Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model(about.gitlab.com)
about.gitlab.com
Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model
https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/01/26/new-gitlab-product-subscription-model/
299 comments
I think we're still on Free, which is awesome and works for us /shrug/. Like they said, we really only need the VCS hosting, though the free static page hosting is nice too.
Top tier is still ~$100/(user*month); that seems a little much… does anyone here pay to use the top tier?
Edit: Wow! I really appreciate everyone’s perspectives here!
Edit: Wow! I really appreciate everyone’s perspectives here!
Especially considering GitHub enterprise is $21/month/user
Well but it seems gitlab offers a lot more value?
I just looked through the feature list, the security stuff is interesting but it requires a strange scenario where your employees are pushing malicious code to the repo (maybe this happens often and I've just never heard of it). Much of the Agile/project tracking stuff is in Jira/Basecamp/Asana/TeamCity (or GitHub projects + issues can be used if your needs are small). Some of the other stuff is done by a myriad of GitHub actions/bots (you'd have to spend some time getting that the way you want it though)
If you want everything integrated together this is probably fine, but GitHub Enterprise + Jira Premium is $35 per user per month (and every other project management tool is cheaper and better than Jira, just about). I don't know what the value add is here, other than self-hosting. (Or at least, the $65 value add).
If you want everything integrated together this is probably fine, but GitHub Enterprise + Jira Premium is $35 per user per month (and every other project management tool is cheaper and better than Jira, just about). I don't know what the value add is here, other than self-hosting. (Or at least, the $65 value add).
Recommendation for Jira replacement?
Preferably with an emphasis on speed?
Preferably with an emphasis on speed?
Zenhub?
Depends on your needs, Jira has lots of features and plugins.
We're building Linear, focusing on speed and providing sane defaults that sense for software companies. The app offline first so all interactions are <100ms. Sprints, projects, roadmaps, multiple teams, GitHub/Gitlab/Sentry supported etc supported. Lot of YC startups and growth companies (100-300 engineers) use us.
https://linear.app
We're building Linear, focusing on speed and providing sane defaults that sense for software companies. The app offline first so all interactions are <100ms. Sprints, projects, roadmaps, multiple teams, GitHub/Gitlab/Sentry supported etc supported. Lot of YC startups and growth companies (100-300 engineers) use us.
https://linear.app
We migrated away from Jira to YouTrack, which is quite flexible. Speed wise it's not too bad, could be snappier. But it is really flexible with full APIs. Jetbrains also has "Spaces" which is more simplified but has other toys.
Security stuff is interesting even in the case where all your employees are saints.
If you are building a docker image for example, you likely are doing a pull from docker hub, the security scanning software can help you catch security issues there.
It can also help with things like dependencies in your node projects, python projects and more (at least, that is what the security scanning software we use at $work does, I assume gitlab is similar).
It's not about employees pushing malicious code, it's about catching issues with dependencies further up the stack, to make sure that the end result you are pushing to your servers/users is not vulnerable.
If you are building a docker image for example, you likely are doing a pull from docker hub, the security scanning software can help you catch security issues there.
It can also help with things like dependencies in your node projects, python projects and more (at least, that is what the security scanning software we use at $work does, I assume gitlab is similar).
It's not about employees pushing malicious code, it's about catching issues with dependencies further up the stack, to make sure that the end result you are pushing to your servers/users is not vulnerable.
Github Actions, Github Checks API already offers more ways to extend it than GitLab. GitLab is really disappointing in that regard. Even for $99/mo you don't get it. There is also barely an ecosystem around GitLab.
I'm under the impression that GitHub Enterprise's on prem ci/cd pipelines isnt available yet
The v3 release candidate got it: https://github.blog/2021-01-15-github-enterprise-server-3-0-...
