GitHub Pricing in May 2026

GitHub's standard pricing follows per-user tiers: Free for unlimited public/private repos with limited features, Team at $4/user/month, Enterprise at $21/user/month for advanced security features and SSO. Real-world GitHub bills for typical 10-person engineering teams on Team land at $40/month; mid-stage 50-person teams on Enterprise hit $1K-2K/month.

The Free Team plan (1 year) offer covers approximately $48 of value per user. Eligibility focuses on accelerator-backed startups. The strategic decision: GitHub's value is the near-monopoly status in code hosting — mindshare, ecosystem, gravity of being the default. For most startups, choosing GitHub is the path of least resistance and the path of greatest network effect. The free year is the right time to validate whether GitHub Team's specific features (private repos, basic team management, GitHub Actions allowance) suffice for your engineering team's needs. For teams growing past startup scale into compliance-driven workflows, GitHub Enterprise's Advanced Security adds security scanning bundled with code hosting. For teams committed to all-in-one DevSecOps under one vendor, GitLab Ultimate targets that consolidation. For Atlassian-standardized organizations, Bitbucket plays the GitHub role with deep Jira integration. For self-hosted source control specifically (compliance, sovereignty), Gitea, Forgejo, and Sourcehut offer open-source alternatives at much lower cost with operational overhead. For most modern startups, GitHub remains the sensible default — the free year covers the typical first year of engineering team usage.