Hacker News

points by reacharavindh 1 day ago | 0 comments

GitHub lets me create public and private repos.. with a free account.. how are they making money?! Why are they throwing hardware at this explosive growth of repos with LLMs?

[–] add-sub-mul-div 1 day ago

They're using our data to create AI products that they sell to whales who subsidize our usage. Whether that's long term viable, I don't know.

[–] jamesfinlayson 1 day ago

GitHub Enterprise maybe? For a while there it was more expensive than GitLab Enterprise.

[–] r_lee 1 day ago

github is owned by Microsoft, their intention is not just to make money off of it

it's like Gmail and Google

[–] reacharavindh 1 day ago

I understand why Google would run Gmail for free.. it’s signals for their ad machine even if they don’t literally push the contents of the emails themselves directly. I mean the metadata, connections etc is valuable for ads intelligence.

But I toss my otherwise public git repos on GitHub.. if they weren’t handing out for free, I’d have hosted them anywhere else publicly as well. What do they get by hosting my _private_ repos for free? Did they explicitly say anywhere that they are training models on code in private repos? That’ll be a dark pattern hard to miss out here on HN!

[–] nozzlegear 1 day ago

I got an email a couple weeks ago that said my credit card expired and GitHub couldn't renew my subscription. I honestly don't know what that subscription is getting me though, what am I paying for? I used to pay for private repos I think, but that's included for free now.

[–] jamesfinlayson 1 day ago

Up until recently I was paying for data storage (I have a couple of repos with LFS) but the billing on that was changed recently so now I'm under the threshold for payment.

[–] RockRobotRock 1 day ago

private github pages