GitHub plans and products

Every spring Rosa prepares Tidewater's budget for the coming year, and this year GitHub had its own line. At the April 1 session she walked the team through the bill: what the organization pays for, what it gets free, what the extra products are, and what the alternatives would cost. Owen took notes for a different reason. The GH-900 exam expects candidates to know GitHub's plans and products well enough to recommend one, and he had found the official pages confusing, partly because they change often. This lesson sets out the structure, which is stable, and shows how to read the current numbers, which are not.

Accounts and plans, once more

A plan always belongs to an account. Personal accounts can be on GitHub Free or GitHub Pro. Organizations can be on GitHub Free for organizations, GitHub Team or GitHub Enterprise. An enterprise account, which groups organizations, comes with GitHub Enterprise. The plan decides which collaboration and administration features are available in the account's private repositories, how much included usage comes with it, such as minutes of GitHub Actions and storage for GitHub Packages, and what kind of support is offered. Public repositories get most features on every plan, which is one of the ways GitHub supports open source.

What the paid organization plans add

For an organization, the step from Free to Team is mostly about private repositories. Features such as protected branches, required reviewers, code owners, draft pull requests, multiple reviewers, and wikis and Pages for private repositories are available in public repositories on the free plan but need Team or higher in private ones. Team also raises included usage, adds team reviewers and scheduled reminders, and moves support from community forums to email. That is why Tidewater chose Team in MSBA-160: Grace's required review on the private trail-notes repository needed it.

The step from Team to Enterprise is mostly about identity, control and compliance across a larger organization: an enterprise account with several organizations under central policies, SAML single sign-on through the company's identity provider, automatic user provisioning, audit log streaming to a security system, Enterprise Managed Users, data residency in a chosen region, higher included usage, enterprise-level support, and access to features such as custom repository roles, custom organization roles and some organization-wide rulesets.

Ways to run GitHub Enterprise

GitHub Enterprise comes in more than one form, and the exam expects you to tell them apart.

Enterprise Managed Users and Copilot policies

Two administration ideas from the GH-900 outline are worth a closer look. With Enterprise Managed Users (EMU), the company's identity provider creates, updates and removes the user accounts; employees do not use their personal GitHub accounts at all, their managed accounts cannot create public content or contribute to repositories outside the enterprise, and leaving the company removes the account automatically. EMU suits companies that need strong control over identity, at the cost of some convenience for developers who also work in open source.

Copilot policies let organization and enterprise owners decide whether members may use GitHub Copilot, which features and models are allowed, whether Copilot may suggest code matching public code, and which content it should not read. Policies set by an enterprise apply to every organization in it. This matters for companies that need to control how an AI tool handles their code; MSBA-303 covers the details.

Products beyond the plan

Several GitHub products are bought or measured separately from the plan, and a realistic budget includes them.

Usage-based products have spending limits or budgets: an organization can set a monthly maximum for Actions, Packages, Codespaces and similar products, and GitHub stops or warns when it is reached. Rosa set every usage budget to a small amount above Tidewater's average, with an email alert at three-quarters of each, so a runaway workflow could not produce a surprise bill.

Copilot plans at a glance

GitHub Copilot has its own set of plans. For individuals there is Copilot Free, with a limited monthly allowance, Copilot Pro and Copilot Pro+, with larger allowances and more choice of models, and other options that GitHub adds from time to time; students, teachers and maintainers of popular open-source projects may qualify for free access. For organizations there is Copilot Business, priced per seat with central policy management, and Copilot Enterprise, for companies on GitHub Enterprise Cloud. At the time of writing, Business was listed at 19 dollars (US) and Enterprise at 39 dollars (US) per seat per month. Allowances are measured in units that GitHub has changed more than once, so they are best checked on the plans page when needed.

Rosa reminded everyone that GitHub bills in US dollars, so Tidewater's Canadian-dollar cost moves with the exchange rate, and that GST or HST may apply to the purchase. She budgets in US dollars and adds a margin for conversion when the budget is approved in Canadian dollars.

What open source, students and teachers get

GitHub's pricing is shaped by its role in open source. Public repositories receive almost every collaboration feature on the free plans, GitHub Actions minutes on standard GitHub-hosted runners are free for public repositories, and the main security features from lessons 7 to 9 are free for them too. Maintainers of popular open-source projects may be offered GitHub Copilot at no charge. GitHub Education offers verified students and teachers benefits such as GitHub Pro, Copilot access and a pack of partner tools, and GitHub Classroom helps teachers distribute and collect assignments as repositories. GitHub Sponsors, covered in lesson 12, lets people and companies fund the developers whose work they depend on.

For a small company, the practical consequence is that the cheapest way to get advanced features is often to work in public where the work can be public. Tidewater's open trail-report format and the public style guide have branch protection, Actions and secret scanning at no cost, while only the private manuscripts and the admin repository depend on the Team plan.

Support and service status

Plans also differ in support. Free accounts rely on the GitHub Community discussion forums and documentation; GitHub Pro and Team include email support from GitHub staff; Enterprise includes Enterprise Support, with faster response targets, and a Premium Support option with named contacts and service-level agreements can be added. Whatever the plan, the GitHub Status page shows whether a GitHub service, such as Actions, Pages or Codespaces, is having problems right now, which is the first thing to check when something that worked yesterday suddenly fails for everyone. Rosa added the status page to the team's bookmarks and to the troubleshooting section of the contributing guide, after a morning in February when the team spent an hour debugging a workflow that was failing because GitHub Actions itself was degraded.

Choosing a plan

The plan question is less about price than about needs. A useful way to decide is to work from the requirements to the lowest plan that meets them, then add products only where there is a clear reason.

Tidewater's answer did not change: the Team plan, usage budgets on Actions and Codespaces, no paid security products yet (lesson 7), and a decision on Copilot Business for the web team after a month's trial. Rosa wrote it up as a one-page decision record in the admin repository, with the date and the prices used, so next year's review would start from facts rather than memory.

Reading GitHub's own pages

Because plans and prices change, the most useful skill is knowing where to look. The pricing page at github.com/pricing shows current plan prices and a feature comparison. The plans article in GitHub Docs lists what each plan includes. The billing section of GitHub Docs explains how each product is measured and charged. An organization's own billing and plans settings show what it is actually paying, its usage this month, and its budgets. Owen's exam tip, which Priya endorsed, was to learn the shape of the plans, Free to Team to Enterprise, private-repository collaboration at Team, identity and compliance at Enterprise, and not to memorize numbers that may have changed by exam day.