I just signed up the other day (yay), and they most certainly allow you to create private repos. So if it’s against their TOS, they’re the ones breaking the rules, and not the users.

Edit: I got curious, and private repos are acknowledged and allowed on Codeberg, to a point:

How about private repositories?

Codeberg’s mission is to promote free/libre software. Keeping software private is obviously not our primary use case, but we acknowledge that private repositories are useful or necessary at times.

The rules of thumb are:

If you are a contributor to free/libre software projects, we allow up to 100 MB of private content for your convenience. Use it for your personal notes, your side project or any other you want to keep private.

I need more clarification on this rule! We know that this rule is not the most precise, and it is mostly evaluated on a case-by-case basis. Our goal is to avoid abuse of our infrastructure for purposes not in line with our mission. If you are a heavy contributor to the free/libre software ecosystem and this is apparent from your profile, we might also accept if you use slightly more than 100 MB.

If you are not heavily contributing to free/libre software, but obviously supporting the spirit of the ecosystem (e.g. by participating in projects by creating issues, doing translations or submitting tiny fixes), we’re also happy to have you aboard.

If you do not contribute to free/libre software (or if it is limited to your personal homepage), and we feel like you only abuse Codeberg for storing your commercial projects or media backups, we might get unhappy about that.

If your private content is strictly required for a free/libre software project (like team-internal discussions, preparation of security patches, or preparing a release for a limited amount of time), private content will also be tolerated.

If you use more than 100 MB of private storage for the use cases mentioned earlier, please send us a request and we can evaluate it.

If you do not contribute to any free/libre software project at all, Codeberg is unfortunately not the right place for you. However, check out the alternatives, we’re sure you’ll find a cozy place for your work.