GitHub pricing guide: how to switch from per-repo to per-user pricing

Wait, GitHub offers per-repository pricing?

Well, not anymore. In the past they had a “per-repository” pricing plan where you would pay based on the number of repos you purchase for your org account, and under this plan, you could add as many users as you want.

Recently, as teams started building their software with a multi-repository architecture, there’s been an explosion in the number of repositories. This applies to even for small teams and for them, the per repo pricing plan makes less sense.

In response back in 2016, GitHub changed their pricing to be based on the number of users. This “per-user” pricing became the only GitHub pricing plan available to new customers.

GitHub of course “grandfathered” existing customers on the old pricing plan. Customers already on this plan at the time were allowed to continue buying repositories.

Until now.

Not only you can’t buy any more private repositories for your org account, but every new repo you create will now automatically be public, and you can’t change it to private until you switch 😱

Switch to GitHub per-user pricing in 5 steps

Many of our customers are still on the old GitHub pricing plan, so we previously added a “Repository Limit” feature in Datree, to help prevent teams from creating more repositories than they’ve bought.

This was a handy feature because it allowed teams to stay within the allocated budget. Now, because every new repo over the limit will be exposed to public, this feature has become critical.

The recommended process for switching to the new pricing plan:

# 1 – Find out how many repositories are left on your private repositories plan in Billing Overview in GitHub:

# 2 – Set Repository Limit (we recommend setting it to 90% of the org repositories bulk, e.g. set the limit to 90 if your bulk includes 100 repositories)

# 3 – Optional: you can “buy time” by removing (deleting) dead repositories from your account. Repositories without any commit in the last year are considered dead.

# 4 – Remove any inactive members from your org account so you only pay for users that are actually using GitHub. An inactive member is a user who didn’t commit any code in your org in the last year.

# 5 – Switch to the new per-user pricing plan in the Billing Overview section on GitHub: