I don't understand why Github hasn't solved this problem with pricing updates. My understanding is they are getting hammered with LLM generated code growing their traffic by over an order of magnitude. So why not rate limit non-paying users and charge for whatever scarce resource is being consumed that is causing them to constantly fall-over? This seems like a basic economics problem.
Because any price at all will immediately cause users to shift to another platform, and GitHub's value is that it is _the_ place to put your code on the internet.
Being the _the_ place for open source is what let them dominate the enterprise. Now that they dominate the enterprise, it'd make financial sense to put hard limits on the free tier. It's cynical but it would be foolish to lose that cash machine. It'd open them up for a competitor to slowly build up good will in open source then take them on in enterprise, but right now they are risking losing it all.
Having worked at places with GitHub Enterprise, that isn’t much of an improvement. You could host something else, but almost everything in this space isn’t great at scale.
Im definitely not referring to GHE. Im talking about real self-hosting infra. It wasnt that long ago that this was possible, and cheaper and more reliable. It's a pay me now or pay me later argument. Everyone now is complaining about the pay me later part of these 'deals'
I don't know how true that is nowadays, I think if you sign up to Enterprise Cloud you're in the same spot as everyone else
(maybe F500 people have their colocated box, but I have the impression that those are the "first class" seats (very expensive but _very few_) whereas enterprise cloud is the "business class" (loooooots of seats making a lot of money)
Someone did a study that suggested the network effect is logarithmic in nature, but if that’s true it means something with 95% market share is 3 times “better” for having everyone there. Not 20 or two orders of magnitude better but not nothing.
Please could you link to the study if you can find it. The definition of "better" seems quite critical here, as well as whether it's specific to code hosting websites. A messaging platform is pretty useless if I'm the only user, but Github would still be useful to me without anyone else having an account.
And the audience you want are users who will never, ever pay to get access. If GitHub starts throttling free users, they throttle the audience you're talking about far, far harder than you.
The audience will go away to somewhere you aren't. Then what?
No one needs github for git itself, nor even for web front-end to git, nor even for hosted/managed someone else's problem web front-end to git, nor even all of that for free.
There's a lot of consumer surplus with the features GitHub offers. I'm sure they can have better pricing tiers to capture the surplus without losing too many users.
It's easy from an armchair to say things like they should just get more capacity, or they should segregate free repos onto other servers. But maybe they are doing what you're thinking, and with that churn they get mistakes that cause outages, esp dealing with legacy systems. I've been there (not at GitHub or MSFT).
They do not need to make any technical changes. They could make the change overnight: $1 per repo per month (or whatever).
This would stop the aggressive growth that they clearly cannot handle anyway.
The question is: are they willing to compromise growth for QoS. So far the answer is a resounding: "no". They are deliberately sacrificing the experience of existing users to gain new ones.
No way I pay $1/repo/month. No way I pay $1/repo/year. I still host and maintain my old code on GitHub, but any free tier pricing update and I jump ship immediately.
There are tons of existing free users, they'd be sacrificing those too. And yeah they don't want to sacrifice growth either, so the remaining is an engineering question.
How much more value did those commits create than in 2025?
But that discards my point, which is that you should probably have been prevented from pushing all those to github unless you were paying them for it, but you weren't because the executives running github can't admit that AI is bad for their platform.
How much more value did those commits create than in 2025?
We have 2x fewer developers now than in 2025. Yet, the amount of features and bug fixes we're pushing is something like 5x.
So probably 10x more value is my guess for my entire team.
If you mean translating that into revenue, I'm not sure. Our product is better than ever with features a much bigger team couldn't dream of building before. Stability has also been better with fewer bugs, issues, downtime. When there are bugs, it gets fixed far quicker than before.
they've been complaining about LLM generated code and the related traffic for months now, this specific incident might not be caused by it but the general trend is
Their problem is partly scale, but also that they are making a ton of use of AI tools, which is undermining the quality of their software. The latter can't be fixed with a price increase, they need to pull their heads out of the AI groupthink for that.
>So why not rate limit non-paying users and charge for whatever scarce resource is being consumed that is causing them to constantly fall-over?
I think it behooves them for the public presentation of their issues to too much load. If they implemented load shedding and still had issues the follow-up questions would be less comfortable.
I remember! I think they changed that like 10 years ago? I thought BitBucket had done something not long before and assumed GitHub was just keeping up with a competitor.
That is essentially your number of followers. Pretty hard to have a system that cannot be gamed. I think followers are probably loosely correlated with tech ecosystem impact in some capacity, but the second there is an incentive to accumulate them, well...
