GitHub Free users now get unlimited private repositories

Published January 7, 2019

If you’re a GitHub user, but you don’t pay, this is a good week. Historically, GitHub always offered free accounts but the caveat was that your code had to be public. To get private repositories, you had to pay. Starting tomorrow, that limitation is gone. Free GitHub users now get unlimited private projects with up to three collaborators.

The amount of collaborators is really the only limitation here and there’s no change to how the service handles public repositories, which can still have unlimited collaborators.

This feels like a sign of goodwill on behalf of Microsoft, which closed its acquisition of GitHub last October, with former Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman taking over as GitHub’s CEO. Some developers were rather nervous about the acquisition (though it feels like most have come to terms with it). It’s also a fair guess to assume that GitHub’s model for monetizing the service is a bit different from Microsoft’s. Microsoft doesn’t need to try to get money from small teams — that’s not where the bulk of its revenue comes from. Instead, the company is mostly interested in getting large enterprises to use the service.

Talking about teams, GitHub also today announced that it is changing the name of the GitHub Developer suite to ‘GitHub Pro.’ The company says it’s doing so in order to “help developers better identify the tools they need.”

But what’s maybe even more important is that GitHub Business Cloud and GitHub Enterprise (now called Enterprise Cloud and Enterprise Server) have become one and are now sold under the ‘GitHub Enterprise’ label and feature per-user pricing.

The announcement of free private repositories probably took some of GitHub’s competitors by surprise, but here is what we heard from GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij: “GitHub today announced the launch of free private repositories with up to three collaborators. GitLab has offered unlimited collaborators on private repositories since the beginning.We believe Microsoft is focusing more on generating revenue with Azure and less on charging for DevOps software. At GitLab, we believe in a multi-cloud future where organizations use multiple public cloud platforms.”

Note: this story was scheduled for tomorrow, but due to a broken embargo, we decided to publish today. The updates will go live tomorrow.