It's important to note that 7.5% is the max we would make. The more direct dependencies you fund, the less we make. When we reallocate funds, the same rule applies.
Our goal is to support projects outside of GitHub but we had to start somewhere and GitHub seemed like a pretty logical choice.
Staying in an annual budget of $98 million sounds feasible for a place like github. That's an $8.1m/month burn. Just be a little less elaborate, I'm sure this is doable.
Why? 50% of 7.5 billion is still a lot of money. Github doesn't have that many employees.
In fact, they have 745 employees. That averages out to 4.6 million per employee. Now, there's probably a good bit of VC money in there diluting that, but i'd bet not by more than 50%. I think the employee equity pool did just fine here.
Exactly my thoughts. Considering Github's recent numbers (300M USD/year revenue) and its recent acquisition by Microsoft, something like 30M USD/year would be enough to fund 250-1000 people a year full time. Maybe there might be an upper limit on how much you can make through the platform (like 10k USD/month), so instead of ending up with a few millionaires, a 10% revenue share would be enough to fund 250-1000 people full time, much more people half-time. With such a system in place, I think everyone would be better off, including Github - Microsoft.
How many private repos do you need? I'm also in a very cost-conscious company, but compared to other infrastructure costs, GitHub is very very inexpensive.
Why the heck would GitHub take $100 million in investment and still push for earning a profit every quarter? Does it make any sense to you? Now you can see why I'm confused.
GitHub: They keep 6%. With 3% for CC fees and 3% for GitHub. [1]
Patreon: Varies a bit more. Patreon takes 8%, unless they have been on the platform since before the 2019 change and are still on the 5% plan. And payment processing depends on size. Under $3 is 5% and $0.10 per transaction. Over is 2.9% and $0.30 per transaction. And more if PayPal or Venmo in not USD.
[2]
So the split seems much better on GitHub. But the conditions are a bit different for using the platforms, and you can get perks on Patreon which you may not be able to get on GitHub. I can't remember who / which project but I believe I saw one that said something about a difference in taxes / VAT and not being able to give some of the perks on GitHub because of it. Cannot find it right now though.
You make a good point in that this could be absorbed as an implicit cost of a client project - but tell me again, why would we do this, when we can simply use BitBucket and create as many repositories as we like, without any problems whatsoever?
Our only limit is then the amount of people we hire, which is far more reasonable in my eyes.
If we were working on a small number of projects, then it would absolutely not be a problem to work with Github - it's when you have a lot of tiny projects that it becomes prohibitively expensive to work with.
Fair enough, that's how Github wants to price their service - I guess its catered more to actual startups (who have a few large core projects) rather than businesses like ours.
I looked at the project's sponsorship on GitHub, Patreon and OpenCollective. Guessing the average GitHub sponsor donates $3/mo, he's at ~$1,360/mo before fees and taxes. If the GitHub average is $6/mo, that's ~$2,140. The GitHub average would have to be $30/mo to hit $100k/yr.
(Wasn't sure if you were suggesting he's earning 100+k/year)
Exactly. I was looking a creating a business that was something like Patreon for open source devs. Github already has 98% of what they need for this business. The marginal cost of this is a rounding error for them.
More than that, it's an excellent differentiator for their business, so then can justify all the GitHub Sponsors expenses just as marketing budget. Other people have been replicating the "nice web front-end for Git" part of their business. But this turns GitHub's large audience into a potential revenue source, which will be very hard for other people to duplicate.
I wouldn't throw out the phrase "so little money" so eagerly.
I'm a student with practically no income, and I have about 50 repositories for my school and weekend projects. To use GitHub, I would have to pay them $100/mo.
Our goal is to support projects outside of GitHub but we had to start somewhere and GitHub seemed like a pretty logical choice.
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