GitHub gives paying users unlimited private repositories

GitHub has tweaked its pricing model and now gives paying users an unlimited number of private repositories for personal accounts that are not visible in the public domain. Until recently, there were several plans with between five and fifty private repositories.

A personal account now costs $7, regardless of the number of private repositories. For businesses and organizations, that costs $9 per user per month or $25 for the first five users. In the previous pricing model, users could never create an “unlimited” number of personal repositories and the maximum number was split into different tiers, with the cheapest personal account at $7 per month offering up to five private repositories. The most expensive version with fifty repos cost $50 a month. The amounts for companies and organizations were significantly higher, from $25 for ten repos to $200 for 125 repositories.

Users who already pay will receive the adjustment automatically, Github writes on its blog. Accounts that people currently pay more for will be compensated. Organizations can remain in the old structure. If a change does occur, companies and institutions will have at least one year to adjust this.

The change may be in response to open source startup GitLab, which offers free and unlimited private repos, BitBucket, which is free to teams of five members, as well as Atlassian and other service providers such as AWS and Google Cloud Platform.