GitHub: Free for Open Source
Lately people have been asking about our pricing plan. While we’re not ready to reveal it quite yet, we are ready to talk about one aspect of it: GitHub will…
Lately people have been asking about our pricing plan. While we’re not ready to reveal it quite yet, we are ready to talk about one aspect of it: GitHub will host open source projects for free.
There will, of course, be a reasonable size limit. To give some context, a fresh checkout of the 100k+ LOC Rails project is only 2.2 megs. Furthermore, only 3 of GitHub’s 2000 existing users are using more than 50 megabytes on public projects. Git is very space efficient.
What about forks? Well, let’s say you’re hosting a 40 megabyte open source project and I fork it. Because Git is so awesome at handling space, my forked repo uses less than 1 megabyte initially.
Big open source projects needing more than the limit should contact us. We’d love to sponsor your development.
GitHub is most definitely the best way to do open source. Sign up for a beta invite (if you haven’t already) and see for yourself.
Written by
Related posts
What’s coming to our GitHub Actions 2026 security roadmap
A look at GitHub Actions’ 2026 roadmap, outlining how secure defaults, policy controls, and CI/CD observability harden the software supply chain end to end.
Updates to GitHub Copilot interaction data usage policy
From April 24 onward, interaction data—specifically inputs, outputs, code snippets, and associated context—from Copilot Free, Pro, and Pro+ users will be used to train and improve our AI models unless they opt out.
GitHub availability report: February 2026
In February, we experienced six incidents that resulted in degraded performance across GitHub services.