What you describe sounds fair to me. The problem is that 50GB is not a decent fraction of a hard disk.
If you store 50GB in AWS S3 (US-East-2), download 1000GB, do 100 PUT operations and 1000 GET operations, the cost is $89.68 per month.
Considering that GitHub isn't just providing you with storage, but a complete Git LFS solution plus storage, plus traffic that you can just use and not think about, I think it's worth the expense. But then again I probably wouldn't store binary blobs in Git.
One is that amazon has an enormous markup on bandwidth, compared to their other products.
The other is that GitHub does not actually let you download each file 20x in a month and "not think about" it. 50GB of space for a month only gets you 50GB of bandwidth.
If Amazon didn't explicitly ban people from using Lightsail bandwidth with other services, you could put together an all-AWS package that has 150GB of high quality S3 storage and enough bandwidth to download it 2-3x per $5 (minimum order quantity 2). For a service like B2 you could store 250GB twice (each copy having its own cross-server RAID) and download it once for $5. At digitalocean $5 will get you 250GB of probably-redundant data with 1TB of bandwidth, though it eventually tapers off toward 167GB/$5.
I need the data for my team, so we pay, but I use it as an excuse to force the team to clean up data every so often. As a game company we need large repos. It was either Gitlab or Azure DevOps.
It's quite easy to burn 1000G of storage on GitHub/GitLab (again, don't forget all the revisions). That puts just the storage cost at $6000/year. At this price point, it's really worth hosting on your own.
As Danieru mentioned they are forcing ppl to manually do cleanups, that probably indicates the storage costs are even higher which worth manual interventions.
An I happy paying 6 dollars a year for a single gigabyte: I'd rather pay less.
Edit: I pay attention to costs, and repo size is the sort of thing which has a. Habit of growing. All else being equal I'd prefer my team receive the money. A dollar I can give to my team/employees feels good, a dollar paying for over priced storage feels bad.
I know that a small game studio must have a tight budget — and yours looks like a really interesting project (just subscribed) — but it seemed like an awfully strong objection to what I would have assumed would be a small fraction of your total expenses.
> it doesn't seem terribly far off of S3's pricing
GitHub's offering is close to S3 but only because AWS charges so much for bandwidth. The storage portion is less than a quarter of the equivalent bill.
And then GitLab is charging 5x as much as GitHub.
Hell even uploading to an S3 compatible API was insanely cheaper than Github.
That and i really hated the feeling that Git LFS was being designed for a server architecture. I didn't have an easy way to locally dump the written files without running an HTTP server.
There are a couple Git LFS servers that upload to, say, S3 - but i really just wanted a dumb FS or SSH dump of my LFS files. Running a localhost server feels so.. anti-Git to me.
While i was writing it i found the basic process of basic large file storage to be insanely simple with Git. I debated doing the same thing but backed by a seasoned backup solution, like Borg/Bup/etc.
So definitely not "as much as you want." If you pull it too many times you may get charged another $5.
If you were to add the $1.15 storage cost onto a reasonable bandwidth number like $0.01/GB you'd just about reach a third of $5.
IIRC, it's $5 per 50GB per month? That's really a deal breaker to me and wondering whether people actually use LFS at volume will avoid LFS-over-GitHub.