Majority user, here.

I already pay GitHub monthly because I have some repos that I want private. I'm a solo dev, only hacking on side projects that may or may not be something one day, but want to keep them private anyway. My bill is about to go down, and my benefits go up. All in all, I'm quite alright with this change, agree that it's positive.

I get that it gets worse if I ever take on N number of developers, but that's a hurdle I'll deal with if I ever get there. I do imagine I'm not alone in this position.

I'm curious, as a solo dev, had you considered bitbicket?

I've used BitBucket as a solo dev working on personal projects, a solo consultant, and an employee on a team. It's pretty mediocre, especially if you look beyond its integration with the rest of the Atlassian ecosystem.

The number of times I've wanted to search a repo for something only to have to clone it and search in my IDE is staggering.

Same for me - lack of searching kills me every time!

You might want to look into https://github.com/etsy/hound if you ever want to search. I found this superior to Github as well if I want to find all repos that reference something.

The repo migration functionality is also super flimsy.

Yeah, but GitHub got me early on before I cared about private repos, and honestly I was just too lazy to move stuff over. They also win me over with integrations, though I'm sure BitBucket has a similarly expansive set now. Had I ever gone full Atlassian, I'd have switched, but never wanted to add Jira to my life badly enough (though when I was seriously working on a project with a friend, I considered it).

Wow, you actually just made me think of something that could have been a great change for GitHub.

Rather than completely limiting private repos in their old pricing model, they could have limited "active" repos, and created an archive feature, where archived repos were not available via Git, but still existed as backups and in case you ever wanted to make them active again.

I do, however, believe that the new, per-user pricing is more sustainable. File storage is rather cheap; running Git pull / push is not necessarily.

They already had this in their old model. If you downgrade your plan and have more repos than allowed, they don't force you to delete them. They archive them and if you ever need to access them and make them active again, you just upgrade, for at least the month. Seemed pretty fair.

You can still remove a repo and keep backups yourself. Allowing it through GH makes it very easy to exploit this by archiving/unarchiving repos constantly.

The problem for Github was that the best place to "keep backups yourself" was Bitbucket. I archived a number of inactive projects from Github to Bitbucket. But that gets tedious, so why not start them on Bitbucket in the first place?

This is a positive change for me as well.