If you need to give Epic Games special treatment just because they have a huge amount of outside collaborators, then your pricing model is broken.

It would be more fair to charge $9/mo per organization member + $1/mo per active outside collaborator (somewhat similar to AWS CodeCommit) than to charge for every single active and inactive member and collaborator equally. Maybe throw in a 50% bulk discount for active outside collaborators over 1000.

This is not a "unique situation", it's how many organizations use GitHub (just on a smaller scale than Epic Games). As giovannibajo1 puts it[1], this change is very unfair to software houses. Giving Epic Games special treatment is only avoiding the issue.

If 5% of Epic Game's 90664 collaborators are active for a given month, then with my proposed pricing model it would now cost them ($9/organization member + ~$2766)/mo, instead of >$800k/mo. No special deals needed, and everyone (presumably) is happy.

This proposed pricing model also scales well for software houses that have have many active outside collaborators. For example, a company with 20 employees and 50% of 100 outside collaborators active in any given month would be charged $230/mo. With 50 employees and 50% of 500 outside collaborators active, it would be $700/mo.

This should also work well for large companies. 200 employees + 30% of 4000 outside contributors active = $2900/mo.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11673352

The new plan doesn't fit wide organizations at all. With 300+ users we are looking at $30000 pr year for 70 repositories..

We get the freedom to create more repositories for the price of having to actively kick any inactive user out to save cost.

PS: Please make it like Slack. Don't pay for inactive users that doesn't commit anything that month.

So what you're saying is - you know your new pricing is even more ridiculous than your old pricing, but you're willing to burn a little profit to keep big-name clients for the sake of PR.

Gotcha.

If I understand this model correctly you fail to admit that there are at least 3 distinct types of users: developers (full access), users (read-only), issue trackers (wiki/issues only). And this model is geared toward a very specific type of organization with a relatively low number of users/trackers compared to developers.

Epic's example is just silly, but nevertheless the world is not black and white. I guess there should be a large number of organizations with multiple CI/CD agents each using distinct credentials for each target. Or examples of software houses requiring client access to issue tracker/wiki.

I guess GitHub analysed their data and made the best decision, but this really does not seem geared toward Enterprise in traditional sense of the word.

Some $vendors (just using familiar terms here) somewhat cover the gray areas pricing $x per unit, where unit is e.g. 2 users or 5 repos, whichever is higher.

It is interesting that - this change will force organizations to pay for "bot" users - that exist for deployment/notifications etc. Our payment bill just doubled from $50 to $106 now (including the bot accounts).

What about organizations that have many members, but few that actually contribute code? We have accounts for most of the people at our company so they can view issues and pull requests, but only about a dozen ever push code.