We don't want 180 million users
SimonOpen one of your repos on GitHub and count what’s on the screen that isn’t your code. A feed on the dashboard, Copilot chat over every page, Discussions, Sponsors, Projects, achievements, a Marketplace. Most teams use five things: repos, pull requests, issues, CI, and a registry.
None of this is an accident.
GitHub passed 180 million developers last year; a new one joins every second. At that scale the median user defines the product, and every feature, however far from your work, has a million people asking for it. Then last August GitHub’s CEO announced he was leaving, Microsoft chose not to replace him, and GitHub was folded into CoreAI, the division built around Microsoft’s AI strategy. The priorities are right there in the org chart.
A product takes the shape of the business behind it. GitHub’s business is 180 million accounts and an AI strategy that needs them. Yours is fifteen people trying to ship. Both are rational. They are not the same shape.
What the surface costs
A feature you never use is not free. You pay for it in three ways.
Reliability is the first. An independent tracker counted 257 incidents on GitHub’s status page between May 2025 and April 2026, 48 of them major. Actions, the piece a small team leans on hardest, accounts for 57. GitHub’s own availability report names the mechanism: “hidden coupling,” one slow dependency affecting several product experiences. Coupling is the engineering name for surface area. Fewer features, fewer outages. That’s not a coincidence.
Attention is the second. The product reshapes itself around the owner’s strategy of the year, which is currently Copilot: in the editor, and now reviewing your pull requests. You can turn some of it off. You can’t turn off the churn.
Money is the third. Per-seat pricing grows your bill with every hire, and the roadmap it funds answers to the median of 180 million users, which is not you.
People are acting on this. In November the Zig project moved to Codeberg, citing Actions reliability and GitHub’s AI push. Codeberg is a non-profit doing exactly the job it was built for; it’s where we point open-source projects ourselves. In April, Mitchell Hashimoto announced Ghostty is leaving after a month in which outages cost him work nearly every day: “This is no longer a place for serious work if it just blocks you out for hours per day, every day.”
Small on purpose
Codebahn is managed Git for small teams. Repos, builds, issues, pull requests, a container registry, releases. Three interfaces: browser, terminal, and whatever AI agent you bring. That is the product.
Forgejo, the software Codebahn is built on, ships more: a wiki, project boards, stars, an activity feed. The code was already written, tested, free to switch on. We disabled it anyway. Surface costs the person using it even when it costs the vendor nothing: one more tab to wade past, one more subsystem that can break.
Every feature request gets the same question: does it make the product harder to explain in one sentence? Usually it does. Project boards: Linear does them better than a forge ever will. A wiki: your docs already live somewhere. AI review summaries: if you want them, your agent can write them; they won’t show up on their own. The full list of what we left out, and what to use instead, is at codebahn.net/simple.
The discipline holds because the business is shaped for it. Codebahn is self-funded and independent: no growth mandate to feed, no board hunting for expansion revenue. The roadmap has two inputs, what customers ask for and what we hit running the product ourselves. There is no third input. We’d rather run a few things that hold than fifty that mostly do.
If your team lives in Copilot and the Marketplace, GitHub is the right tool, and none of this should move you. If you want the full DevOps platform, GitLab Premium is one at $29 per user per month, and if you use the breadth, it’s worth it. Stay where you are.
The people who end up at Codebahn have usually already decided what they don’t need. What they get is a product where every feature is maintained by someone who uses it, and where the next feature has to win an argument. Most won’t.
If you think we’re wrong about your team, say so: hello@codebahn.net.
How we keep it small. Codebahn vs GitHub. Pricing.
GitHub is a trademark of GitHub, Inc. GitLab is a trademark of GitLab Inc. Codebahn is not affiliated with or endorsed by GitHub, Microsoft, or GitLab.