GitHub makes all of its core features free for all users and adds new features to its Android app

XDA

By Aamir Siddiqui

Published Apr 15, 2020

GitHub has announced that all of its core features are now free for all users. Additionally, the Android app is also updated with new features. Read on!

GitHub is one of the most popular ways out there for developers to host and share source code. What differentiates GitHub and other such code-sharing services from normal file hosting services is the implementation of version-control systems. This makes it easy to keep track of changes, which comes in very handy for collaborative projects. Last year, GitHub allowed free private repositories for teams with up to three collaborators. Now, GitHub has announced that all of its core features will be available for free to all users. The Android app has also received a minor update that addresses several complaints on the app.

Pricing Changes

GitHub's latest announcement means that all users, including those currently on free accounts, can now have free unlimited private repositories with unlimited collaborators for all. This also extends to teams that use the service for commercial projects, and also includes up to 2,000 minutes per month of free access to GitHub Actions.

Here are the plan and pricing changes that GitHub announced:

GitHub Free for organizations is immediately available and includes private repositories for unlimited users
All organizations previously using Team for Open Source now have GitHub Free
Free tier for individual developers now includes unlimited collaborators
Organizations and individuals using Free tier will receive Community Support
Pro tier will now include 2GB of Packages storage and 10GB of data transfer
Pro tier now has a reduced monthly price of $4
Team tier now has a reduced monthly price of $4 per user with no minimum seat requirement
Team tier will include 3,000 Actions minutes per month for private repositories after May 14

[blockquote author="GitHub CEO Mr. Nat Friedman"]We’re switching GitHub from a pay-for-privacy model to pay-for-features, what’s typically called freemium — you may have heard of it. The way I think about it is we want every developer and team on earth to be able to use GitHub for their development, whether it’s private or public development. It’s a fundamental change to the business architecture of GitHub.

That’s the thing we can think about internally -- the thing that everyone else can think about is: they can just use GitHub now, for whatever reason. If you’re starting a startup or if you’re a team inside of a big company and you just want to use GitHub — no credit card required, no budget required — you can just set your team up.[/blockquote]

While these changes come in the backdrop of increased Work-from-Home activity in light of the COVID-19 pandemic and health advisories, GitHub stresses that these changes have been on the roadmap for a while, and aren't just a limited promotion. The FAQ from the company mentions that unlimited collaborators on the Free tier is a permanent change.

GitHub for Android v1.1

Alongside the pricing changes, GitHub also rolled out a small update to its new Android app. The v1.1 update addresses some of the major complaints and oversights on the app, like bringing over the ability to switch branches in a repository, create new issues, and view the individual commits in a pull request.

Changelog for the v1.1 update: