Codefloe Is a Professionally Hosted Public Git Forge

69 pointsposted 3 days ago
by jeremyjh

46 Comments

watusername

2 days ago

Being "professionally hosted" is not enough: You need a "cluefully developed" distributed git backend to be a GitHub competitor. Codeberg is already buckling despite being nowhere near GitHub's scale. When Codefloe gains more users/agents, it's going to suffer from the same fate since Forgejo/Gitea/Gogs just isn't a good foundation to build on top of.

nylonstrung

2 days ago

What do you think makes it a bad foundation to build on?

oooyay

2 days ago

Their primary storage medium is block storage which is quite expensive. Codeberg cited it, although post-hoc, in their decision to ban AI projects. GitLab runs (or ran) the large block storage based Git service I know of which is Gitaly.

If you want to achieve public service level traffic and cost then you pretty much need to find a way to leverage object storage.

inigyou

2 days ago

Note that this assumes cloud-based. A rack full of hard drives is far cheaper per GB than either, even at 50% utilisation and 2x redundancy. (It would have to be! Amazon obviously wants to make a profit)

Scaevolus

2 days ago

See Cursor's recent blog post on launching a Github competitor, particularly the architectural history.

rootnod3

2 days ago

Right...check the vibe coded slob pile for reference...

jiqiren

2 days ago

Free CI is what really is going to keep many on GitHub (Actions). Codeberg has Woodpecker CI requires a FOSS application to get approval to use limited free tier. CircleCI has a free tier also but doesn't look like official documentation for integrating with Forgejo.

Being able to produce x86_64/arm64 builds for macOS, Linux, and Windows for free is a minimum start to get movement to another provider IMHO. GitHub already does this.

jeremyjh

2 days ago

They have free CI with pretty generous limits: Up to 4 CPU, 7 GB memory and no max build times. I don't think there is a public Windows or Mac runner. But I think this is where they could run into real issues if they get a lot of adoption without a lot of donations. It could get expensive fast.

inigyou

2 days ago

How does GitHub prevent me from mining crypto on free CI?

mtlynch

2 days ago

I've ported a couple of repos to CodeFloe in the last few days, and so far, so good. Performance is similar to when I self-host Forgejo on a dedicated VPS where I'm the only user, which is super fast. And their built-in CI is pretty nice.

It's a huge contrast to Codeberg, which struggles with basic navigation of the web UI and every git push or pull takes 2-10s.

jorams

2 days ago

> Performance is similar to when I self-host Forgejo on a dedicated VPS where I'm the only user, which is super fast.

I don't mean to be negative, but that's probably because it's pretty much the same thing. Codefloe is tiny. Some quick counting shows it has a grand total of 1012 registered users, including bots, and 1416 public repositories of which the top 3 with the most stars (I know this is a mostly meaningless metric, but for scale) have 27, 13, and 8. It's too small to run into scaling issues.

mbreese

2 days ago

That’s an interesting question - it’s one thing to run an instance of forgejo for a limited user base and another to run at mass public scale.

How does someplace like a GitHub/Gitlab go it? Are user accounts or repos sharded across different servers? Is there a different underlying scaling system? If one wanted to run Forgejo “at scale” what would it really require, or does this need to be factored into the design from day one?

crabmusket

2 days ago

This recent post that made it to the front page talks a lot about approaches GitHub has taken over its history:

https://cursor.com/blog/git-at-any-scale

mbreese

2 days ago

I ended up finding my own answer (after reading the above).

https://nesbitt.io/2026/02/26/git-in-postgres.html

Following another recent theme, the answer for Forgejo seems to be - just use Postgres.

jeremyjh

a day ago

That approach was mentioned in the Cursor article. If a KV cache like Redis is too slow for that to work with large repositories, I don't see how Postgres could possibly work.

arjie

2 days ago

I just use Github as a backup and use my own git repos as primary. Works really well. CI/CD is blazing fast as well. You don't need all these complicated actions flows and all that. Just write for yourself. And a missing feature is a short prompt away. Especially useful is that Github has a co-tenancy problem and an untrusted input problem. For your own company, you can build that more surgically. I wouldn't normally go on the build side of buy v build, but write-to-deploy duration minimization is a strong value of mine and with agents you really need that tight.

user

2 days ago

[deleted]

exiguus

2 days ago

As far as I can tell; it's not EU. It's Switzerland. Which is a huge difference when you think about data protection and privacy.

---

Btw: If I try to open the website in a normal browser, I can't, because they have some kind of protection.

jeremyjh

2 days ago

Its in Germany.

exiguus

2 days ago

It's a Company in Switzerland that tell they host most of there stuff with Hetzner in Germany.

catapart

2 days ago

Seems good! I'd migrate some of my open source projects, but they utilize the public static page hosting features of GitLab and GitHub, since they are typescript libraries that are demonstrated in the browser, so I'm reluctant to upset that.

jeremyjh

2 days ago

Codefloe has that feature (which isn't in stock Forgejo). But yes it might take a little bit of work to migrate to it.

rantingdemon

2 days ago

What makes this different than Codeberg?

miloignis

2 days ago

Allowing heavily AI projects, from a glance.

jeremyjh

2 days ago

You can have private personal projects and even commercial/business projects. Codeberg does not want private personal projects.

tensor

2 days ago

Codeberg is for open source projects only. This is for anyone.

whalesalad

2 days ago

"In no event shall CodeFloe or its suppliers be liable for any damages (including, without limitation, damages for loss of data or profit, or due to business interruption)"

So many fly-by-night "github replacements" popping up. Step 1, buy a hetzner dedi server from the auction for $100/mo. Step 2, install Forgejo. Step 3, ride the wave of anti-US, anti-big-corp senitment to get users onto your platform. Step 4, an HDD fails in your i9-13900k and you lose half of your users' data.

If you are going to offer hosting, you need to state what kind of guarantees around data protection you offer.

mtlynch

2 days ago

I think you're holding CodeFloe to an unreasonably high standard here. What SaaS vendors agree to financial guarantees if they lose user data or have an outage?

Here's GitHub's policy:

> We will not be liable for damages or losses arising from your use or inability to use the service or otherwise arising under this agreement.

https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

Here's Atlassian's policy for BitBucket:

> 14. Limitations of Liability

> 14.1. Damages Waiver. Except for Excluded Claims or Special Claims, to the maximum extent permitted by Law, neither party will have any liability arising out of or related to this Agreement for any loss of use, lost data, lost profits, interruption of business or any indirect, special, incidental, reliance or consequential damages of any kind, even if informed of their possibility in advance.

https://www.atlassian.com/legal/atlassian-customer-agreement...

otterley

2 days ago

> What SaaS vendors agree to financial guarantees if they lose user data or have an outage?

Lots of them. See, e.g., https://aws.amazon.com/compute/sla/

Now, they're not written in terms of compensatory or consequential damages, but you will be entitled to a service credit (which is a "financial guarantee" of sorts) if the conditions are met.

Private agreements frequently have these sorts of provisions as well. You need to be a pretty big or strategic customer to get those, though, and they're often paired hand-in-hand with long-term agreements with mandatory minimum spend.

inigyou

2 days ago

Service credit is practically worthless. Oh we deleted all your data? Here's a month of free hosting for the data you don't have.

whalesalad

2 days ago

That is fair. This was just the only thing in their terms that I could find that made any mention in regards to data protection. If you are running a service like this, some kind of SLA should exist. I am less concerned with financial protections and more concerned with data protection.

stryan

2 days ago

At the very least, the main guy behind this is pat-s who was originally a WoodpeckerCI dev and has been in and around Codeberg/Forgejo/Woodpecker for a while so I trust he knows his stuff. His work on CrowCI (Woodpecker fork) has been great.

I also swear I've read that same "buy a hetzener dedi install forgejo" etc etc line before, but maybe it's just you're not the only person cynical about the situation.

oytis

2 days ago

What kind of guarantres does Github offer?

dijksterhuis

2 days ago

> Short version: We provide our service as is, and we make no promises or guarantees about this service. Please read this section carefully; you should understand what to expect.

https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

> Short version: We will not be liable for damages or losses arising from your use or inability to use the service or otherwise arising under this agreement. Please read this section carefully; it limits our obligations to you.

https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

baggachipz

2 days ago

None. But I'm willing to bet they'll still be around in 3 years.

inigyou

2 days ago

I'm not. There's a reason all these alternatives are getting to the front page.

exiguus

2 days ago

IMO the good news about CodeFleo is, that they are very transparent of how they do the job. And as fare as I understand them, they store data in S3.

inigyou

2 days ago

> they store data in S3

Then their operating costs are extremely high and they will either shut down or find a way to recoup them.

exiguus

2 days ago

What does a TB S3 cost a month?

inigyou

2 days ago

$23 for storage plus $90 every time you download all of it.

exiguus

2 days ago

Maybe they go with Hetzner S3 that cost 7,5EUR/Month for a TB.

inigyou

a day ago

That's per TB reserved. At 50% utilisation 15€ per TB stored

stephenway

2 days ago

This is a fair criticism of hosted Forgejo in general. Running Forgejo is the easy part. Backups, restore testing, upgrades, isolation and actually operating it for years are the product. Disclaimer, I run one called Fjord