An organization never signs in. It holds repositories, teams, billing and policy, and people reach it through their own personal accounts, so a project outlives any one maintainer: you remove a membership instead of handing over a password. On a personal account every collaborator gets the same push access; organizations add graded roles (Organization Roles) and teams. Both are free for unlimited public and private repositories. In September 2026 github.com/pricing lists Team at $4 and Enterprise at $21 per user per month; Team adds rulesets, required reviewers and code owners on private repositories and 3,000 instead of 2,000 Actions minutes a month.
Organization names share the username name space, so a name is free only if no account of either kind holds it:
for name in booknest booknest-dev booknest-hq; do
echo "$name: $(curl -s "https://api.github.com/users/$name" | jq -r '.type // "free"')"
donebooknest: free booknest-dev: Organization booknest-hq: Organization
Two are already other people's organizations. BookNest stays on the personal account binarybehemoth, a realistic start: many projects move to an organization only when a second maintainer arrives.