I love GitHub's response, but I would urge the project more strongly to use modern CDN solutions. CDNs are dirt cheap and incredibly powerful nowadays, for the data sizes that we're talking about here.
How would you define "dirt cheap"? One of the most popular CDN's out there (Akamai) charges $3,500/month for 10TB/month. Who's going to foot that bill? :)
That's a list price that they charge those who don't care to negotiate.
CloudFlare starts at $0 and doesn't meter/charge for bandwidth. CloudFront charges 9 cents per GB and is integrated with other AWS APIs (which can be very useful). Both those solutions could be managed with a donation pool, I would try the CloudFlare free tier first.
Not surprising, Akamai is always at the top end of the pricing spectrum for CDN services.
That price point works out to $0.35/Gbyte. More typical list pricing for US/EU is in the $0.10-0.15/Gbyte ballpark. Prices decline rapidly as your utilization approaches 1PB per month.
I believe that's off by an order of magnitude - that's actually the price per 1 TB. Also, you can turn off distribution into remote PoPs that charge more than $85/TB.
I believe the problem was not the bandwith usage (which would be saved by a CDN) but the way CocoaPods is using git that generates a lot of CPU expensive operations.
Things that GitHub suggested help with that: faster check for updates, breaking up big directories so diffs are computed faster.
