I think I’m not alone in having many Git repositories, many of them I don’t currently use because they’re from old projects. However, I don’t want to delete them because I might want to refer back to one of them or make a change (which I’m doing right now for a three year old project). I absolutely love GitHub but their pricing is very unfriendly for people like me. Consider this:

I’m using 10 of the 10 private repositories under the Bronze plan, yet barely using any disk space. I have another maybe 15-20 repositories of old projects I’d love to add to GitHub, but upgrading to the level necessary to allow that would cost me $100 a month! That’s way too much for me as an independent developer!

Unfuddle, where I used to store my private repositories until I started paying for GitHub in August, had a more friendly limit but also allowed archiving, where archived projects didn’t count against your main limit. At the same time, they could still be restored into normal projects. Great! Unfortunately in every other way GitHub is superior…

So what’s the solution? Well, I first emailed GitHub to see if I could just buy more private repositories. No dice. If I want to avoid ballooning numbers of projects but stay on GitHub, I could try moving all my old projects into one archive repo. This sounds ugly – my first thought was doing it via submodules – though Eelco had the good idea of using headless branches for each project. Unfortunately this still strikes me as a hack.

So I fear I may need to host my old repos on another server. There are lots of other supplies with better private repository pricing, or I might just setup the repos on my own server. Thoughts?