Codefloe launches EU-hosted Forgejo Git forge with all features free

Codefloe has launched a public Git forge that runs on the open-source Forgejo platform and is hosted entirely in Germany. The service surfaced on Hacker News's front page, where the submission described it as a professionally hosted public Git forge. The details below come from Codefloe's own site, so they are the operator's claims rather than independently verified facts.

What Codefloe is

According to the site, everything runs and is stored on Hetzner servers in Germany, which places user data under German data protection law and the GDPR. The core of the service is Forgejo, the community-built forge software that provides repositories, issues, pull requests, releases, packages, APIs and migration tooling. Codefloe says it extends Forgejo in a few focused areas for a more integrated developer experience, and that it runs every change from a public fork so its modifications remain reviewable rather than disappearing into a private patch set.

Features are free, paid tiers cover resources

Codefloe states that no features sit behind a paywall: private repositories, CI/CD, hosted pages, package registries and preview environments are available to every account. Paid tiers exist only to cover resource costs for storage and CI/CD. Running costs are partially covered by donations and the higher tiers, and the project says income and expenses are reported transparently, with donations split among the people maintaining and developing the platform.

Infrastructure you can inspect

Unusually for a hosting provider, Codefloe publishes the machinery behind the service. The Ansible playbooks, OpenTofu modules, CI pipelines and monitoring configuration all live in public repositories, as does the Kubernetes setup behind supporting services such as single sign-on, Renovate and secrets handling. The pitch is that instead of trusting a status page, users can check how the platform is actually run. The company even publishes an excerpt of the HAProxy edge configuration used to fend off abusive crawlers: in the published snippet, a source exceeding a tracked request rate of 100 is rejected with HTTP 429, with exemptions for the git protocol itself, package pulls and allowlisted good bots.

A stated position on AI

The site addresses AI directly. The team says it uses AI tools itself and that users are welcome to do the same, but it commits to never training models on anything stored on the platform and to never selling or handing data to anyone who would, now or later. Aggressive scraping is handled at the network edge so that the forge stays fast for people actually using it.

Moving over

For teams weighing a switch, Codefloe supports importing existing projects from GitHub, GitLab or Bitbucket with history, issues and pull requests intact, and offers a batch migration CLI for moving many repositories in a single run.

Why it matters

GitHub's position as the default home for code leaves developers with few credible hosted alternatives, and fewer still that offer a different legal jurisdiction. A Forgejo-based forge running under German and EU law gives compliance-sensitive projects a hosted option without self-hosting, and it joins community-run Forgejo services such as Codeberg in turning the software into a real alternative rather than a self-host-only project.

The pricing stance is a direct contrast with the per-seat and per-feature plans common elsewhere: every capability is free, and payment is tied to resource consumption. The open-infrastructure approach is the most distinctive part of the launch, because publishing the provisioning, CI and edge-filtering code makes the service's claims checkable in a way most providers never attempt.

The open question is sustainability. Donations and resource-priced tiers must cover both server bills and development time, and a free tier with no feature gates invites heavy use. The project's promise of transparent income and expense reporting will show over time whether the model holds, and its public fork of Forgejo means the community can watch whether the openness survives contact with operational pressure.