They have paid plans which are quite pricey compared to the cost of data.

A repository isn't likely to cross the 1 gb threshold easily. They also email you if it does.

According to A16Z's podcast or something somewhere they have been profitable since inception so it was not much of a problem.

Keep in mind traffic and storage are cheap, and cheaper still in bulker quantities. 1 TB of data is about $30 a month on S3. If each repository averaged 50 mb one user's $7 a month subscription could support nearly 5,000 repos. 50mb is also quite large for a repository btw.

If each was about 5mb that's nearly 50,000 repositories that could be supported cost wise with their cheapest $7 micro plan.

Which points out that when your use case for Github is as offsite backup and/or a central repository, self hosting on Amazon is a potentially cost effective alternative.

GitHub Enterprise + $100M from VCs goes a long way.

https://enterprise.github.com/home

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/github/funding-round...

But they started with no external funding.

When Github first started, it became immediately profitable because they had paid plans from the get go and they weren't dealing with that much data at first. They didn't have pull requests or issues or anything like that at the start, it was just a push/pull remote server with a web viewer.

After that, they grew enough to keep up with growth in the company and features until they got the Andreseen investment and threw growth into overdrive.

yep i have a micro plan currently.

I can almost guarantee that I am using less than 5Mb throughout my Github, so I don't doubt they are making money.

Github data is not "gargantuan". They have 9 million users. They put limit to repository size to 1GB. My estimate would be that most repo don't even get to 10% of this. Plus this is mostly source code and text files that compresses very nicely. Given this information, I would estimate that Github data can fit in under ~5000 2TB hard drives. Cost of hosting data would be around $5 million per year. I bet their employee cost is much larger than this (my estimate is $50M).

But they mostly store text, compared to video streaming or imgur that is quite small amount of data per user I guess

If you can do some minor work, then you can make money on the internet with sismo money boom. Do a Quick Google search if you haven’t heard about it yet.