---
title: Paid Private Repos for Hound
teaser: |
  Hound is now reviewing 7,000+ GitHub pull requests each week. We are now
  charging for private repos. Public repos are still free.
tags: news,hound
author: Dan Croak
published_on: 2014-08-19
---

In April, we announced [Hound][hound], a hosted service that comments on Ruby
style guide violations in your GitHub pull requests. Since then, about 2,000
users have signed up for Hound. We have been hard at work across [127 commits]
making Hound faster and more reliable.  Recently, Hound has been reviewing about
7,000 GitHub pull requests across about 300 GitHub repos each week.

[hound]: https://houndci.com/?utm_source=giantrobotsblog&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=pricing-announcement
[127 commits]: https://github.com/thoughtbot/hound/commits/master

## What people are telling us

We have heard from users that their teams are quickly getting on board with
Hound. By their nature, formatting issues are quick fixes. By its nature, Hound
is in your face. So far, the combination seems effective for actually making
positive change in the repo.

Some people are treating Hound as CI in the sense of catching the final 5% of
style issues they may have missed locally. These folks may even have RuboCop
running locally in their text editor.

Others rely more heavily on a "human memory + Hound" approach, preferring to
configure plugins such as [Syntastic] to focus only on syntax issues, which
keeps Vim running fast.

[Syntastic]: https://github.com/scrooloose/syntastic

Another group includes style checkers / linters in their test suites. We hope to
convince them that style violations should not fail the build, that a system
like Hound commenting during code review is the right balance of machine-based
feedback and humans making final decisions.

## Pricing

As we promised in [the launch announcement], we are now charging for private
repos. Private repos are $12 per month.

[the launch announcement]: https://thoughtbot.com/blog/introducing-hound

There are no limits on number of users, pull requests, or Hound
comments. Public repos are free.

We believe this pricing strategy is low cost compared to the benefits Hound
provides. It is tedious, error-prone, and time-consuming for humans to do the
menial work of style-checking. Saving even one developer 15-30 minutes each
month during code review would make Hound worth paying for.

Based on feedback from users, though, we think we're saving teams more time than
15-30 minutes each month. By keeping codebases formatted consistently, Hound
lowers the cognitive overhead while we read code and lets us focus on
higher-level concerns.

## Enable Hound on your private repo

Enable Hound on a private repo by [clicking the toggle button next to the repo
name][hound]. When you submit the credit card form, you will be charged for the
first month. We will then charge you once a month from the time it was enabled.
When you disable a repo, we will stop charging you for it.

## Existing private repos

As a thank you to early users, current Hound-enabled private repos will remain
free until September 19, 2014. To keep using Hound after that date, please
disable and re-enable Hound on your private repos. If you do nothing, you will
not be charged and we will automatically disable Hound on uncharged private
repos on September 19, 2014.

## What's next

We are charging for Hound in order to run it sustainably, improve it, make it
review other languages such as CoffeeScript, and maintain it. We hope you love
it as much as we do.

Thank you for supporting Hound!