We are a Gitlab client, and very happy with their service. I hope that their business model succeeds, and am happy to be supporting them.
The Bronze --> Premium transition seems to me to be a valid price restructuring, and this will prompt us to upgrade to Premium rather than downgrade to Free.
However,
- Ultimate seems like minimal value for substantial extra cost. There's no way we could ever justify it.
- The collaboration model is terrible. We would love to introduce lots of our clients to gitlab as part of a collaboration - thereby increasing gitlab's mindshare, install base, and potential customer base - but the price tag attached to inviting a previously-free-tier collaborator doesn't make sense for us.
- Premium needs to include Jira-killing features. Do that and we're yours probably for life.
Personally, as an iOS user, I do not want the App Store opened up at all.
Currently, I can go to the App Store, install any app, and be about 99.9% confident that the app will do me (or my technologically illiterate mother) absolutely no harm.
This is something I value highly, and am happy to pay the “Apple premium” for.