Quick Answer — Why Is Git LFS Billing So Surprising?
Because the expensive part is invisible. Storage is a number you can see in the repository; bandwidth is generated every time anyone clones, and every time a CI job checks out without a cache. On most teams, bandwidth is the overwhelming majority of the bill.
GitHub bills Git LFS on metered usage: an included allowance per plan, then a per-GiB rate above it. Free and Pro accounts include 10 GiB of storage and 10 GiB of bandwidth; Team and Enterprise Cloud include 250 GiB of each. Pre-paid data packs have been retired in favour of metered billing.
A mid-size repository: 40 GB of LFS objects, growing 3 GB a month, cloned 220 times a month at 2.5 GB per clone, on a 10 GiB allowance:
- Billable storage — 30 GB, costing $2.10 a month
- Billable bandwidth — 540 GB, costing $47.25 a month
- Total now — $49.35 a month, of which bandwidth is 96 percent
- Twelve months later — $51.66 a month, $606.06 in total across the year
- Clones needed to exhaust the allowance — 4.0
Four clones. That is the whole story: a repository with a 2.5 GB working set burns its entire monthly bandwidth allowance before five people have checked it out.