From “no longer a pain in the ass”
to “developers, agents, and code”

One of the stylesheets of the June 18, 2008 capture didn’t load from the archive, so the still renders as black serif text on white, with a graphical sign-up button. The menu reads Home, Pricing and Signup, Repositories, News and Login.

The page explains Git before it explains GitHub. Git is the new hotness, a fast, efficient, distributed version control system ideal for the collaborative development of software. GitHub is the easiest (and prettiest) way to participate in that collaboration: fork projects, send pull requests, monitor development, all with ease. Ruby on Rails, Merb and RSpec are named as projects already hosted there. Three quotes from developers follow, and David Heinemeier Hansson’s starts with Killer apps makes or breaks any platform.

GitHub had gone officially live on April 10, after a beta.^[1] Scroll to the bottom and the footer says who ran it: GitHub is Logical Awesome | ©2008. Under that, next to a red Engine Yard badge, a thank-you: Amazing Rails hosting by our good friends at Engine Yard.

A year later the page has a style and a pitch: GitHub is for Public Open Source and Private Business Code. The June 2009 capture has a search box for public repositories and a featured project dated 17 June 2009: yajl, by lloyd, which is not just another JSON parsing library. Beside it, under Join a growing selection of companies that have adopted GitHub as their code host of choice, the logos’ alt texts name EngineYard, EMI Group Limited, TechCrunch and WePlay.

A pale blue band makes the first head count: Unleash Your Code, 90,000 coders and climbing. Further down, a list of Git videos includes Linus Torvalds visits Google to share his thoughts on git, the source control management system he created two years ago. The footer still says GitHub™ is Logical Awesome ©2009.

By June 2010 the slogan has moved to the top and the count has more than tripled: Join 288,000 coders with over 903,000 repositories. The featured project is jquery-ui, and its blurb carries a typo: jquery-ui is the offical jQuery UI component library.

The June 2011 capture puts the count in a gray banner across the top: 817,925 people hosting over 2,271,206 git repositories. Coders have become people. Under the banner runs a list of hosted projects, jQuery, reddit, Sparkle, curl, Ruby on Rails, node.js, ClickToFlash, Erlang/OTP, CakePHP, Redis, and many more, and then a row of logos: Twitter, Facebook, Rackspace, Digg, Yahoo!, Shopify, EMI and Six Apart.

Then the page defines itself like a dictionary. On the left, git /'ɡɪt/. On the right, git·hub /'ɡɪtˌhʌb/, the best way to collaborate with others. A blue button reads Plans, Pricing and Signup, and inside it, under that label: Unlimited public repositories are free! The footer reads © 2011 GitHub Inc., next to Powered by the Dedicated Servers and Cloud Computing of Rackspace Hosting.

GitHub reached its first million users in September 2011, three months after that capture, and its second million in August 2012.^[2] In June 2012 the banner reads 1,706,091 people hosting over 3,002,440 repositories. The tab says GitHub · Social Coding, and the logo row has changed: Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, VMware, Red Hat, LinkedIn and Mozilla. An eBay logo is in the code as well, commented out.

GitHub shipped a new identity on April 16, 2013: an updated logo, an official mark and an updated Octocat.^[3] The June 22, 2013 capture shows the new capitalized GitHub wordmark at the top left of a light page with a lot of white space. The headline is Build software better, together. The browser tab says it too.

The sign-up form is now part of the first screen: Pick a username, Your email, Create a password and a green Sign up for free button. Under the password field sits a gray tip, Tip: use at least one number and at least 7 characters. The counter is gone.

Three icons explain the product. Great collaboration starts with communication. Manage and contribute from all your devices. The world’s largest open source community. A green box below them states the condition for private code: Collaborate on private repositories when you sign up for a paid individual or organization plan.

In our January 1, 2014 capture the header has turned dark. The headline is the same, and a blue line has been added under it: Need private repositories? Upgraded plans start at $7/mo. The capture was made at 04:28 UTC on January 1, and the footer in its code still says © 2013.

Halfway down, The power of GitHub on your desktop. offers two downloads. GitHub for Mac Requires OS X 10.7+. GitHub for Windows is For Windows XP, 7, & 8.

In the June 2015 capture that line reads For Windows Vista, 7, 8, & 8.1, and XP is gone. A blue banner with cartoon clouds now sits under the header, aimed at teams in the Microsoft stack: Work in Visual Studio and deploy GitHub Enterprise on Azure. Three months earlier, on March 26, a DDoS attack had begun that GitHub called the largest in its history at that time.^[4]

The June 2016 page opens on a photo of a small black Octocat figure, under How people build software. The wordmark has left the top left corner. Only the cat-silhouette mark remains, which GitHub’s brand guide calls the Invertocat, to tell it apart from Mona, the mascot.^[5] The menu splits the audience into Personal, Open source and Business.

Under the photo: Introducing unlimited private repositories, All of our paid plans on GitHub.com now include unlimited private repositories. GitHub had announced the change on May 11, 2016, with a Personal plan at $7 a month.^[6] The bottom of the page says it again: Public projects are always free. Work together across unlimited private repositories for $7 / month.

Just above that line, a mock-up of an organization profile shows NASA, with the caption GitHub is proud to host projects and organizations like NASA.