Today, we’re making GitHub Enterprise Server 3.0 available as a release candidate. Announced in the GitHub Universe Keynote, it’s the biggest ever change to Enterprise Server, bringing customers:
* Actions – developer-first workflow automation and CI/CD * Packages – publish and consume packages together with code * Mobile Apps (beta)- iOS and Android apps for collaborating from any device
For companies interested in automating code security with GitHub Advanced Security, we’re also bringing:
* Code scanning – scan every pull request for known vulnerabilities with CodeQL * Secret scanning (beta) – detect credentials in code before they hit production
Today, we’re making GitHub Enterprise Server 3.0 available as a release candidate. Announced in the GitHub Universe Keynote, it’s the biggest ever change to Enterprise Server, bringing customers:
* Actions – developer-first workflow automation and CI/CD * Packages – publish and consume packages together with code * Mobile Apps (beta)- iOS and Android apps for collaborating from any device
For companies interested in automating code security with GitHub Advanced Security, we’re also bringing:
* Code scanning – scan every pull request for known vulnerabilities with CodeQL * Secret scanning (beta) – detect credentials in code before they hit production
When I took a break from my startup, I ended up working for a fintech company and you will be surprised by
a) how much money they have
b) how little understanding of tech they have
For many non-traditional tech companies, they feel spending more money, will help offset tech deficiencies. In the same way that, novice golfers equate spending more money on golf equipment will make them better golfers.
a) how much money they have
b) how little understanding of tech they have
For many non-traditional tech companies, they feel spending more money, will help offset tech deficiencies. In the same way that, novice golfers equate spending more money on golf equipment will make them better golfers.
Great. Why should tech companies (and by extension software engineers) provide discounted service to non tech businesses?
No other industry has made themselves so available at such affordable pricing than tech has?
Where are all the blog posts/free software/free advise from those finance companies?
Where is all the free legal/free court counsel info from all lawyers?
It's about time tech started charging for commercial use.
Software engineers worldwide deserve more of the pie and letting traditional industries eat Michelin quality food at fast food prices has to end.
Retailers don't sell at cost - they never have. They sell at as much profit as they can get (and yet free ERPs exist/cheap e-commerce exists).
All so the non-tech business people can have greater profit? Fuck that.
No other industry has made themselves so available at such affordable pricing than tech has?
Where are all the blog posts/free software/free advise from those finance companies?
Where is all the free legal/free court counsel info from all lawyers?
It's about time tech started charging for commercial use.
Software engineers worldwide deserve more of the pie and letting traditional industries eat Michelin quality food at fast food prices has to end.
Retailers don't sell at cost - they never have. They sell at as much profit as they can get (and yet free ERPs exist/cheap e-commerce exists).
All so the non-tech business people can have greater profit? Fuck that.
Is this satire? Have you noticed that the richest companies in the world are tech companies?
The place I work is on Premium currently. I was starting to look into using some of their application security tools until I realized like 90% of them are Ultimate/Gold features. It was a huge bummer, especially because I don't have the case yet for getting us to upgrade to Ultimate just for those features.
The question for Premium to Ultimate is "are you using GitLab for project and requirements management?"
For that, the ultimate tier is now competing with a Jira suite, or something that PMs use made by Microsoft or a similar type of product.
The licensing for the project management tool can easily run $50+/month/user
Add in the "business/customer access to the issue tracking" and if you've got Jira or similar, that adds on a gain a bit more $$.
Next, adding the artifact scanning tools. Yes, you can get them 3rd party... but its another thing to set up.
In the end, picture the 50-100 employee shop where the sysadmin is weighing in on "get GitLab Premium vs GitLab ultimate" and the reduction of additional installs and licenses that need to be managed.
Yea, it it adds $80/user/month, but if it saves an hour or two per user per month in productivity gains - that can make a difference.
In the organization I currently work for, we were considering the options of (GitLab Ultimate) vs (GitLab Premium + Jira + other tools) and ultimately went with the premium and other for a number of reasons... but GitLab Ultimate made a strong showing.
For that, the ultimate tier is now competing with a Jira suite, or something that PMs use made by Microsoft or a similar type of product.
The licensing for the project management tool can easily run $50+/month/user
Add in the "business/customer access to the issue tracking" and if you've got Jira or similar, that adds on a gain a bit more $$.
Next, adding the artifact scanning tools. Yes, you can get them 3rd party... but its another thing to set up.
