I think GitHub intends to have approximately every software developer in the world use GitHub, which is not the planned endgame for most software companies.
I do not think, if your customers number less than hundreds of thousands, that getting the custom of folks for whom $9 is a lot of money is a worthwhile use of your time. Devs consistently overestimate the impact on their marketing/etc of having cheapskates use them, and underestimate the real operational costs. (These customers are disproportionately pathological; they contact support rudely, with inane questions, at a rate orders of magnitude higher than good customers.)
If Github priced it so low, I guess they wanted to capture that segment of developers who would pay $7 a month but no more. It makes me want to price my product too at $7 a month at a lower tier. Any comments on this please?