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Comment by rubyrescue | Hacker News Reader

biggest question is whether there's a price point missing - $100 for lowest-priced organization support is pretty high.

It is very high, but fortunately this creates an incentive for other firms to enter the space with creative, competitive offerings.

On the other hand, $1200 per year for any company that is making money is fairly minimal. Github isn't in the business of trying to compete with a $20/month slice with nightly s3 backups and ssh, which is the bargain basement way to do lots of private repos.

So far github has been able to offer value beyond simple git hosting, so the question is whether it can do this for orgs.

I think a $50 plan would be perfect. It's hard to justify the $80 jump from the medium plan for a small company that doesn't need a lot of the features (teams and permissions, for example), but would like the convenience of allowing everyone to administer the organization.

That being said, it looks like a great addition to the site, and I think charging extra is definitely warranted--I just wish there were a better priced plan to bridge the gap between $22 and $100.

This is exactly how I feel. The new features look great; we'd be happy to pay extra for them. But with less than 10 developers, we're too small to make full use of them. $78 extra/month is too high a price for the benefit we'd gain.

Agreed, I'd love to use organizations but paying for 50 repos is just outright crazy. We have a 12 person dev team, and 10 repos. Can't justify 100mo just for that. Will need to stick with unfuddle for now.

Chris/Tom: please provide a lower priced entry for organizations.

I don't want to be rude and I am making some assumptions here (also no knowledge or experience of running a company). But if you have 12 people dev, assuming they are being paid for their work and not working pro-bono. Assuming its a company. You are probably spending somewhere around 600k - 750k per year on these developers. Surely 100/month is not too much?

Like I said, I am making some assumptions. Maybe I am missing something.

It's a question of opportunity cost. Are the new features worth $100/month as opposed to the old way of paying $10-20/month?

Some people will say yes. Some people will say no.

It's a little silly to say "Well, you're spending 600k-750k a year, you can afford it." They can also afford a bouncy castle.

The right question is--does this provide enough value to justify the cost? For the parent, no, it doesn't.

I don't follow the logic here or the bouncy castle analogy. A private repo adds more direct value to a company that has 12 devs than a bouncy castle (ok maybe indirectly it might make them happy and more productive, but its stretching a bit).

I understand the question of whether it provides value, and it would be sufficient argument if you are company with lets say ~50k/yr on expenses. But when you are spending (assumptions of course) 600k-750k JUST employing your dev team, I just don't see how this $1100/year is too much; esp when the cost is associated with a core aspect of your business.

We are not talking about renting a water cooler here.

> A private repo adds more direct value

They already have private repos. The new features are permissions and a dashboard. Those particular features might be nice to haves, but for many small or midsized dev teams are not "a core aspect of [their] business."

It's not unreasonable to look at the new offerings ad say "I'm not going to pay 5x for a dashboard and better permissions."

You're right, 100 isn't too much, but it seems wasteful. We dont need 50 repos.

Drew hit the nail on the head. Couldnt have said it better.

Solved! http://github.com/blog/675-organizations-for-small-businesse...

I think it's better to start high and appear generous and in touch with your customers when you release at a new-lowest-price based on a careful gauge of customer reaction.

In other words: yeah, definitely, but I think we should stay tuned.

There's definitely room for a bronze package there.

So true. A price point is definitely missing there. I'm thinking something in the $35-$40 range.

especially as there is NO warning during the conversion process that the price will rise so dramatically. This really sucks. I just planned to upgrade to a small or medium plan but now I dont think I will, I'll probably just keep using our private gitosys setup for private repos and github for just open source. 100$/month is a LOT for just repo hosting, I can have a dedicated server with backups for that much.

Our small and medium plans are unchanged, the only price increase was for organization plans. Existing business plan customers have also been grandfathered in, they don't have to upgrade if they don't want to.

I don't understand the price argument. I happily pay more than that for services core to my workflow, and I'm not even a company, this is just for contracts I pick up every 2-3 months.

If this expense is too much for a business you are not bringing in enough cash. 45 minutes of my time pays for 1 month, it's nothing compared to the value I get from it.

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