this post was submitted on 02 Dec 2025
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This seems perfectly reasonable and I wish you the best of luck. Just don't expect anyone to provide the infrastructure for your proprietary secret sauce for free!
Well, github would provide it for free. Their business model is that just hosting shit is free, but costing them actual server resources means you gotta pay 'em. And that's a sensible business model IMO, but unfortunately they're also owned by Microsoft, which I didn't even like 2 decades ago, let alone now that they're pushing AI.
Guess what I'm hoping is for Github alternatives, potentially based on Forgejo, to adopt a similar business model (free storage, paid runners beyond a very limited free tier essentially), without the whole using everyone's code for AI training part.
I also have no problem with a small recurring donation. But the ironic part here is that I wouldn't want to use a forge that's so small that it NEEDS the donations. I don't want it to disappear after a year.
Someone might spin that up, but it feels unlikely. Github was always kinda subsidized as a power play on MS's part, and now that it's well established enough they're squeezing it for ROI. An instance that doesn't need your donations still needs resources to perpetuate itself from somewhere, I'd personally rather depend on infrastructure that was transparent about that (whether paid or donation based) than be treated as the product
Github existed for like 10 years pre-microsoft. Though they did get an investment from Shitreessen Fuckwitz after a few years. Before that, they actually earned enough money on their own to keep the lights on.
I meant more that I'm willing to use an instance after it already has enough recurring donations OR paid users to sustain itself. Because at that point they don't need to treat you as a product to save their own asses, nor are they likely to go bankrupt. So I meant the ironic part is that I'm willing to pay, but for an instance that's doing well enough that it doesn't desperately need my money to keep the lights on.
I guess I'm just a little more pessimistic at this point, don't actually know the specifics of their financials but assumed github had been operating at a loss the whole time. That's pretty typical for startup stuff in general and especially so for "free" services, if it seems too good to be true it probably is type thing. I see forgejo's transparency and ideological commitment to open source as a defense against that type of behaviour cropping up in the future, hence "feature not bug". Like you said, it'd be trivial to host your private repositories elsewhere or for someone to spin up their own paid instance for commercial use. I'd be a little suspicious of what was keeping the lights on if someone directly replicated github's model because, well... look how it's going!