“Until now, if your organization wanted to use GitHub for private development, you had to subscribe to one of our paid plans. But every developer on earth should have access to GitHub. Price shouldn’t be a barrier,” GitHub announced on its official blog. “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. Teams who need advanced features (like code owners), enterprise features (like SAML), or personalized support can upgrade to one of our paid plans.” Looking at the Team Plan, the price has been reduced to $4 per user each month. Previously, this plan cost $9 per month for users. This reduction will also apply to existing Team Plan subscribers who will see a discount on their monthly statement. Some users would have already paid for a yearly subscription to GitHub. The company says those customers will see a prorated refund within the next month.
Permanent Change
While it seems that Microsoft has made this change to ease the load on developers during the COVID-19 outbreak, they are not temporary. That means when the restrictions around coronavirus ease, GitHub core features will remain free.
