Preston-Werner’s bet has paid off. GitHub is now profitable. Users can sign up for free and start contributing, but they pay money if they want to privately host code there — starting at $7 per month. GitHub also sells an enterprise product that lets companies run your own version of GitHub behind the corporate firewall. That starts at $5,000 per year, but can cost hundreds of thousands annually for companies with hundreds of coders.
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When Scott Chabon wrote a book about GitHub, the first fork appeared within a month. It was a German translation of his book. Now, three years later, it’s been translated into 10 languages, with another 10 translations in the works. Half of the traffic to the book’s website comes from China. “Tons of people in China are learning Git because they can read [the book] in Chinese on my website, because somebody provided that,” he says