The reason they announced this is specifically to capitalise on GitHub CoPilot becoming paid.
Some significant fraction of developers worldwide are right now deciding whether to pay. So they have rushed out essentially a landing page for some of the "like it but not quite willing to pay" folks
Yes and if I were to guess a lot of folks who are upset about copilot stealing and selling code don't have GitHub sponsors enabled so it feels not genuine. It reads more like "here's a friendly reminder that you can make money with open source as long as you enable GitHub sponsors which btw will make us money too[0]!".
[0]: Organizations will have at least a 10% fee taken from GitHub once the beta is finished. There's also no guarantee that personal accounts will remain fee-less too, this could easily be "just another" spot where a company offers something for free for mass adoption and then charges for it later. In any case it's marketing for a feature that provides revenue to GitHub.
The fact that it's the first major development to be started at GitHub after their acquisition by Microsoft is such a hit too. Way to spend their social capital. I can't imagine the money they made from Copilot subscriptions was worth it since companies have certainly stayed away from this...
Thus, the price of Github Copilot is going to go up, 2x to 5x.
For all of the criticism of Github Copilot, for a lot of developers (but not all), the value Github Copilot is incredibly high, much more than $20/month.
The current rock bottom pricing is low compared to the value provided for those users.
As such there is a big opportunity to multiply the price here being charged. Probably an increase between 3x to 5x.
The excuse is because they are losing money, but the underlying reason is that the value it is providing is so high in terms of developer productivity.
I love copilot, but I don't even pay for github, maybe have it bundled with like an 8 dollar github upgraded account or something, might entice many of us who just use "free" github services to upgrade, but by itself. I don't think so.
> GitHub Copilot costs $10 USD/month or $100 USD/year per user. GitHub Copilot is only available to individual developers and individual accounts within organizations, but organization administrators cannot purchase bulk licenses for teams at this time.
No bulk licensing of Teams? This makes no sesnse, so if a team wants to make Copilot part of their official tools, each member have to purchase this individually. Thats a huge PITA
I'm a programmer, I don't really feel threatened by Github copilot. If the world can produce code more cheaply, the world becomes a much better place for everyone and a little worse place for developers.
This is great and I will most likely take advantage of this new offering, but I cant help but wonder why.
"everyone deserves GitHub" is marketing, not a corporate strategy.
How does GitHub stand to benefit from this change? How does more non-paying users help the company?
I am not trying to be a tinfoil hat jerk here. Life in the age of information has taught us all that (again) "nothing is free". So what am I paying here?
Why not? I’m curious to understand this phenomenon. You see value it copilot, presumably because it makes you more efficient or productive. But either not enough to pay the fee, or.. ? Mind sharing why you aren’t willing to pay? (I don’t work for GitHub. I do write commercial software though)
Some significant fraction of developers worldwide are right now deciding whether to pay. So they have rushed out essentially a landing page for some of the "like it but not quite willing to pay" folks
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