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?
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!
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.
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.
Users spend tokens on DeepSeek, Claude, and others -> generate variations of projects uploaded to GitHub -> Microsoft (GitHub's owner) -> trains LLMs on this -> ends up with better models.
No matter what model a user may use at any price point, microsoft can distill it.
It's distillation at a higher level
most good programmers aren't going to commit garbage solutions; they'll push it to a git remote once they see it actually solves a problem they are trying to solve, and since the git commits and their messages are also AI generated, you've good visibility into the user's intention and resulting edits to the codebase.
Did you read the numbers? The volume growth requires a top down examination of everything, which is not going to be fast or easy to do. From 65 million to 7 billion inside a couple years is a ridiculous surge.
At its GitHub Universe conference on Wednesday, the company announced that it is now seeing 7.4 billion commits per month. To put that into perspective, developers pushed 65 million monthly commits to the platform in 2024.
> At its GitHub Universe conference on Wednesday, the company announced that it is now seeing 7.4 billion commits per month. To put that into perspective, developers pushed 65 million monthly commits to the platform in 2024.
Of course, this is because AI is pushing commits without anyone reviewing them.But I think the solution here might be for AI to commit locally and then consolidate a whole feature into a single commit before pushing.
Github taking their 99% uptime and completely destroying it has been the funniest thing of this slopwar so far.
Glad Microsoft did this to themselves.
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?
GitHub Enterprise maybe? For a while there it was more expensive than GitLab Enterprise.
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.
github is owned by Microsoft, their intention is not just to make money off of it
it's like Gmail and Google
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!
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.
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.
private github pages
Here's a thing
Users spend tokens on DeepSeek, Claude, and others -> generate variations of projects uploaded to GitHub -> Microsoft (GitHub's owner) -> trains LLMs on this -> ends up with better models.
No matter what model a user may use at any price point, microsoft can distill it.
It's distillation at a higher level
most good programmers aren't going to commit garbage solutions; they'll push it to a git remote once they see it actually solves a problem they are trying to solve, and since the git commits and their messages are also AI generated, you've good visibility into the user's intention and resulting edits to the codebase.
They want to capture it all.
Except that in 4 years now they haven’t.
Want to know how many of those commits from AI agents and how many from people.
at least 5 nines.
We need a bigger artic vault
well, then do something about it ?! this seems like an insane solution. just keep throwing hardware at it until you run out of cash, i guess
Did you read the numbers? The volume growth requires a top down examination of everything, which is not going to be fast or easy to do. From 65 million to 7 billion inside a couple years is a ridiculous surge.
> At its GitHub Universe conference on Wednesday, the company announced that it is now seeing 7.4 billion commits per month. To put that into perspective, developers pushed 65 million monthly commits to the platform in 2024.
Of course, this is because AI is pushing commits without anyone reviewing them.But I think the solution here might be for AI to commit locally and then consolidate a whole feature into a single commit before pushing.
Is this sustainable in the long term?
This must be squeezing GitHub per user margins, no?
They went from 65 Million monthly in 2024 to 7.4B ?
Holy Crap that is 100x increase. No wonder why they can't keep up.
Related:
Octoverse: Commits, pushes, reach new highs in 2026
https://github.blog/news-insights/octoverse/octoverse-commit... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50280770)
160pb in SSD?
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