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Comment by saagarjha | Hacker News Reader

I'm curious if GitHub is now a loss leader for Microsoft, or if personal subscriptions were a small portion of their revenue.

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I always believed Microsoft saw GitHub as a potential "in" for millions of developers, rather than a product that could generate revenue.

This move doesn't worry me, as I'm sure Microsoft would look to do something easy to calm the nerves of people who worried about Microsoft's acquisition. The cynic in me sees this as sweetener for Microsoft's later moves to integrate GitHub with Microsoft's developer tools, which will infuriate me along with millions of other developers.

Why would better integration between Github and Microsoft dev tools be a bad thing?

Not OP but I think some people think that Microsoft might make it more difficult to use other services with GitHub rather than just streamline it for Microsoft. I don't think strengthening Microsoft + GitHub integration is a problem and is probably smart for them to do. They just should not and probably won't make it prohibitively difficult to integrate with say AWS or GCP.

Because I want GitHub to be agnostic and not pushing me towards anything?

This was always one of the core worries about GitHub and Microsoft. Microsoft will not leave GitHub alone. It's too important to developers, and no matter how much they say "we won't touch GitHub", nobody (rightfully) will believe them.

I'm assuming MS knows enough not to break existing integrations, but they could build in a direction such that Azure-based stuff becomes a "first, best" integration with GitHub.

Never mind loss leader; github can probably pay for itself by providing internal analytics to Microsoft which they can use for qualifying hires.

If you want I suspect you can just go play with: https://blog.github.com/2017-01-19-github-data-ready-for-you...

I guess it only counts open source projects, but still that's a lot of data.

Sure, they publish some data. But I'd imagine that Microsoft can pull strings to get better data faster.

Doubt it's worth while...

Afaik I saw the data set was updated weekly.. afaik it's maintained by GitHub.

Yeah I'd imagine that GitHub Enterprise and org subscriptions are their primary source of income. User subscriptions never really made much sense to me.

I'm fairly sure that the bulk of GitHub's revenue comes from companies using GitHub as their primary SCM.

B2B revenue is huge compared to anything you'll get from the few hobbyists who are both able and willing to pay for this kind of service.

I have zero insight on this but I also don't know anyone in my circle who pays individually for Github... When they need that, they use Bitbucket.

I know several people I worked for or did business with that paid for Organization accounts, from Team to Enterprise.

It sounds like recently they sorted things out, but Bitbucket's interface was buggy to the point of unusability for me. Some scary permission issues like not being removed from a corporate team.

Bitbucket’s website is slow as hell. I actually physically cringe when I have to do something through the website (e.g. create a pull request) because I know I’ll be staring at slow-loading pages for the next 5 minutes, even for something that’s 3 clicks away.

And their new sidebar interface is not only slow, but also not very intuitive. It really makes me want to migrate our corporate repositories to GitHub.

Just to throw in my anecdote, I've been paying for a personal account for 8 years. It'll be interesting to see where Microsoft goes with this.

I started paying a year or two ago when I wanted to make a private side project that I didn't want open source. It's nice to keep the same UI between other projects and this one. $7/mo or whatever it is was worth it IMO. Plus I like their lightweight project management tools.

I've paid $8 for the basic plan for years.

I'm an individual software contractor and I pay for a personal plan. GitHub UI and UX appeal to me more than competitors do. Also it seems that all the libraries I regularly use keep their code on GitHub, it feels like a community to me.

In third world countries we typically don't want to spend $100 a year for something like this when BitBucket and GitLab are free. This change is a big deal for our situations.

Anecdote: I used both GitLab and a paid GitHub personal account.

I didn't opt to pay for GitHub until I needed to host some private config files in Git, and at the time (maybe a year, year and a half ago?) GitLab wasn't in as great of shape as it tends to be now: for me, it was slow, unreliable, and sometimes just felt "off" in ways I can't really quantify. I already used Github for open-source work and at my day job (and had been using it at work for years), so I paid up (given the alternative, with GitLab not being what I was looking for, was to pay up and host a Gitea instance, or use BitBucket, which was a complete non-option for me).

These days GitLab seems to be a lot more stable and able to handle day-to-day workflows, but GitHub still has the community factor, so all my public repos and forks live there. It made sense to continue to keep my private repos next to my public ones, so when my annual subscription renewed, I was cool with it.

Migrating fully over to GitLab/Gitea/flavour-du-jour is something that's perpetually on my "TODO: investigate" list, and never actually gets done, because despite any minor gripes I may have with it, GitHub tended to "just work", and it "just worked" ~$80/yr worth.

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