Microsoft-owned GitHub is making a major change to its service. To date, private repositories on the service required users to pay $7 a month for a personal developer account. And if you were a regular user who isn’t willing to pay $7 a month for private repositories, you wouldn’t have any options than to pay for the subscription service.

Until this week.

GitHub is expected to roll out a change to its free service tomorrow, introducing the ability to create private repositories without actually paying anything. The change will allow developers to create unlimited private repositories without needing to pay for the paid accounts. Unlimited private repositories were already available for free via GitHub’s Education program to students and teachers, by the way.

There’s a catch: if you do create private repositories using the free service, you will only be able to have up to 3 collaborators. This means if you are working on a project with other developers and need more than 3 collaborators, you would have to get a paid account.

And that’s not too much of a problem, to be honest. If you are an independent developer who has a ton of side projects and similar things, you can create private repositories for free without having to pay anything with the change. And truth is, most of the independent projects on GitHub are mostly personal projects that are either not fully developed or left behind by the developer. The majority of the developer community will definitely love this change.

Do note that GitHub is yet to officially announce the change, though the announcement was revealed a day early thanks to a broken embargo.

Tagged with GitHub, GitHub Premium