I am not going to open source the project at the moment, I have to clean things up a bit before that. I'm probably gonna do that as soon as it reaches a good first RC

I would imagine you're going to get a fraction of the users testing it that you're looking for then. I know I'm not going to put my username and password into a closed source app from a random stranger on the internet.

At the moment it’s just a reader so login is not yet available

Isn't this the source code? https://github.com/mattrighetti/HNReaderApp/archive/refs/tag...

I have inserted the link to the source code in the readme, I need to clean things up a bit right now

Nope just the readme.

Open sourced now since it seems highly requested, link in the readme!

Don't worry about cleaning it up; that's the way to get more contributions!

Are you a paying customer of GitHub?

I thought GitHub free user repos are required to be open source.

No, GitHub never required your code to be open-source. In the past, free accounts couldn’t create private repositories. Nowadays, they can, but those private repositories are limited.

A public repository does not need to contain open-source code, or even any code at all. I imagine the repo just contained a README, and that’s completely fine GitHub-wise — why would GitHub mandate people to have code in repos?

Github changed their pricing model last year. Everybody, individuals or companies, can have unlimited private and public repositories.

I have a college student pro account, for free, so yeah :)