The popular software hosting and collaboration platform GitHub has made some of its core premium features available for free for everyone.
First. the Microsoft-owned hosting site said that it is reducing the prices of its most popular paid tiers. And second, it is moving the 'Teams' subscription which previously cost $9 per user a month, and making it available for free.
For developers who want to use GitHub for private development, but didn’t want to pay the per-user price, the company said that they can also sign up for the free version of GitHub.
What this means, they too can get the access to unlimited collaborators on private repositories, without having to pay for anything.
On its blog post, GitHub said that:
"Until now, if your organization wanted to use GitHub for private development, you had to subscribe to one of our paid plans. But every developer on earth should have access to GitHub. Price shouldn’t be a barrier."
"This means teams can now manage their work together in one place."
Prior to this change, the free model of GitHub allowed users to have unlimited repositories as long as the repositories were made public. With the change, developers can make their private repositories for development without paying any fees.
Apart from private repository access, a team can also get 2,000 GitHub action minutes per month at no cost. Actions is GitHub’s automation tool that allows developers to make their apps orchestrate any workflow based on an event - like sending a notification.
Besides the Free, Pro, and Team tiers, GitHub also sells an Enterprise tier, and an even more feature-rich GitHub One plan that comes with a special pricing (negotiable, and usually for large companies and organizations).
In a Q&A session hosted by Hacker News, GitHub CEO Nat Friedman said that he wanted to roll out this change for the last 18 months, saying that:
"We also retained our Team pricing plan for people who need email support (and a couple of other features like code owners)."
"In general we think that every developer on earth should be able to use GitHub for their work, and so it is great to remove price as a barrier."