beyond affordable for us ($8k+ per year).

I think it is a big mistake to bill for external collaborators, it completely screws software houses that need this model to use GitHub.

I keep my eye on Microsoft's Visual Studio Team Services. It has a bit of a clunky name and aimed more at enterprises but I think at some point they will position it as a competitor to GitHub. It's free for the first five developers, and no charge for "stakeholder" user accounts.

https://www.visualstudio.com/pricing/visual-studio-team-serv...

So 29 users would be $182/m (check my maths) and you'd pay nothing for the external collaborators (assuming they fit the "stakeholder" role ... no need access to the code).

If you no longer want/need the social aspects of GitHub, you can just move to GitLab. Much more affordable and you can self host it yourself. We have an on premise GitLab installation. Besides the rare upgrade, it's pretty hands off. And it's costing us $0 in licensing fees for over 60 users ;-)

We self-host GitLab as well for ~20 users and are very happy with it.

We install every incremental update, which GitLab publishes very frequently -- weekly or several times a month. They are always seamless. The GitLab team is working so hard.

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/blob/master/CHANGELO...

Thanks tedmiston!

I started using gitlab.com for that reason, but I will not stay there because it is too slow, to the point it is very annoying.

I'm sorry GitLab.com is slow, we're working to improve the speed in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42 and https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/1

alternative, written in go and using way less moving components and resources is https://gogs.io It's lighter but also lighter in features than Gitlab.

I looked at GitLab, it seems to come off second best in terms of features [1].

[1] https://www.visualstudio.com/get-started/overview-of-get-sta...

Hard to argue with free though, if that's what you're looking for.

I've always found VSTS to be at the same time expensive, bloated and missing essential functionality. I think the mentality of .NET / Microsoft developers is strange. By following Microsoft's lead, wherever that may take you, you're missing out and you don't even know what :-P

I'm a PM on VSTS. If you're willing to share what we're missing and what's bloated, I'd love to hear it. [email protected] or a reply here would be much appreciated. Thanks!

What features are you missing in GitLab?

> Besides the rare upgrade, it's pretty hands off

rare upgrade? They release every 4 weeks and often the update is absolutely mandatory due to various RCE vulnerabilities. Github would need to become much more expensive before it would be cheaper to use in-house gitlab.

Any company that has a sysadmin should simply host their own GitLab.

Company I work at uses VSTS and we're happy with it. It's actually a much larger product than just code hosting, as it also includes loads of other things like Agile Planning tools, Build system (which is now much simpler than the crazy old TFS XAML based TeamBuild. Although you only get an allocation of build "minutes" every month) and Release Management (OctopusDeploy style system). You can do cool things around PRs, like enforcing that certain users, or groups of users must approve to be mergable, or that a certain build off that branch must succeed to be mergeable. All this stuff is possibe obviously in GitHub, it's just a bit more integrated. Worth checking out

Yes, your math is correct, verified with their pricing calculator https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/calculator/?servic...

Thank you for posting this!

It feels to me like there needs to be a distinction between users and developers now they've changed their pricing model, with developers getting full git access, and users getting read-only source viewing through a browser, issues, and wikis. That way agencies can add customers for collaboration without having thousands of users to pay for.

great idea

we're in the same situation. I'm looking at at least a tenfold increase. All of a sudden self hosting a gitlab instance looks cost-efficient.

At those price points you don't have a sales rep and individual pricing?

Would billing your customers for Github access be a solution?

>I guess software houses that keep old projects (for maintenance and future requests from clients) fall into this category, but who else?

Companies using micro services? Companies that don't want to have one big repository for their software?

What made our small team choose BitBucket over GitHub was the consideration that having to pay for # repositories would force us (and about everyone) to organise code not based on development convenience, but on $ convenience, which means put everything in a few very big and messy repositories.

Good point. Also, before having 1 repository was a way to avoid higher bill. Now it'd require to have just 1 user which I doubt anyone will try to do.

Then again with git this isn't so much of a problem, if you aren't wanting to play the blame game this works quite well.

It's possible that people have started realizing the advantages of monolithic version control [0] which prompted Github.

Team | Cost Before | Cost Now

1 repo, 100 users | $25 | $880

[0] http://danluu.com/monorepo/

I think this price increase is OK. You'd be hard pressed to find any enterprise product that would only charge you $25/mo for 100 users.

