How does GitHub make money?

GitHub offers unlimited collaborators and public repositories, but charges for private repositories

With more than 33 million unique visitors now using the service every single month, Git repository hosting service GitHub has become one of the top 100 most visited websites in the world.

The company offers distributed revision control and source code management functionality of Git. Developers use it to communicate with each other while organizing programming projects. It acts as a way to store, and share, code. Its products include Atom Text Editor, which is a hackable text editor; and GitHub Pages, which provides websites hosted directly from a GitHub repository.

So how does it make money? The answer is actually pretty straightforward: Github sells monthly plans to individuals and to businesses. In every instance, it offers unlimited collaborators and unlimited public repositories. The plans only go up based on the number of private repositories.

Its personal plans, which are for individuals looking to share their own projects and collaborate with others, start out with the free plan, which comes with no private repositories. The next plan, called Micro, offers 5 private repositories for $7 a month. Small offers 10 for $12 a month, then Medium offers 20 for $22 a month, and, finally, Large offers 50 for $50 a month.

GitHub's organization plans, which are designed for  businesses managing teams and varying permissions, also start out with a free plan that has no private repositories. Then it goes to Bronze, which has 10 private repositories for $25; Silver, which offers 20 private repositories for $50 a month; Gold, which offers 50 private repositories for $100 a month; and, finally, Platinum, which offers 125 private repositories for $200 a month.

Organization plans also come with Business plans for private repositories, team-based access permissions, billing receipts that can be sent to a second email address, and owners team access to organization members' two-factor authentication status.

On top of those plans, users can add additional storage and bandwidth, each at $5 for a 50 GB pack. 

So how should users know how many repositories they need? This is how GitHub answers that question: "Generally, each repository corresponds to a project. Private repositories are needed for each project you don’t want to make open source and publicly available."

Repositories can be changed from private to public and vice versa.

In addition, the company also offers GitHub Enterprise, which can be deployed and managed on a team’s choice of infrastructure. Pricing for GitHub Enterprise starts at $2,500 per 10-user seat pack per year, which includes maintenance, upgrades, and technical support at no extra cost. 

GitHub has over 10 million registered users and over 25 million repositories, and is has been growing quickly: it had only 1.7 million developers, and around 3 million software repositories, back in 2012. GitHub does not, however, break down how many of those users are paying. 

Headquartered in San Francisco, and with fffices in Boulder, Colorodo and Tokyo, GitHub currently has over 300 total employees, and has been said to be seeing 300% annual growth.

The company has raised $350 million in venture capital, including a $250 million round that it raised last month at a reported $2 billion valuation.

(Image source: github.com)