Bitbucket Growth Playbook

GitHub charged for private repos. Startups needed to hide their code.

The 'Private-First' Bottom-Up Strategy: Bitbucket tacticaly exploited GitHub's early pricing model. By offering unlimited private repositories for free—while GitHub was charging for them—they became the default home for early-stage startups and sensitive private projects. This 'Loss Leader' strategy allowed them to capture developers at the 'Seed' stage, ensuring that as these companies grew and needed enterprise features (integrated CI/CD, permissions), they were already deeply locked into the Bitbucket ecosystem.