GitHub has given developers a welcome helping hand during these difficult times by making its core tools free.
Organisations can now make private repositories without paying any fees. Previously, even small teams would’ve had to pay for a premium membership starting from $7/month.
Last year, GitHub made private repositories available for free users but with restrictions in areas such as the number of collaborators; which hindered teams. Unlimited collaborators and private repositories are now included in the free tier.
Teams can now also access 2,000 GitHub “action minutes” per month at no additional cost. GitHub Actions enable applications to automate individual tasks. Developers can combine their own series of tasks to create Actions, or use ones created by the community.
500MB of GitHub Packages storage is also now included in the free tier.
The free tier is great for many small teams with smaller budgets, but larger teams will likely need a few more features.
GitHub has reduced its former “Team” premium tier from $9/month to $4/month. For the additional fee, development teams can access 3,000 Actions minutes and 2GB of GitHub Packages storage.
While the COVID-19 pandemic likely prompted a quicker rollout, GitHub CEO Nat Friedman says the company has been considering the change for the last 18 months.
In a Q&A on Hacker News, Friedman said:
“We’ve wanted to make this change for the last 18 months, but needed our Enterprise business to be big enough to enable the free use of GitHub by the rest of the world. I’m happy to say that it’s grown dramatically in the last year, and so we’re able to make GitHub free for teams that don’t need Enterprise features.
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.”
GitHub currently supports more than 40 million developers and is aiming for 100 million by 2025.
