Why? They still charge per user, and multi-user private account is what companies look for. Really, I don't believe that GitHub relies on profit from personal side projects. It's also companies they are after.
Actually, Github's model is somewhat different; what they're charging for is the ability to make things private
There are a large number of potential business applications where this might be an important feature which most commercial users and some non-commercial users would be willing to pay for, and it saves the vendor the trouble of policing licences.
Customer support might well be one of those applications
That really does depend on your market and customers. I've got a github account - but it's pretty much incidental to getting new work. My track record, value delivered, personal network, etc. do that.
This is both good and worrying. It'll be nifty to see how they implement it, and I'm sure it will increase the company's financial security, but I greatly worry about how it might impact their customer priorities. Before, the customers using Github to host their repositories were the only ones to cater to; will this create a conflict of interest in any way? They say "quality jobs", but really, how do they maintain this quality in any fashion, and do they really have any incentive to do so?
The only reason I have a bitbucket account is because github's pricing model is so bad. I even wanted to pay for a small account, but 5 or even 10 repos is nothing compared to my number of repos.
In business cases like this, a bad tradeoff is being made. There may be some amount of money that their repo based pricing might make them over a per-user model. If they leave that money on the table though, they'd shrink what is left for their competitors and make themselves harder to disrupt. They would also get a greater pool of accounts that may grow to paid-status.
It's actually simple. GitHub tests on their free users and see their reaction. If the feedback is positive, move it to paid clients. If not, keep frustrating your free clients so they move to paid accounts.
There is an element of "double dipping" here that I see as a problem.
I already pay $7 a month for my own personal Github account, and for me personally it's nice to have no limit.
But if we switch to the new model at work then not only am I paying my $7, but my company will have to pay an additional $9p/m for me to have access to the repos I use daily for work.
Even if they removed me from the organisation and added me as a collaborator this will be an additional cost.
They can spin it how they like but I suspect for a large number of organisations they are going to see quite an increase in cost from using Github.
The number of very small teams or individuals this encourages to start using github probably allows every organization who can't afford this to leave and github to still increase the money they're making. It seems like a good move based on my imagined profile of their user base. 1 million teens and young 20-somethings just decided they'll give 7$ a month to github.
For bigger organizations, this is practically no money compared to other software they're using. So they'll just take the hit.
Sounds like the only customers being lost were those using github for no-commit users. Is that really a huge segment? If so they just need a special account status to fix this.
I think their recent change to per user pricing plays into this nicely. These features look really cool, but I can see it being costly to an organization when you have to give managers, project managers, etc. access to Github just so they can manage issues.
I looked into github for our company a while ago, but since we deal with quite a lot of consultancy work where we offer collaborator access to clients (for their own changes, issue tracking, etc), it was going to be prohibitively expensive to afford a plan which got everyone the necessary account.
In contrast, having unlimited users, even with a fairly small set of repos, is a very valuable offering, and I might reconsider it in favour of our current redmine setup, which doesn't offer nearly as many useful features.
At $25, which is only £16 or so, it's pretty much on-par with the VPS we're hosting our current repos on.
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