I prefer to pay someone to host the private repos. No free tier means every user is treated like a paying customer, and every user's data is considered valuable. It also means that as long as the pricing is sane, the company isn't going to shut its doors for lack of revenue. Before RH I was paying Springloops.
It's $6/month to take care of my most important assets. That doesn't even buy a meal at McDonalds anymore; it's worth it.
> as long as the pricing is sane, the company isn't going to shut its doors for lack of revenue.
BitBucket is owned by Atlassian for 2 years now and they don't look like they're about to go out of business ($60mil revenue in 2011, 400employees, worldwide offices). When they bought it, it was them who set private repos to unlimited (when @jespern was running it alone, it was set to 5), so I believe they know what they're doing and that it fits their business model. Over 5 collaborators need a paid plan and that's just how they set up the pricing scheme.
As far as I can see as an active user and lurking through their blog and bugtracker, BB is actively developped, so I assume you don't have to worry about them running out of business, looks like it's a valuable asset in Atlassian's software portfolio (at least valuable enough to work on it).
Except when they don't handle security well, and you end up with anybody that feels like it capable of reading your private source code... Like, say, NOW.
It's $6/month to take care of my most important assets. That doesn't even buy a meal at McDonalds anymore; it's worth it.