Why would you lower your price if people are still paying for it and you are the market leader? Also at $7 per month it is among the cheapest tools for a professional developer.
Well, it's Microsoft, so more complex tiering and tie in to MSDN should be on the road map.
> Their current price of $7 a month is absolutely absurd for individual developers.
How so?
> I can get a pretty decent VPS for $2 a month cheaper.
Perhaps, so what? That's an unrelated service.
> Considering that most of their competitors give small teams free private repos, their price should be half of that.
Their competitors do that to build a user base and mind share in the face of GitHub’s huge advantage in network effects.
https://www.visualstudio.com/team-services/pricing/
It's very simple, reasonable, and sane compared to GitHub's.
Right now I use VSTS for private repos, but it'd be nice to be on GitHub were the vast majority of open source projects are hosted.
I currently pay for GitHub, personally. This has the following benefits:
- Easy to collaborate with other people if I want to invite them to my projects.
- Web-based code hosting, meaning I can access my code from anywhere regardless of whether I have access to my own machine or not.
- A web interface! This is quite useful for browsing code or sharing particular snippets with others.
- Integration with third-party tools. Almost literally every code-related service that offers integration will integrate with GitHub – things like CI servers etc. for example. This means basically zero-effort setup for many other tools.
The cost to me is basically a rounding error, and the utility is great.