More numbers: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878
What's the question here, you don't believe growth is currently exponential, or do you think it shouldn't be hard to scale, when 10x YoY is not enough?
More numbers: https://x.com/kdaigle/status/2040164759836778878
What's the question here, you don't believe growth is currently exponential, or do you think it shouldn't be hard to scale, when 10x YoY is not enough?
As a business user, our costs have gone up while service has gone down dramatically. Meanwhile our marginal cost to GitHub has hardly changed. Where our costs to them have increased, they mostly charge us per cpu minute, so obviously aren’t making any kind of loss on our account.
I’m sure they’re experiencing scaling issues across the platform, but it’s unacceptable for that to have a negative impact on us when we're sending them $250/dev/yr for (what is in all honesty) hosting a bunch of static text files.
I understand that, and maybe GitHub became a bad deal because of that.
But if anything, their post and your reply are precisely an endorsement of usage based billing.
The bit that's growing 13x YoY (and which they expect will easily blow past that) is unmetered - commits. The bit that is metered (for some, not all folks) - action minutes, grew only 2x YoY.
GitHub was not built to limit the number of commits, checkouts, forks, issues, PRs, etc - nor do we want them to - but that's what's growing ridiculously as people unleash hordes of busy beaver agents on GitHub, because their either free or unlimited.
Where there are limits - or usage based billing - people add guardrails and find optimizations.
Because for all the talk, agents don't bring a 10x value increase; otherwise, they'd justify a 10x cost increase.
Besides, other forges are having issues too. Even running your own. We have Anubis everywhere protecting them for a reason.
That sounds bad. Paying users don't want huge and every-growing numbers of freeloaders reducing the return for each dollar they spend...
That would only lead to further and further degradation of service until the paying customers were absolutely desperate to find a deal that didn't require them to lug around such a heavy ball and chain.
It all made sense at the beginning when Github was free for OSS and OSS was thriving, but now these billions of commits are mostly incredibly low value. I'd bet the average commit now doesn't create 1/10th of the value the average commit did in, say, 2018
> we're sending them $250/dev/yr for (what is in all honesty) hosting a bunch of static text files.
You know, you can just host your own code forge. Or you can just drop gitolite on a server. Or pull directly from each others' dev machines on a LAN.
GitHub is not git.
Our 20-dev company is unfortunately exactly the wrong size to justify self-hosting. We're not large enough that it can be someone's dedicated role, and we're not small enough that we can be experimental around our vendors for something so critical to our output.
We're actively looking into alternatives outside of GitHub though.
I'm curious how Azure DevOps reliability has been for comparison. My current job is managing stories in DevOps with SCC in GitHub ent. While I like Github slightly more, have been curious about the decision.
We use Azure DevOps at work for few things. It's been pretty rock solid since all agents don't recommend it and it's different architecture.
It's also legacy at this point since Microsoft is pouring all resources into GitHub but for most people/companies, they could probably use Azure DevOps just fine.
Concur on the rock solid comment. We use Azure Devops with git repos, lots of pipelines using self hosted or Microsoft hosted agents. There was an issue with Microsoft hosted agents a few months ago, but that didn't last long, and is the only issue in my memory.
I do prefer github interface over azure devops.
In that case, why are you using them at all?
> we're sending them $250/dev/yr for (what is in all honesty) hosting a bunch of static text files.
so start a GitHub competitor which bills $50/dev/yr for solving this easy problem and make a lot of money?
These numbers should have been in the blog post, not the graphs that are present.
> What's the question here, you don't believe growth is currently exponential, or do you think it shouldn't be hard to scale
I think you're putting words in my mouth here; I didn't say either of those things. I'm saying that this blog post is a meaningless platitude when the github stability issues predate this, and that all this post says is "we hear you're having issues".
Sorry if I misread your intent.
I just think their charts, taken at face value, show substantially the same thing (for PRs, commits, new repos).
Either those charts are a bald-faced lie (the tweet could be as well) or there is no way for that chart to be something else.
The only way to fake exponential growth like that would be to use an inverse log scale (which would be a bald-faced lie).
It doesn't even really matter what's the y-axis baseline, unless we really think growth was huge in 2020, then cratered to zero by 2023, now back to the previous normal.
As for the rest of the post, I do think it's panic mode platitudes. But I honestly don't know what I'd write instead that's better.
You can already see people complaining loudly where they instead of "we'll do better" decided to limit usage.
No problem - it's tough online sometimes.
> I just think their charts, taken at face value, show substantially the same thing (for PRs, commits, new repos).
The problem is that these charts show the massive exponential growth in 2026. But this didn't start in 2026, this has been going on since early last year. My team had more build failures in 2025 due to actions outages or "degraded performance" than _any other reason_ and that includes PR's that failed linting or tests that developer were working on.
> As for the rest of the post, I do think it's panic mode platitudes. But I honestly don't know what I'd write instead that's better.
IMO, this needed to be written a 6 months ago (around the time that the memo of them prioritising the migration to Azure was released), and then this post should have been "We're still struggling, this isn't good enough. Here's the amount of growth, here's what we've done to try and fix it, and here's what we're planning over the next 3-6 months", instead of "Our priorities are clear: availability first, then capacity, then new features" and "We are committed to improving availability, increasing resilience, scaling for the future of software development, and communicating more transparently along the way." This isn't transparency (yet).