One of the most popular software hosting and collaboration platform, GitHub, has now made some of its key premium features free to use for everyone. GitHub, which is owned by Microsoft, said recently that any organization could make private repositories for development for free.
Before this announcement, if any organization wanted to host a private development on GitHub, the organization had to subscribe to one of the premium plans that started as from US$7 per month. Last year, GitHub made private repositories available and free, but it came with some restrictions, for example, the number of collaborators.
Additionally, a team of developers can get up to 2,000 GitHub action minutes per month for free. Actions on GitHub are an automation tool that allows applications to orchestrate any workflow based on an event, then sending a notification. This free tier is ideal for small-scale projects.
However, if you are looking for advanced features such as code owners to control your project better, you will need to pay US$4, instead of the usual US$9 for teams.
In a question and answers session that was hosted by Hacker News, Nat Friedman, the CEO of GitHub, said that he wanted to roll out this change for the last one and half years.
“We've always wanted to make this change for the last 18 months, but needed our Enterprise business to be big enough to enable 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… 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,” Nat Friedman said.
Currently, the platform has around 40 million users across the world, and it is estimating at least 100 million users by 2025. Making premium features free for everyone is a step in the right direction, and it will most probably achieve this number or even exceed it by 2025.
