I was happy to read that they were offering free private repos, however, I'm leaving Github for good next week (except for public portfolio and archived work.)
I go to make my public repo private and get this crap, smacking me in the face:
So, basically it's a sales maneuver.
Use Bitbucket, which was the first one to offer free, private repos for the sake of supporting developers - which also allows for unlimited hooks, presents it's own board for each repo JIRA/Trello-style, a wiki Confluence-style, and up to five contributors on any free account. It can also be integrated with Slack at no cost.