GitHub Inc., the popular open-source hosting and repository service owned by Microsoft Corp., is hoping to entice more developers to use its platform after making all of its core features freely available for anyone to use.

For the uninitiated, GitHub is a web-based version-control and collaboration platform for software developers. It’s used to store the source code for a project and track the complete history of all changes to that code. It allows developers to collaborate on a project more effectively by providing tools for managing possibly conflicting changes from multiple developers.

GitHub has always been free to use, but nonpaying customers could only store their code in a public repository that’s accessible to everyone. However, today’s announcement from Chief Executive Nat Friedman (pictured) means that developers no longer need to pay to use GitHub’s private repositories.

“Until now, if your organization wanted to use GitHub for private development, you had to subscribe to one of our paid plans,” Friedman wrote in a blog post. “But every developer on earth should have access to GitHub. Price shouldn’t be a barrier.”

The company told SiliconANGLE that thanks to the strength of its GitHub Enterprise business, it’s now in a position to make a larger set of features available for free.

The platform still isn’t completely free, though, as some of the more advanced, enterprise-grade features it offers, such as Security Assertion Markup Language, can be accessed only by paid subscribers.

The good news is that developers can now pay a lot less for those additional features. That’s because GitHub has simultaneously announced that it’s cutting the monthly cost of its paid Team plan by more than half, from $9 per user to just $4 per user. The price change is effective immediately and also applies to existing subscribers, whose bills will be reduced automatically going forward.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that GitHub is playing the “freemium” card with today’s changes, amid a battle for market share with other code repositories such as GitLab and Bitbucket.

“Allowing free usage for collaborators is a key move to help build applications with teams, and the move supports modern software development,” Mueller said. “It remains to be seen if the move manages to attract more developers and development projects to GitHub.”

Image: GitHub