Microsoft’s GitHub has 90 million active users, $1 billion in annual revenue

Microsoft has made a number of business acquisitions, many of which have proven to be very beneficial for the tech giant. The biggest of these was GitHub, which was greatly appreciated on the earnings call after being able to reach $1 billion in annual revenue.

Microsoft acquired the software developer-centric web-based version control and collaboration platform in June 2018 for $7.5 billion. At the time, it was only able to generate $200 to $300 million in revenue and had about 28 million active users. Now, the GitHub community has grown tremendously and it is finally gaining 90 million active users and growing revenues.

"With GitHub now generating $1 billion in annual recurring revenue since our acquisition, GitHub's developer-first spirit has never been stronger," said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft." More than 90 million people now use the service to build software for any cloud on any platform - a threefold increase."

Still, despite these great achievements, it's important to note that GitHub has changed little in terms of providing free access to the service. Prior to the acquisition, this was a concern for many users, but rather than use the hosting service to quickly make back the money it spent, Microsoft decided to retain its original nature as a free online software development platform. It also chose to improve the site by adding CI/CD tools, security tools, GitHub actions, Codespaces, and more. Now, it is reaping what it has sown.

"Microsoft hasn't forgotten why we did the deal in the first place and what the important pillars of the deal were," said GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke in a statement to TechCrunch, adding that he appreciates that GitHub has maintained its "original form." The overriding principle is to put developers first. And that's what we're doing every day."