GitHub is introducing new pricing plans offering unlimited private repositories for $7 per month for Individual accounts and $9 per user per month for Organization Accounts after the first five users at $25 per month.

GitHub is, and will remain, free for hosting open source projects and individual projects that are publicly available. It is free for students and it is also free for non-profits which can have unlimited private repositories and unlimited users.

The changes just being rolled out are for private repositories held by individuals and organizations which used to be charged per repository rather than per user.

Under the previous pricing plan GitHub charged individuals $7 per month for five private repos; $12 per month for up to 10. Organizations paid $25 per month for up to 10 private repos, $50 per month for 11 to 20 repos. This obviously meant there was a financial disincentive to add repos.

Individuals with private repos are likely to welcome this change as they are unlikely to be worse off - they can now build as many non-open source projects as they want in separate repos and invite collaborators to join in for no more outlay than before. If previously they were on one of GitHub's larger account plans, when they are automatically moved to the new pricing scheme they will receive a credit.

Organizations, however, won't necessarily be better off. If previously an organization had 100 users of 10 private repos it paid $25 per month. Now it will pay $880 per month. On the other hand, if an organisation of 10 users had 50 private repos, the bill under the old scheme would have been $100 per month and now it is $70 per month will be a disincentive to proliferating more repos.  

GitHub isn't automatically moving those on organization plans. Instead the blog post announcing the changes states:

We want everyone to have a plan with unlimited private repositories, but don’t worry—you are welcome to stay on your current plan while you evaluate the new cost structure and understand how to best manage your organization members and their private repository access. And while we're currently not enforcing a timeline to move, rest assured that you'll have at least 12 months notice before any mandated change to your plan.

GitHub's Enterprise tier, in which code is hosted on in-house servers or in a private cloud, has also moved to per user pricing. Previously the lowest cost enterprise account was $2,500 per year. The new plan now $21 per user per month in 10-user packs, with annual billing, meaning that lowest cost for a one-year enterprise subscription is $2,520. 

Before deciding what to do many businesses will be looking to alternative code hosting sites, such as GitLab which has been gaining in popularity despite facing criticisms of being slow and being subject to frequent, and disruptive, upgrades. It is free for unlimited repositories when hosted on Gitlab's servers and is $39 per user per annum for its Enterprise Edition. 

Another front runner is Atlassian Bitbucket which offers free team accounts on its site for up to five users, with tiers of 10, 25, 50, 100, and unlimited users available for $10, $25, $50, $100, and $200 per month.

Microsoft's Visual Studio Team Services might also be considered as it as a competitor to GitHub. It's free for the first five developers, and no charge for "stakeholder" user accounts. An organization of 100 users would be $750 per month. 

Rather than move from GitHub some organizations might decide to look at the number of their users who really need to have access to private repositories. By reducing the number of users they pay for they might reduce their monthly bill rather than increase it.

The guidance on GitHub is:

Your organization's number of paid seats must equal the number of organization members and outside collaborators or bots that have access to any of your private repositories. If you'd like to pay for fewer seats, you can remove members from your organization or convert members to outside collaborators and give them access to only public repositories, then downgrade your organization's number of seats.

Converting repos that don't really need to be private to being public might also be necessary under this strategy. 

More Information

Introducing unlimited private repositories

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