GitHub is making its core features free for everyone, CEO Nat Friedman announced in a post on Tuesday.
“This means teams can now manage their work together in one place,” Friedman said. “CI/CD, project management, code review, packages, and more. We want everyone to be able to ship great software on the platform developers love.”
Users can now access unlimited public and private repositories and have unlimited collaborators working on a project. The free features also include 500 MB of GitHub Packages storage and community support.
Previously, teams that wanted to use GitHub for private development had to sign up for a paid plan. Those will still exist for more advanced features, and the company also announced that it was slashing the price of those Team plans by more than half, from $9 a month (per user) to $4 a month.
In the programming world, GitHub is like the Library of Alexandria, a vast repository for source code, files, documentation, issue tracking, and more.
Although GitHub’s announcement came at a time when other companies are offering services for free to help people during the COVID-19 pandemic, GitHub’s decision is unrelated.
A spokesperson for GitHub told us the following: “We did not launch this because of COVID-19. These updates to our offerings were planned before COVID-19, with the goal of making GitHub even more accessible to teams of all sizes. Of course, we understand the positive impact this will have for smaller teams and organizations in these times as they figure out how to continue to build and maintain their businesses. We hope this will relieve at least one burden and that teams can continue their work. But it’s important to note that these plan updates will not change once we’re through this pandemic.”
