Git Hosting Alternatives That Don't Bankrupt Your Engineering Budget

GitHub Enterprise costs $21 per user per month. Sounds reasonable until you multiply by 1,000 developers and realize you're paying $252k annually just for Git hosting. That's before CI/CD minutes, which GitHub charges separately and will easily double your bill.

I've been through this budget nightmare three times. First at a fintech startup where GitHub's enterprise pricing exceeded our entire engineering payroll for the first year. Then at a Fortune 500 where our monthly GitHub bill hit $47k because some asshole uploaded the entire Windows SDK to a repo - I think it was like 600GB? Maybe more? Point is, we went from $15k/month to $47k overnight and GitHub's billing alert came 3 weeks later, like "hey, you owe us an extra $96k, thanks!"

The Real Problems Nobody Talks About

Vendor Lock-in Fucks You Long Term: GitHub's pricing model is designed to trap you. Start small, get your entire workflow dependent on their ecosystem, then watch them jack up prices. They killed free private repos for teams, they'll find new ways to extract money.

Compliance Theater Costs Extra: Need SOC 2 compliance? That's GitHub Enterprise Cloud at minimum. Want audit logs? Extra. Need IP allow lists? More money. Every enterprise feature is a separate line item.

Performance Shits the Bed at Scale: GitHub's web interface becomes unusable with repositories over 10GB. I've clocked 5-minute load times just to browse files on a repo with 15GB of Unity assets - the browser tab literally shows "Page Unresponsive" warnings. Git LFS helps but costs $5 per 50GB pack, so a typical game project with 200GB of assets costs $20/month just for storage before you even count the bandwidth charges when your artists pull updates.

Support is Garbage Unless You Pay Premium: Standard GitHub support is "submit a ticket and wait 3 days." I once had production broken for 4 hours because GitHub Actions decided to shit the bed with Error: Process completed with exit code 143 and their support response was "have you tried restarting the job?" GitHub Premium Support starts at $2,000/month for 8-hour response times. Production down? Too bad, should've paid for premium.

Real Integration Pain Points: GitHub's SAML SSO works great until someone leaves the company and their access doesn't revoke for 8 hours because SCIM sync is broken in v3.7.2. API rate limits (5,000/hour) crush CI/CD pipelines at scale - you'll hit 403 API rate limit exceeded errors on repos with more than 20 parallel builds. And don't get me started on webhook reliability during outages - expect 502 Bad Gateway responses and webhook failures that GitHub support will just shrug at.

I learned this the hard way: when your Git hosting bill exceeds your infrastructure costs, it's time to look elsewhere. These alternatives actually solve real problems instead of creating expensive new ones.

After evaluating every viable platform across three different companies, here are the ones that don't completely fuck your budget:

• Azure DevOps - Microsoft's answer that doesn't completely rape your budget
• AWS CodeCommit - Cheap if you're already in AWS, otherwise integration hell
• Self-hosted Forgejo - Free as in beer, expensive as in DevOps engineer salary
• Perforce Helix Core - Enterprise performance that costs enterprise money
• GitKraken Glo - Actually decent UI, reasonable pricing
• Beanstalk - Simple deployment focus, works for smaller teams
• SourceHut - Minimalist approach, email-driven workflow
• RhodeCode - Mixed VCS support when you have legacy SVN hell
• Bonobo Git Server - Windows shops that live in Active Directory hell

GitHub Enterprise pricing shows the damage - multiply by your dev count and cry. Azure DevOps pricing calculator is what you'll use to calculate your savings. GitLab is transparent about their highway robbery pricing. Use Microsoft's migration tools when you're ready to escape GitHub's pricing hell.

I've deployed Git hosting alternatives at three companies in the last five years. Here's what you need to know about each option without the marketing bullshit.

None are perfect GitHub replacements, but every single one can cut your costs dramatically if you understand what you're signing up for. Spoiler alert: you're signing up for a different flavor of pain.

Azure DevOps: Works Great If You Like Microsoft Hell

Azure DevOps is Microsoft's answer to GitHub, and it's actually not terrible. At $6/user/month for basic features, it's cheaper than GitHub Enterprise until you factor in CI/CD costs that'll fuck your budget sideways.