In the end, picture the 50-100 employee shop where the sysadmin is weighing in on "get GitLab Premium vs GitLab ultimate" and the reduction of additional installs and licenses that need to be managed.
Yea, it it adds $80/user/month, but if it saves an hour or two per user per month in productivity gains - that can make a difference.
In the organization I currently work for, we were considering the options of (GitLab Ultimate) vs (GitLab Premium + Jira + other tools) and ultimately went with the premium and other for a number of reasons... but GitLab Ultimate made a strong showing.
The thing that killed ultimate for us was the fact that there was no ticket manager only role. Why pay 100/mo for a product manager who just fills out tickets. It's absurd.
The permission model that GitLab has is one of the disappointing things about it and part of the reason we went with a different product for issue management (and I frequently grump about it). I'd really like to be able to define my own roles and assign different actions that that role can do.
I feel that it wasn't made to host enterprise products but rather FOSS in competition with GitHub and then made a pivot to enterprise products but not quite moving away from the "this is for FOSS on the web".
Things like "can modify own comments" not being something that can be modified (people updating their own comments and then not being able to go back over it for an audit or information request of some sort) or having a manager role that can administer the members of a project but not the code.
And yea... having to pay $100/month for a product/project manager in a larger org is a rather firm "nope." Have a dozen of those and that's a lot to pay for not much functionality.
A previous company that I worked at... there was a project manager. Just one. It was a small company - I sat across from the other Java developer. In there, were you've got a small organization where $100/month for a PM is a lot to swallow, but its only $100/month for one PM (and then you get all the other features that saves you from having to hire another operations person) - that's not as hard a price to swallow.
There the thing would be "ok, we've got 10 people at $20/month and all this other stuff that we need to set up on our own, so $200/month vs 11 people at $100/month and a bunch that we don't need to set up on our own $1100" -- the "is it worth $900 for the rest of the infrastructure done for us - along with dumping trello for gitlab issues" and the answer would probably be "yes."
I feel that it wasn't made to host enterprise products but rather FOSS in competition with GitHub and then made a pivot to enterprise products but not quite moving away from the "this is for FOSS on the web".
Things like "can modify own comments" not being something that can be modified (people updating their own comments and then not being able to go back over it for an audit or information request of some sort) or having a manager role that can administer the members of a project but not the code.
And yea... having to pay $100/month for a product/project manager in a larger org is a rather firm "nope." Have a dozen of those and that's a lot to pay for not much functionality.
A previous company that I worked at... there was a project manager. Just one. It was a small company - I sat across from the other Java developer. In there, were you've got a small organization where $100/month for a PM is a lot to swallow, but its only $100/month for one PM (and then you get all the other features that saves you from having to hire another operations person) - that's not as hard a price to swallow.
There the thing would be "ok, we've got 10 people at $20/month and all this other stuff that we need to set up on our own, so $200/month vs 11 people at $100/month and a bunch that we don't need to set up on our own $1100" -- the "is it worth $900 for the rest of the infrastructure done for us - along with dumping trello for gitlab issues" and the answer would probably be "yes."
We've used GitLab CE internally for source code control + CI/CD since May 2014 (6+ years) and are currently evaluating their paid offerings as an overall replacement to Jira.
Based on my observations so far, Ultimate is quite expensive when you have an "all in" approach. Every user, despite whether they would use the feature set must be licensed as Ultimate under the current model.
I really wish there was some flexibility in how the licensing model works — right now, the all in approach is prohibitive to bringing on new users, as you need to justify the $1,200 upfront cost per user added — not all users / projects need to be licensed under the same tier — some user's needs are basic and cannot justify the cost of a license.
--
Some thoughts on how this could be addressed...
A) Assign a licence tier to a user (ie: Some users get Ultimate features, others are on premium with limited access to features)
B) Assign licenses based on projects — if a project has "Ultimate" features enabled, all users in that project count towards an "Ultimate" seat
Based on my observations so far, Ultimate is quite expensive when you have an "all in" approach. Every user, despite whether they would use the feature set must be licensed as Ultimate under the current model.
