Isn't that exactly the danger of running on a freemium business model?

Everything goes according to plan, you establish a new market, lots of free customers get introduced to your product and love it and you skim off the cream that want power or enterprise features as your paying customers. What stops a new competitor from swooping in and saying they have something very similar, they aren't going to be spending anything supporting free customers, and with presumably lower costs, charging their customers less? With complete focus on paying customers, they might provide a better product too.

I'll venture a guess you've never heard of the git hosts that only offer private plans. Allowing people to post public code for free is fundamental to our business model and a major reason why we're successful.

I haven't, though I haven't had the need for one either. But if they exist and they're decent, you don't think I would find them if I researched for a git host?

I don't argue with you that freemium works in the short and probably medium term, and it's great advertising. You have a great service going, and I think in your case, you build a lot of good will among developers hosting public code for free. But in the long run, in the general case, and assuming no network effects, I think there's a way to undercut such business models by focusing 100% on the paying customers.

As a paying customer, I'm disappointed they dropped one of the services that prompted me to move to GitHub.