Our captures from 2017 to 2020 share one headline, Built for developers, on dark gray, with the sign-up form in a white card on the right. The type is thin in 2017 and 2018 and heavier in 2019 and 2020.

In the June 2017 capture the line under it ends build software alongside millions of other developers. The tab makes a new claim, The world's leading software development platform · GitHub. Further down, the security section is headed Boxes? Check.

The June 15, 2018 capture adds a strip with a big silver 10: Thank you for 10 years, We’re celebrating 10 years of code, commits, and collaboration. Under it, More than 1.8 million businesses and organizations use GitHub stands over a row of logos from Airbnb to Walmart.

Eleven days before this capture, on June 4, Microsoft announced it would buy GitHub for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock.^[8] The page doesn’t mention it. In the text of all 19 captures the word Microsoft appears twice, in the 2012 logo row and in the 2015 banner.

In June 2019 the line under Built for developers has a number again: build software alongside 36 million developers. The password hint asks for at least 15 characters, or at least 8 including a number and a lowercase letter. Below the header, Get started with GitHub Enterprise sits above a video panel from the GitHub Satellite conference.

GitHub Free had gained unlimited private repositories on January 7, 2019, with up to three collaborators per repository.^[9] On April 14, 2020 that limit went, and GitHub Team dropped from $9 to $4 per user per month.^[10]

The 2020 capture above says so in a dark blue strip: GitHub is now free for teams, GitHub Free gives teams private repositories with unlimited collaborators at no cost. GitHub Team is now reduced to $4 per user/month. The head count reads 50 million developers. Near the bottom of the still, a yellow robot appears above two laptops.

What the homepage said about the price of private code, in the captures shown here.

The June 2021 capture is a new page, and its centerpiece is drawn from real work. A glowing globe fills the right half of a dark blue sky. GitHub said its spikes and arcs came from recent pull requests: blue spikes for open ones, pink arcs for merged ones. Its builders used no textures, and the globe lowered its visual quality when it failed to maintain 55.5 frames a second over the previous 50 frames.^[11]

Mona the Octocat stands beside it in a space suit, and the image’s alt text reads Mona looking at GitHub activity across the globe. The redesign brought back detailed drawings of Mona after years of simpler outline illustrations.^[12] The headline is Where the world builds software, and four counters sit under the sign-up field: 65+ million developers, 3+ million organizations, 200+ million repositories and 72% of the Fortune 50.

Lower down, Give your code a home in the cloud ends with Host it all for free with unlimited public and private repositories. In the code, the demo project is an Octocat Classifier, which is used to determine whether a given image contains an Octocat.

In June 2022 the globe and the headline remain, and the numbers have moved: 83+ million developers, 4+ million organizations, and 90% of the Fortune 100.

The head count on each capture that shows one, in the page’s own word for its users. Years without a figure on the still are left out.

The June 2023 capture swaps the globe for the surface of a red planet, with a small flying craft in the sky.

Above the headline, a dark pill links to Introducing GitHub Copilot X, Your AI pair programmer is leveling up. The headline is Let’s build from here, followed by Harnessed for productivity. Designed for collaboration. Celebrated for built-in security. Welcome to the platform developers love.

Copilot had started as a technical preview on June 29, 2021,^[13] and went on sale a year later at $10 a month or $100 a year.^[14] In January 2023 GitHub announced more than 100 million developers, two years ahead of the goal it had set for 2025.^[15]

By June 2024 the headline is the same and the line under it is new: The world’s leading AI-powered developer platform. A thin bar at the very top, easy to miss, says Get your boss on board for GitHub Universe! Tickets are 35% off for a limited time. Below the header, Accelerate innovation opens a section about AI. The page’s code says Copilot empowers developers to complete tasks 55% faster, and near the bottom, Over 100 million developers call GitHub home.

The June 2025 capture centers the headline and the sign-up controls. The headline reads Build and ship software on a single, collaborative platform, then Join the world’s most widely adopted AI-powered developer platform. Next to the email field are two buttons, Sign up for GitHub and Try GitHub Copilot. Under them, a code editor shows a demo of Copilot Chat.

Near the bottom of the code, last year’s line has lost its number: Millions of developers and businesses call GitHub home.

The June 2026 page keeps the layout and both buttons. The tab says Change is constant. GitHub keeps you ahead. The headline says The future of building happens together, and the line under it names who builds: developers, agents, and code come together on one platform. The menu in the code offers a GitHub Copilot app to Direct agents from issue to merge.

One entry in that 2026 menu looks out of place: Archive Program. On February 2, 2020, GitHub took a snapshot of every active public repository. Stars counted too: a repository with at least 250 of them went in, however long it had been quiet.^[16]

The snapshot was written to hardened film designed to last 1,000 years and stored in a decommissioned coal mine deep beneath an Arctic mountain in Svalbard.^[16][17]

The button on the June 2008 homepage said Sign up now!, under a promise that Git hosting was no longer a pain in the ass. In June 2026 the buttons beside the email field say Sign up for GitHub and Try GitHub Copilot.

In 2009 the page counted 90,000 coders and climbing. In October 2025 GitHub’s own yearly report counted more than 180 million developers.^[19]