DEV Community

Cover image for How GitHub Makes Money?
Vinit Gupta
Vinit Gupta

Posted on

How GitHub Makes Money?

Github was merely a bootstrapped start-up business. It gained enough revenue in the first year to get more employees. After four years from the start of the company, it was funded by Andreessen Horowitz with an amount of $100 million for venture capital.

Currently, Github has more than 33 million unique visitors who are using the services every month. The Github repository hosting services are among the top 100 most visited websites in the world.

GitHub is designed for businesses managing teams, it starts with a free plan that has no private repositories. After this, they go to Bronze in which they have 10 private repositories that cost $25. After bronze, it has a silver section that offers 20 private repositories for $50 per month. Then it goes for gold that offers 50 private repositories for $100 per month finally the highest is platinum to offer 125 private repositories for $200 per month.

Who all are the Competitors of GitHub?

Github has an employee count of 1800 and works with funding of $351 million. It generates revenue of $250Million. Along with these, there are various competitors to challenge Github and it’s services.

SourceForge:

SourceForge, the company founded in the year 1999 in La Jolla has been the top competitor
of Github, the company SourceForge is led by Logan Abbott, with a total employee count of 134. It generates revenue of $250 million less than GitHub.

BitBucket:

Bitbucket is a web-based version control repository hosting service owned by Atlassian, for source code and development projects that use either Mercurial or Git revision control systems. Bitbucket offers both commercial plans and free accounts.

GitLab:

GitLab is a web-based DevOps lifecycle tool that provides a Git-repository manager providing wiki, issue-tracking, and continuous integration and deployment pipeline features, using an open-source license, developed by GitLab Inc. The software was created by Ukrainian developers Dmitriy Zaporozhets and Valery Sizov.

Future of Github:

Though Github is still running as an independent company after Microsoft’s approach to it. There are several changes made to it. It has several goals to fulfill in order to earn a profitable future.

There are basically three goals for GitHub:
● To ensure that it becomes the best place to run productive communities and teams.
● Making the company accessible to more developers around the world.
● Making the company more reliable, secure, and performing.

These big ambitions need commitment and seem to be real as evidenced by the rapid rollout of changes. By making lives easier for developers, Microsoft is going to make GitHub more attractive which will let GitHub build on its community. The company will gain the resulting network effects.

Other major projects like LLVM migrating to GitHub, makes it look like Microsoft’s stewardship of the service is gaining community acceptance. That’s a great success for GitHub because it’s a service that’s as easy to migrate from as it is to migrate to.
Running a business that supports open-source development needs a light touch and a sensitivity to the needs and requirements of modern application development. With Microsoft’s help at GitHub, there’s a definite sense of rejuvenation around the platform and that’s a brilliant idea.

Top comments (0)