Seems like Bitbucket was acquired by Atlassian for two reasons:
1. Free DCVS hosting as a free perk to existing customers, with tight integration to existing Atlassian products.
2. Free DCVS hosting to non-customers, with the hopes of converting some to the Atlassian suite.
We (a dutch 'embedded' software company of about 300 developers) currently use SVN for our version control. We use some tool, of which I forgot the name, to simplify managing repositories and permissions. This costs us a couple of hours per year in maintenance and support, and the tool cost somewhere around 1500 euro. Hours go for around 80 euro's here, so lets say 3.000 euro TCO per year.
For us having code in the cloud (read within reach of the US government) is not an option, our customers will not allow it. I believe our insurance will not even allow that. Also we need to have Ldap/Active Directory integration; Ldap is the only way we can effectively manage authorisation between a large amount of services.
Looking at all the alternatives, Atlassian Stash, Gitstack, etc. Github is by far the most expensive(75.000 per year). Right now, we have decided that setting up a Gitblit server ourselves, will be the most cost effective.
There is no way I can convince my boss that using Github will save us 60.000 euro per year.
Github make full sense for open source projects, with easy forking and pull requests. However, I dont see any advantage to take a private repo, even worst at the price they propose, and hosted in a complex legal context.
Their enterprise pricing is probably designed for under a 100 employees.
No one is going to make you commit to a contract or bite your hand off if you ask them if they can go cheaper.
Where do you think the largest cost in an app like this comes from? Especially the onsite installed version? It's in support of the users.
Just name your budget to them and see if they meet it or not. Simple as a couple of emails. Maybe it could be $40k for 500 users… who knows?
> Where do you think the largest cost in an app like this comes from? Especially the onsite installed version? It's in support of the users.
Absolutely agree with that, this is the reason why we prefer unlimited licenses. I work at research facility and every year we have thousands of newcomers who stay here for several months and then leave, we simply cannot take on us management of their accounts.
However, even if you're counting 60.000 euro per year, it's not really such a large number when you consider that you have 300 developers. Saving on average 7~ hours per developer per year in work efficiency would more than make up for the fees, but the costs of switching over and perhaps picking up a new version control is also something to consider.