GitHub is now free for all developer teams

Microsoft has overhauled GitHub’s pricing strategy to open up access to the development platform’s core features to all users and teams, free of charge.

Targeted primarily at small development teams and startups, the newly-introduced free version of GitHub offers unlimited collaborators and unlimited public and private repositories.

This is in addition to Microsft lowering the pricing for its secondary and enterprise tiers to $4 per user per month and $21 per user per month, respectively. These rungs include more in-depth and advanced features, with the enterprise tier, for example, offering SAML single sign-on and advanced auditing.

“Until now, if your organization wanted to use GitHub for private development, you had to subscribe to one of our paid plans,” said GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. “But every developer on earth should have access to GitHub. Price shouldn’t be a barrier.

“This means teams can now manage their work together in one place: CI/CD, project management, code review, packages, and more. We want everyone to be able to ship great software on the platform developers love.”

GitHub Free is immediately available and also offers 2,000 actions minutes/month, 500MB of GitHub Packages storage, and support. All businesses previously using Team for Open Source now have access to GitHub Free, while organisations using GitHub Free will be given additional access to community support.

Customers that have already subscribed to a paid-for plan prior to 14 April will receive a refund for a prorated amount through the end of their billing term.

GitHub Free for Organisations is similar to GitHub Free for account users in the core features available to users, but the former differs in that it offers a host of business-centric settings like access controls for managing groups.

GitHub has taken a few strides forward since Microsoft acquired the development platform for $7.5 billion in 2018, despite widespread anxiety around what the future may hold for the open-source hub.

Since then, GitHub has launched a ‘Patreon for coders’ in the form of the GitHub Sponsor tool which allows fans to financially support open source developers.

Microsoft has also added npm to its development repository, setting out plans last month to eventually integrate the JavaScript platform into GitHub, following a series of improvements.