The Good Shit: If you're already drowning in Microsoft products, Azure DevOps integrates seamlessly with Active Directory - no more managing separate user accounts. Azure Boards actually works better than Jira for most teams, which isn't saying much but still.

The Gotchas: Microsoft-hosted CI/CD agents cost $40/month each with "unlimited" minutes that aren't actually unlimited - they throttle you after 30 parallel builds. We needed 10+ agents for our 200-person team and each one times out after 6 hours, breaking overnight builds. Self-hosted agents are $15/month but prepare to spend a week figuring out why they randomly disconnect with "Agent lost communication with the server" errors in v3.225.1, and another week when the November 2023 Azure DevOps update broke SSH key authentication for no fucking reason.

Real talk: I deployed Azure DevOps for a 200-person engineering org. Migration took 6 weeks, mostly spent unfucking years of GitHub Actions workflows. Total cost ended up 40% less than GitHub Enterprise, but only because we self-hosted everything.

AWS CodeCommit: Cheap Until It's Not

AWS CodeCommit looks amazing on paper - $1 per user per month, unlimited repos, integrated with IAM for access control. Reality is messier.

What Works: If your entire infrastructure lives in AWS, CodeCommit integrates beautifully with CodePipeline and CodeBuild. VPC endpoints let you keep everything private without exposing Git traffic to the internet.

The Pain: No built-in issue tracking, no project management, no web-based code editor - it's literally just Git with AWS auth. The 2GB file limit will bite you in the ass when some designer commits a 3GB Photoshop file and breaks everyone's git pull with fatal: pack exceeds maximum allowed size errors. The web interface looks like it was designed in 2005 by someone who actively despised developers.

I used CodeCommit for a startup that lived entirely in AWS. Great for the price, but we ended up bolting on Jira, Jenkins, and three other tools to get basic functionality. Total monthly cost stayed low, total engineering complexity went through the roof.

Forgejo: Free Software, Expensive DevOps

Forgejo is the community fork of Gitea after Gitea's governance went to shit. It's completely open source, which means no licensing costs and full control over your data. Also means you're responsible for everything that breaks.

Why It's Appealing: Zero vendor lock-in, runs on potato hardware, includes everything GitHub has (repos, issues, pull requests, CI/CD). Forgejo Actions is GitHub Actions-compatible, so migration is mostly painless.

Reality Check: "Free" software costs money in DevOps time. Budget 20 hours/month minimum for maintenance, security updates, and infrastructure management. Database maintenance (PostgreSQL crashes with FATAL: lock file \"postmaster.pid\" already exists every few months), backup strategies, SSL cert management (Let's Encrypt renewal fails silently), load balancing for high availability - it all becomes your fucking problem at 3AM when developers are pissed they can't push code and you're standing in your kitchen in boxer shorts trying to SSH into a server that's throwing Connection timeout errors.

Real cost at my last company: $80k annually for a DevOps engineer whose full-time job became babysitting our Forgejo instance for 150 developers. Still cheaper than GitHub Enterprise, but that engineer could've been working on actual infrastructure improvements.

The official Forgejo installation guide and Docker setup docs will get you started. Everything else you'll learn at 2 AM when production breaks and you're googling "postgresql FATAL lock file postmaster.pid" while your team is pissed.

Perforce: Enterprise Performance, Enterprise Price Tag

Perforce Helix Core is what you use when Git fundamentally can't handle your workflow. Gaming studios, CAD shops, and anyone dealing with massive binary assets.

What It Actually Does: Handles terabyte-sized repositories without breaking a sweat. Changelist workflow lets you atomically commit across multiple projects. Stream-based branching actually makes sense for complex codebases.

The Price: $9/user/month plus server licensing that starts at $5,000/month. Support contracts are mandatory and expensive. Budget $150k+ annually for a team of 100.

Used Perforce at a game studio with 50GB+ repositories full of texture assets. Performance was incredible - never waited more than 30 seconds for any operation. Cost was also incredible - our Git hosting budget exceeded our entire backend infrastructure costs.

Only consider Perforce if Git literally cannot handle your use case. For 99% of software development, the cost isn't justified.