The problem being that a minor volunteer who donates 4 hours of coding over the course of a year would now incur a $108 github bill for having that access. It's totally out of proportion with how much they're using the service.

Or say you have 80 very-part-time contributors who together match the output of 1 full-time employee, github is going to charge you as much as they would for 80 full-time employees.

Any pricing structure is going to have some people who get a great deal and other people who get screwed, but it sucks when you've selected a platform, invested in getting set up on it, and then have the pricing rug pulled out from under you.

the software is AGPLv3'd, and run by hundreds of educational organizations around the world. Those organizations typically contribute changes back via Github. Non-employees don't contribute to our private repositories. We gain quite a bit from maintaining a large open source community, but it's not "free labor."

I apologize- I thought volunteers were contributing to your private repos. If I understand correctly, your issue is that you have (say) 10 employees accessing private repos and 100 contributors to public/Free ones, but you're to be charged for all users you add to your org? I can see how this would be frustrating.

I see two possible solutions that don't force you to switch vendors:

1. Have non-employees fork & submit pull requests. 2. Split your private stuff off to a different org & formally separate free stuff from proprietary, make the free stuff community managed.

If these are problems, I'd maintain that this is a "have your cake and eat it to" problem, on the one hand keeping ownership & control of the project and reaping the attendant benefit to the edx brand, and on the other hand getting people to hack on your stuff for free. But in any event this is a broader existential issue that exists across the OSS world right now (see express.js), so I'm probably reading too much into your case. :)

From the announcement:

"These users do not fill a seat:

Outside collaborators with access to only public repositories"

Ah, I didn't see that part of the announcement at all. That makes the new pricing much closer to what we were paying before. Thanks for pointing it out!

oh yeah. That's probably why I assumed "collaborators" must have had access to private edx repos.

You are jumping to a whole lot of conclusions there.

Why are you assuming that the labor is free? And regardless if it is or isn't, how is that even relevant? GitHub has no idea how much or how little a contributor is paid for their contributions.