I really wish there was some flexibility in how the licensing model works — right now, the all in approach is prohibitive to bringing on new users, as you need to justify the $1,200 upfront cost per user added — not all users / projects need to be licensed under the same tier — some user's needs are basic and cannot justify the cost of a license.
--
Some thoughts on how this could be addressed...
A) Assign a licence tier to a user (ie: Some users get Ultimate features, others are on premium with limited access to features)
B) Assign licenses based on projects — if a project has "Ultimate" features enabled, all users in that project count towards an "Ultimate" seat
I cannot find if project-scoped access tokens (which was a Bronze+ feature) are available in the Free tier, or whether they require Silver.
It's such a glaring omission on GitHub - which only has personal access tokens which give apps full access to all your repos.
It's such a glaring omission on GitHub - which only has personal access tokens which give apps full access to all your repos.
So they give full access to all repos you have access to (I.e. organizational repos) or only the ones you own?
If so this would mean I would consider to moving to a platform where the repository owner can control the tokens.
If so this would mean I would consider to moving to a platform where the repository owner can control the tokens.
GitLab employee here. Just asked the Product Manager responsible. Project Access Tokens [0] will be available on Premium for GitLab.com and available on Free for self-hosted.
[0]: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/settings/project_acc...
[0]: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/settings/project_acc...
But not in the CE?
Not working on the feature, but it seems to be available in CE. We disable it for GitLab.com because the feature has some potential to be abused:
- CE: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/d0b75f214f67345c...
- EE: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/d0b75f214f67345c...
(I think Project Access Tokens create bot users under the hood that are associated with the token. So if one were to create hundreds of tokens that means hundreds of users.)
- CE: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/d0b75f214f67345c...
- EE: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/d0b75f214f67345c...
(I think Project Access Tokens create bot users under the hood that are associated with the token. So if one were to create hundreds of tokens that means hundreds of users.)
Thanks!
I thought you were going to make the layers easier to understand? :P
Different features at different levels between self-hosted and gitlab.com seem counterproductive in that regard.
Different features at different levels between self-hosted and gitlab.com seem counterproductive in that regard.
Certain features are disabled on GitLab.com in order to prevent abuse, are difficult to scale or just make no sense. In the case of the Project Access Tokens, the feature is quite new and it is to prevent abuse. See also the (nephew/niece?) comment I made in the thread (one to the side from yours, one down)
> I cannot find if project-scoped access tokens (which was a Bronze+ feature) are available in the Free tier, or whether they require Silver.
The manual says "Bronze and above" for gitlab.com https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/user/project/settings/project_acc... but I tried the open-source "CE" docker container earlier this week and found that they worked there (maybe that's what "Core" means?)
The manual says "Bronze and above" for gitlab.com https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/user/project/settings/project_acc... but I tried the open-source "CE" docker container earlier this week and found that they worked there (maybe that's what "Core" means?)
This is a great move forward, but compared to GitHub, this is still very high.
Free -> 9$/m -> 49$/m seems like a much more reasonable pricing. I'm sure more users would pay if fhe price is better.
Free -> 9$/m -> 49$/m seems like a much more reasonable pricing. I'm sure more users would pay if fhe price is better.
ok, this might suck. We are on bronze right now and yes there where some things in silver that would have been nice to have it was never worth the costs per user to upgrade (especially because a lot of features already in bronze are not things we actually use or need), this might mean we either switch to free or abandon gitlab if there is an alternative.
> especially because a lot of features already in bronze are not things we actually use or need
This has been my org's issue as well. We use dedicated, external products for project management, CI, binary asset storage, container registry, wiki, etc etc. I get that a one-stop shop might be really valuable for a small org with basic needs that align well to what GitLab supplies, but I don't know if it scales up all that well. I would worry about getting partly migrated and then discovering some functionality gap, and maybe finding out that the GitLab team that built that feature no longer exists and there was basically no one maintaining it any more.
