Thanks 😃

From this conversation, I figured that outside collaborator doesn’t need to be on a paid plan to have access to an org’s private repo, right? However, will this not account to the org’s paid seat count?

I asked because it looks like an outside collaborator of private repos takes up paid seats of the organization, based on the following links.

https://help.github.com/articles/adding-outside-collaborators-to-repositories-in-your-organization/

and

https://help.github.com/articles/removing-an-outside-collaborator-from-an-organization-repository/

Thanks!

Note this only applies to personal private repositories. If you have an organisation and you want to add an external collaborator to a private repository, the organisation has to have a seat available (which is not free).

It’s a bit irritating, but it’s presumably to stop the problem of organisations having a single paid user and a ton of free collaborators without paying for more per-user licenses.

>> it’s presumably to stop the problem of organisations having a single paid user and a ton of free collaborators without paying for more per-user licenses.

How could this stop the problem? It seems to only encourgae it.

I just discovered also, I need to pay extra seats in my organization for a few extra collaborators.

Let me get the case:

I have an organization and I’d like for my internal people to be on paid seats.

I’d like also to be able to have for some side projects we do for a some extra money, to be able to add a few collaborators to the private repos. As this are like probably 1 or 2 projects ocassionally, mostly for 1-3 months, the collaborators would be 1-2 people from the companies we’d be doing this projects, 99% non-developers, so they can see some activity and be able to collaborate on the issue/project board. Possible we’d not remove them, as the issue board should be there for reporting bugs.

But, Github enforces us to have them paid, although they are really outside the real usage we do internally.

There should be a difference for 2 type of collaborators. One that is like a full developer, mostly at same level like internal people, and to be paying a seat for, and another type, like limited readonly repo, participate in issues only type that could be free.

Attlasian/Jira offers this, with their support feature, where I can add free collaborators with only one thing - report issues.

We are a team of 3. With 3-4 small extra projects added each year, I’d endup with 6-12 extra seats to pay monthly. It is also embarrassing to tell the clients I need to kick them off.

This leads me to the critical need to create many organizations, or bring them on my pro account as free collaborators - not looking too professional.

So I guess the prices are decided by some non-developers hungry for money, like lots of people where in M$ decades ago, and the CEO of M$ should come to them and smash the same great current philosophy M$ has for a lot of products. This will keep us from migrating to other more financially friendly platforms.

Apologies for bumping this old thread, but I have a similar issue to @madalinignisca

If anything this makes it hard to justify paying for Github, as once we bought a few seats that now means we can no longer add outside collaborators. For example, we inherited a project and brought the code in house, but now this means we are forced to remove the previous developers from the repository. They don’t make contributions, but they need read access to the code as part of the support contract. If we’re on the free plan, we’d be able to add them.

There’s other cases too, like for example I’m suggest migrating from Trello to Github’s project boards. However that means that we need to pay for a seat for every person who wants to access even just the project boards which is a bit ridiculous. There should be some kind of access for users that only want to see the boards, or maybe create issues in a repository. This makes it really hard to sell anyone on moving everything we do to Github

This is a bit ridiculous. We actually get more usability out of being on the free plan

Pff this problem is still existing after such a long time.
It's basically impossible to have external partners onboard on private repo's without breaking your (org) wallet.

What's even more stupid, is that many of those external partners (at least in our case) ALREADY PAY for a Github pro account on their end. So if I invite them into my private repo to help out with code, like a temporary freelance project, you end up sucking up all the costs for those freelancers as well.
As an org, you actually pay again for the same feature sets for those that already pay it personally. It doesn't resonate at all.

Why is there no clear price diff for team members vs external collabs? And also an option to choose to pass the bill to freelancer.
Then I can choose if I want to bear the cost of onboarding the collaborator in my org or if they have to do it on their own.
When they click the invite they are offered with some options:
Already on a pro or higher plan -> no issue, can join instantly
Not yet on a pro or higher plan -> upsell to upgrade page on their own account