Cloud-based code repository platform GitHub has expanded its free tier to teams, has reduced paid team pricing from $9 USD user/month to $4 user/month, and is eliminating minimum seat requirements for GitHub Team. Prior to this change, teams that wanted private repositories had to subscribe to a paid plan. “But every developer on earth should have access to GitHub. Price shouldn’t be a barrier,” GitHub CEO Nat Friedman said in a blog post. So, “all of the core GitHub features are now free for everyone.”

Friedman also mentioned easier collaboration as a reason for the changes, saying that the reduced pricing and free organizational tier means “teams can now manage their work together in one place: CI/CD, project management, code review, packages, and more.”

The new tier, called GitHub Free for Organizations, includes the following features:

• Community support

• Two-factor authentication

• Team discussions

• Access control

• Unlimited public repositories with full feature sets

• Unlimited private repositories with limited feature sets 

• 2,000 GitHub Actions minutes

• 500MB of GitHub package storage

The features available to free organization users are nearly identical to free individual accounts, with the exceptions largely coming in the form of access control and unlimited users. Otherwise, there’s the same amount of Actions minutes and package storage, so if your organization needs  more than 500MB of storage you’ll have to pay for one of GitHub’s premium tiers.

SEE: Implementing DevOps: A guide for IT pros (free PDF) (TechRepublic)

How will these changes affect existing GitHub users?

Individual GitHub users won’t notice a change–the new features are aimed squarely at expanding collaboration features and lowering entry prices for organizations that need GitHub Premium but can’t afford $9 per user, per month.

Individual users can still migrate their account to a group account though, which can be done by logging in to GitHub’s organization plans page. 

New GitHub users interested in getting a free organization account can sign up for an account at GitHub and then check out the organization plans page to convert their account to a group one.

Organizations currently using GitHub Team for Open Source will be automatically moved to a GirtHub Free for Organizations account, and will gain all the features that come with the new free tier.

Customers paying for Pro or paid Team accounts will have their bills reduced effective immediately and organizations that paid for a year plan prior to April 14, 2020, will have their bills prorated to reflect the change for remaining months on their contract.

GitHub has published a robust FAQ about the access and pricing changes–those interested in learning more should give it a read.

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