I don't understand. In what way is GitHub's increasing focus on the customers that pay the bills forcing you out? I understand that you don't care about maximum uptime or SSO or the vulnerability detection system, but are they in some manner making it impossible for you to continue using GitHub? Or are you displeased because you feel GitHub could be paying attention to the needs of users like you, instead of big corporate users? Perhaps you feel it's grown Jira-grade complicated, and is no longer suitable for personal projects?

Sourceforge is exactly like MySpace! Sourceforge once ruled the roost. It was, for many people, the only game in town. It got complacent, and thought it could stay top dog while only really caring about the not-particularly-profitable users or if there was a good way to make more money from the services it offered.

Competitors innovated, found other business models, and did much better. Now we have GitHub! Which has learned from the missteps of Sourceforge. One of which was failing to invest in features that high-margin customers value and will happily pay extra for.

No one is forcing me out, and I still pay a subscription (kudos to GitHub for not raising the price over the years even if the exchange from my currency to USD has made it slightly more expensive)

My original comment was an argument that the reorientation towards business clients was not an inevitability as the parent comment said it was. this mindset says products for rational, aware individuals (here, developers) are not worth building anymore since the margins aren’t high enough. If these individuals aren’t worthwhile clients anymore than they are only data to be traded.

Thank you for for clarifying! It's nice to know that you're not being forced out of anywhere by digital gentrification.

There is a very reasonable point that this should be enough for any company not addicted to endless, pointless growth. This is, after all, the ideology of a cancer! Customers should be respected, rather than treated as data-generators fit only to be traded upon. You have made this point wisely and well.

I think it's worth considering why a business might consider limiting its investments in competing for a pool of low-margin customers of limited size. Historical examples suggest that confining your investments to just this customer pool will often end with your customers being attracted away to other providers who have the resources to produce a superior offering. As a result, what should be a healthy and sustainable mindset of building for rational, aware individual consumers can easily lead to being out-innovated and out-competed.

An intelligent reader will note at this point that there is a lot of uncertainty in the previous paragraph. This person is right! There is a great deal of uncertainty at hand, as with all things in markets. With that said, the above scenari is more likely than not, and the expected gains from chasing high-margin customers are generally larger than the expected gains of opting to focus exclusively on low-margin ones in the face of competition.

To such services as GitHub, the consumer offering is not a way to collect data to be monetized. Indeed, the experience for single consumers is critical - it shows the key features and accustoms users to the product. A high-quality offering for rational, aware individual consumers is of paramount importance because it is where the real customer funnel starts.