Some time back I asked myself the same question as I am fine paying for the storage, usage but when it becomes a number of X ( repositories, collaborators) it gets somewhat annoying. So, 6-8 months ago I set out to host my own git server and liked gitorious for its fancy front end and ease of setting up keys and adding collaborators with diff rights, all good and was able to get it running in 90 mins or so. My real problems started on day 2 when it wasn't functioning the way I liked it to, some troubleshooting and found that stomp server exited for unknown reason so the message queue was not working, checked logs and restarted it. I kept having those problems abruptly and every time I had to ssh and restart the stompserver or the git-poller. I think it all depends on how u perceive cost, in my case it was much more than 11$/month coz of the num of hrs lost in maintaining and worrying about it and sometimes it didnt work for hrs when i was not in front of computer. It was then I chose to submit to github plans though I'd still like if I was being charged for usage (any kind) rather than number of X. So I think, like they say TCO was justified.