The numbers in the above chart are dollars, not number of repositories for those who are puzzled by it.

It appears that along with this announcement they are raising the prices of an account.

Hey, thanks for pointing that out, I updated it to be more clear!

I'm not sure how common are organizations with few users and large number of repos

My feeling is that this is VERY common. Most of the software companies I've worked for had between 5-25 people, max, who would need github access. But if you break things up in a granular fashion repo-wise, you can easily have dozens or more repos.

In my own case, we only have about 5 people who need access, but we're already sitting on a bunch of repos and will be needing more soon'ish. I was just debating about if/when to upgrade to the next plan level w/ github, and now I don't have to.

Obviously different companies have different scenarios, but this is a win for us, and I expect it's a win for a lot of other organizations as well.

I'm a nodejs developer. I use its package manager `npm` on a daily basis. `nodejs` packaging philosophy enforces you to break every lib into smaller modules in order to have small, consistent, easy to reason about, modules. While being a great philosophy, it requires developers to maintain many projects, thus owning many github repositories (often private when working for clients).

This is a great news for me.

We have about 300+ users and 100+ repos. We moved to Bitbucket because it would be too expensive to keep using Github. Looks like the pricing change would make it even more expensive for us.

I personally also use Gitlab for private side project repos and only use Github now for open source projects.

That kind of thing is quite common in small agency environments, where you might have a bunch of different clients on support contracts paying for x hours a month of time.

With that being said, in those types of environments, cost is everything, and BitBucket is still the cheaper option.

We're at 394 repos and 13 active users (with 32 disabled users) on our self-hosted GitLab install. All repos are private as well. We're a software agency that usually has 15-20 different projects being actively developed. It adds up quick

For a 50 person group, $430 is peanuts, it's just peanuts.

I'm sorry, I just don't feel for these people, this is getting upset about the $0.10 charge for butter when you paid $10.00 for the popcorn.

Yeah, who cares if they hiked the prices up by an insane amount, right? /s

You're begging the question, I'm saying their price hike is not an "insane" amount.

Any company with 5-10 users, has at least 5-10 repos if they're structuring things properly. That said, I prefer self-hosted GitLab (free) when there are a large number of repos.

The last few places that I worked at only had one big repository hosting all of the projects. They weren't using Git though, SVN and Perforce.

In some ways I can see the ability to have fewer users and more repositories suited towards consultancies (specifically web development). Where there are a lot of projects and customers.

Yeah, I worked at a company that used one big repository for all their software. It wasn't to save money (they were spending quite a lot of money on other tools), but it was just more comfortable for them - in terms of code management, deployment etc. But still, with the old Github pricing, they were paying just a few bucks for a team of 10 people, so in this case getting paid per user makes much more sense.

At my workplace we have 1/5 ratio of users to repositories on our git server. We tend to create separate repositories for modules, applications and even prototypes. In any case if we were to use Github their new pay-per-user model would make more sense for us than the pay-per-repository model.

At work we have a bitbucket server with 6 users and 25 repositories. We recently switched to bitbucket server a few months ago. I'm sure we will get more repositories in the future. Some of the repositories are just a small collection of scripts while others are fairly big software projects.

Are you working on projects for clients or on your own product?

Also, maybe I'm mistaken and this change actually makes sense. Until now I had a one repo called `utils` and we kept random scripts there. Now there won't be any cost for adding new repository, so it might happen we'll start splitting that one.

> I'm not sure how common are organizations with few users and large number of repose - I guess software houses that keep old projects (for maintenance and future requests from clients) fall into this category, but who else?

Any startup architected around microservices, for one

But to me this makes sense - one naturally will have more repos than developers, and as it is costly to add a developer to your team, but adding a repo is a command line, then making cost a function of developers seems to align most software teams with githubs incentives.

Right - and the total cost of a developer is far more than $9/month.

The real place where it hurts is users who aren't paid employees.

Put me on that list: small business doing lots of very small projects. I just upgraded my gh account to the next tier a few months ago and now it looks like my bill will be going back down.

At Gilt we had a ratio of ~10 repos per engineer. #microservices.

At least in our case the new pricing would be couple % below what we used to pay under the per-repo pricing scheme. And about 30% less if we merge our two organizations.

We have a few users and a large number of repos - small team of developers supporting research projects in a university department.

BitBucket is free if you have an academic email address https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing

wow... our bill will be 8x.... $xxx to $6xxx