Spreading themselves so thin does have a real cost— here's an example of recently-resolved ticket for something that I would consider core "repository" functionality (LFS content inclusion in the tarball) but that sat unfixed and unnoted-in-docs for almost four years: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/15079
This has been my org's issue as well. We use dedicated, external products for project management, CI, binary asset storage, container registry, wiki, etc etc. I get that a one-stop shop might be really valuable for a small org with basic needs that align well to what GitLab supplies, but I don't know if it scales up all that well. I would worry about getting partly migrated and then discovering some functionality gap, and maybe finding out that the GitLab team that built that feature no longer exists and there was basically no one maintaining it any more.
Spreading themselves so thin does have a real cost— here's an example of recently-resolved ticket for something that I would consider core "repository" functionality (LFS content inclusion in the tarball) but that sat unfixed and unnoted-in-docs for almost four years: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/15079
Yeah, there are a lot of these kind of tickets imho
What are the things in bronze you did need/want, vs free?
Multiple Issue Assignees for me
For me:
- issue weights
- iterations
- multiple issue assignees
- issue dependencies
We did evaluate silver (now premium), and it wasn't worth it. We will probably upgrade, but this is a 5x increase on the price, and as a long term contributor of Gitlab, this does definitely make me angry.
We did evaluate silver (now premium), and it wasn't worth it. We will probably upgrade, but this is a 5x increase on the price, and as a long term contributor of Gitlab, this does definitely make me angry.
>multiple issue assignees
>issue dependencies
FWIW these are available in Gitea, along with some other Gitlab features that require payment.
It's a much more lightweight alternative, though.
https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/
>issue dependencies
FWIW these are available in Gitea, along with some other Gitlab features that require payment.
It's a much more lightweight alternative, though.
https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/
Is it 10000 CI minutes per user?
Just host your own runners https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/install/
That requires on-prem hardware (or I guess you could spin VMs up in the cloud, but I doubt that works out cheaper than hosted CI).
It definitely is. On AWS, you can run it on spot instances with autoscaling. Including also networking price, it is an order of magnitude cheaper.
Hi, GitLab team member here. You can spin up a cloud instance, or dive deeper into auto-scaling the GitLab CI/CD runner: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2017/11/23/autoscale-ci-runner...
Depending on your needs, automatically managing and deploying this could also be interesting. We have started a new project called the "5 min production app": https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/12/15/first-code-to-ci-cd...
Alternatively, partners provide hosted runners, if that is an option for you: https://partners.gitlab.com/English/directory/search?f0=Serv...
Depending on your needs, automatically managing and deploying this could also be interesting. We have started a new project called the "5 min production app": https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/12/15/first-code-to-ci-cd...
Alternatively, partners provide hosted runners, if that is an option for you: https://partners.gitlab.com/English/directory/search?f0=Serv...
Hi! GitLab Team Member here. Our Premium tier comes with 10,000 minutes per organization per month. You can also buy additional minutes or use your own infrastructure as runners (which would be at no charge from GitLab).
So many projects we use at work (including Qt and GitLab) seem to change their subscription plans to something that is much less favorable for smaller development teams. I wonder where this will lead to in the big picture, when more and more small companies can simply no longer justify paying for those subscriptions.
Probably into another cycle of cheap products to which you'll migrate to, which will then increase prices and again and again until someone realizes that running sustainable services costs money.
Personally, I think it's a side effect of globalization. All else equal, large companies beat small companies by economy of scale. It follows that larger companies beat large companies. The inevitable outcome is an aggregation of tons of small companies into a small number of very large companies.
That changes 2 things for a SaaS company:
1) Large companies pay more (in absolute amounts). They are also likely to be less of a support burden, since they're a single company so they should be relatively uniform. They're unlike to ask for both AWS and GCP support, but the 1,000 small businesses you need to replace that revenue are likely to ask for AWS, GCP and Azure cumulatively.
2) Small companies are more likely to fail. It's not enough to create a competitive product. They have to create a competitive product at a price that allows them to overcome the economy of scale. Creating an equivalent to Google is great. You're probably still going to pay more per-search than Google is, so they can cut prices until you can't keep up.
> I wonder where this will lead to in the big picture, when more and more small companies can simply no longer justify paying for those subscriptions.
