What about companies like Epic Games that have few repos but many users?
With their 2 private UnrealEngine and UnrealTournament repos they would have been paying $25 a month and under the new pricing structure will have to pay $815,913 per month...
edit: That's based on what I can see as a UE4 subscriber, 2 private repos and 90657 users.
We are a small shop that has 4 repositories and 36 users (over half the company). About 10 of those users actually contribute code, the others are monitoring issues, pulling code just to run tests or create distributions, or bots.
If we accidentally hit the upgrade button (we won't), our cost would go from 300/year to 3,648/year. Since only a small number of projects are on github - we use TFS for our main project and github for tools - its just a non-starter.
Heck, 5 "bot accounts" is $540/year to support CI builds and slack notifications. Yikes! More than we pay now.
It seems like the only shop that would save money would be the little in-house development departments with 5 people and tons of projects. However, even there they would probably forego using issues tracking in github because of the extra user cost.
I would be very interested to see real stats on how many orgs actually "upgrade" to this new more expensive pricing model vs how many stay with the more sane model. The real losers are orgs that can't sign up under the old model. The real winners will be the github alternatives (gitlab, bitbucket, etc) that can use this as an opportunity to grow user base.
Hopefully, GitHub can adopt a similar "non-human user" account concept as Slack has. They are free to add and don't log into the normal applications.
Of course, do you really need full accounts for those purposes? Their APIs are really extensive and should give you access to set up things like CI and notifications.
We are reaching out to customers that are in unique situations such as the one you're mentioning here. If you have questions about how the pricing changes affect you, please don’t hesitate to contact support@github.com.
If you need to give Epic Games special treatment just because they have a huge amount of outside collaborators, then your pricing model is broken.
It would be more fair to charge $9/mo per organization member + $1/mo per active outside collaborator (somewhat similar to AWS CodeCommit) than to charge for every single active and inactive member and collaborator equally. Maybe throw in a 50% bulk discount for active outside collaborators over 1000.
This is not a "unique situation", it's how many organizations use GitHub (just on a smaller scale than Epic Games). As giovannibajo1 puts it[1], this change is very unfair to software houses. Giving Epic Games special treatment is only avoiding the issue.
If 5% of Epic Game's 90664 collaborators are active for a given month, then with my proposed pricing model it would now cost them ($9/organization member + ~$2766)/mo, instead of >$800k/mo. No special deals needed, and everyone (presumably) is happy.
This proposed pricing model also scales well for software houses that have have many active outside collaborators. For example, a company with 20 employees and 50% of 100 outside collaborators active in any given month would be charged $230/mo. With 50 employees and 50% of 500 outside collaborators active, it would be $700/mo.
This should also work well for large companies. 200 employees + 30% of 4000 outside contributors active = $2900/mo.
Business are free to close deals with clients in their own terms whenever is lucrative for them. Almost every single company will have "unfair" treatment for big corporations... That way they can get big paying clients. clients that could possibly host their own solutions... It might be that Epic Games in the old business model, with so many users, was not profitable for github, but they are open to negotiate a middle term. It's just business. It is fair.
I think github is on their own right and if you have a case where you think you would be able to negotiate with them, you can send them an email as well... If not, go search another company that have a better cost/benefit for your use case.
Special deals can be made for special cases, it happens all the time. We have a service related business with official pricing, but always bend over backwards when we want to retain long term customers or big paying customers by giving them price cuts and other concessions that we wouldn't normally do to any of our other regular clients.
Not sure why the topic of fairness even comes to the discussion, this is a business not a charity.
> If you need to give Epic Games special treatment just because they have a huge amount of outside collaborators, then your pricing model is broken.
This is an unfair thing to say. Exceptions to otherwise simple rules does not at all mean that the simple rules are "broken".
It is also an unfair thing to say since he clearly says that not only is Epic Games getting this treatment, so is everyone in a similar situation. Furthermore, it has always been possible to negotiate special pricing for special cases. Just send them a message. That is how sales works at almost every company.
Do you understand how businesses work? Almost every company I work for has different terms for lots of customers. They negotiate a deal with a customer, and sign a contract. Every customer might pay different amounts.
So what you're saying is - you know your new pricing is even more ridiculous than your old pricing, but you're willing to burn a little profit to keep big-name clients for the sake of PR.
If I understand this model correctly you fail to admit that there are at least 3 distinct types of users: developers (full access), users (read-only), issue trackers (wiki/issues only). And this model is geared toward a very specific type of organization with a relatively low number of users/trackers compared to developers.
Epic's example is just silly, but nevertheless the world is not black and white. I guess there should be a large number of organizations with multiple CI/CD agents each using distinct credentials for each target. Or examples of software houses requiring client access to issue tracker/wiki.
I guess GitHub analysed their data and made the best decision, but this really does not seem geared toward Enterprise in traditional sense of the word.
Some $vendors (just using familiar terms here) somewhat cover the gray areas pricing $x per unit, where unit is e.g. 2 users or 5 repos, whichever is higher.
It is interesting that - this change will force organizations to pay for "bot" users - that exist for deployment/notifications etc. Our payment bill just doubled from $50 to $106 now (including the bot accounts).
What about organizations that have many members, but few that actually contribute code? We have accounts for most of the people at our company so they can view issues and pull requests, but only about a dozen ever push code.
The post says this about personal accounts: you can even invite a few collaborators. I can't find the exact definition of "a few", but I imagine it's less than 90657.
With their 2 private UnrealEngine and UnrealTournament repos they would have been paying $25 a month and under the new pricing structure will have to pay $815,913 per month...
edit: That's based on what I can see as a UE4 subscriber, 2 private repos and 90657 users.