Is GitHub free?

Yes, for the vast majority of individual use. GitHub’s free tier includes unlimited public and private repositories, collaborators on private repos, a set amount of free automation minutes through GitHub Actions, and every core feature most developers actually use day to day: issues, pull requests, project boards, and GitHub Pages hosting.

What the paid tiers actually add

GitHub’s paid plans, aimed at teams and organizations rather than individuals, layer on things like more Actions minutes, larger storage for build artifacts and packages, advanced code review and security tooling, and administrative controls for managing larger teams. GitHub Copilot, the AI code completion tool, is a separate subscription from core GitHub itself, though it comes free for verified students through the GitHub Student Developer Pack and free for maintainers of many popular open-source projects.

None of this changes what is available on the free tier for personal projects, learning, or a public portfolio. A solo developer building and hosting projects publicly is very unlikely to hit a wall that requires paying.

When it is actually worth paying

Mostly a team and organization decision: needing private repositories with many collaborators at scale, wanting more CI/CD minutes than the free allowance covers, or requiring enterprise security and compliance features. Very few of these apply to an individual developer building a public portfolio of work.

What this means for using GitHub as a portfolio

Since public repositories, GitHub Pages, and Actions are all available for free, there is no cost barrier to building a genuinely useful public GitHub presence: real projects, a documented profile README, and a consistent contribution history.

Once that activity exists, resumefromgit.com reads it directly and turns it into a visual CV and a downloadable resume PDF, also for free and with no account required, working entirely from a public GitHub username.