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 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

Chris Wanstrath

@defunkt