logoalt Hacker News

mixedbittoday at 9:26 AM5 repliesview on HN

An interesting things is that GitHub is an expensive service and my guess would be that MS makes good money on it. Our small company paid about 200+ USD monthly for GitHub, much larger cumulative cost than Windows licenses. My believe was that Windows is getting worse, because it is considered legacy business by MS in favor of new offerings such as GitHub subscriptions.


Replies

samhhtoday at 9:34 AM

I was surprised to learn that Depot runners, which are much faster, are also much cheaper. Would highly recommend them for anyone trapped on GitHub.

show 1 reply
Normal_gaussiantoday at 12:11 PM

Very many more people use Windows to GitHub.

GitHub also runs a free tier with significant usage.

There are ~1.4b paid instances of Windows 10/11 desktop; and ~150m Monthly active accounts on GitHub, of which only a fraction are paid users.

Windows is generating something in the region of $30b/yr for MS, and GitHub is around $2b/yr.

MS have called out that Copilot is responsible for 40% of revenue growth in GitHub.

Windows isn't what developers buy, but it is what end users buy. There are a lot more end users than developers. Developers are also famously stingy. However, in both products the margin is in the new tech.

show 1 reply
evikstoday at 11:37 AM

The legacy business usually explains why there are no new features, only minor maintenance, it doesn't explain why there is a lot of investment into work that makes it worse

blibbletoday at 11:37 AM

I wouldn't be surprised if there isn't some plan to make all of GitHub's backend "legacy"

and switch everyone to the dumpster fire that is Azure DevOps

and if you thought GitHub Actions was bad...

show 3 replies
Ygg2today at 9:58 AM

> My believe was that Windows is getting worse, because it is considered legacy business by MS in favor of new offerings such as GitHub subscriptions.

What if GH actions is considered legacy business in favour of LLMs?