I would argue that we're seeing the fruition of that. The answer is that you go ahead and pay for it. You hope that you can get enough growth to be a company that can afford to pay for it before you run out of money. Or you get acquired by a company whom you're more valuable to, and they can afford to pay for it.
I don't see a viable path forward for small businesses under current circumstances. They can't compete on cost, big businesses are getting really good at emulating small business features (e.g. Spotify does a good job of recommending new music to me, so I don't need the record store to do that), and people are adapting to interfacing with machines instead of humans. I struggle to think of an advantage local stores have other than being able to get the thing you want in less than a day or two.
That changes 2 things for a SaaS company:
1) Large companies pay more (in absolute amounts). They are also likely to be less of a support burden, since they're a single company so they should be relatively uniform. They're unlike to ask for both AWS and GCP support, but the 1,000 small businesses you need to replace that revenue are likely to ask for AWS, GCP and Azure cumulatively.
2) Small companies are more likely to fail. It's not enough to create a competitive product. They have to create a competitive product at a price that allows them to overcome the economy of scale. Creating an equivalent to Google is great. You're probably still going to pay more per-search than Google is, so they can cut prices until you can't keep up.
> I wonder where this will lead to in the big picture, when more and more small companies can simply no longer justify paying for those subscriptions.
I would argue that we're seeing the fruition of that. The answer is that you go ahead and pay for it. You hope that you can get enough growth to be a company that can afford to pay for it before you run out of money. Or you get acquired by a company whom you're more valuable to, and they can afford to pay for it.
I don't see a viable path forward for small businesses under current circumstances. They can't compete on cost, big businesses are getting really good at emulating small business features (e.g. Spotify does a good job of recommending new music to me, so I don't need the record store to do that), and people are adapting to interfacing with machines instead of humans. I struggle to think of an advantage local stores have other than being able to get the thing you want in less than a day or two.
Not all small businesses are stores. A local brewer needs new tooling for their canning line; I’m currently 3d scanning various components and designing replacements that I will machine from stainless and Delrin. I do a lot of this kind of work for local small and mid-sized businesses. I would say that successful local outfits are energetic about making their customers happy and tend to be efficient. I’m sure Siemens could send a team to re-tool this canning line, but it would cost 5x more than having my little company take care of it, and I’m interested in stuff. I don’t mind taking the time to get it right and make it last.
In the past, I considered buying a subscription to show some support but the silver tier was too much for that and the bronze tier had nothing compelling. To be honest even silver/premium only had "pull mirroring" that seemed relevant to my individual use cases.
I second this, the only thing from starter was "pull mirroring", and now I'm priced out of even thinking buying Gitlab premium.
Just within the last 7-10 days or so, I added a task to my "to-do" list to upgrade my personal account to GitLab's lowest cost ($48/year) tier.
I don't actually need any of the features from that tier but I absolutely do* get value from my (personal) use of GitLab (mostly centered around / related to my fairly extensive home lab) and wanted to support the company. I'm not aware of any way to make a donation so I decided I'd just pay the $48/year to upgrade my account as an alternative.
I've been working on a (personal, "offline") project for about the last week and a half -- meaning so I've not been sitting at my workstation during that time -- or else I almost certainly would have just upgraded to the now defunct bronze/starter plan.
Maybe I'll just buy some extra CI/CD minutes (which I don't use) or something similar as a way to show support for the company by giving them a few dollars.
I don't actually need any of the features from that tier but I absolutely do* get value from my (personal) use of GitLab (mostly centered around / related to my fairly extensive home lab) and wanted to support the company. I'm not aware of any way to make a donation so I decided I'd just pay the $48/year to upgrade my account as an alternative.
I've been working on a (personal, "offline") project for about the last week and a half -- meaning so I've not been sitting at my workstation during that time -- or else I almost certainly would have just upgraded to the now defunct bronze/starter plan.
Maybe I'll just buy some extra CI/CD minutes (which I don't use) or something similar as a way to show support for the company by giving them a few dollars.
Remember when you make a pricing model for your company: you can never change it without some kind of backlash unless you can make things cheaper. So it's fine to charge a bit more initially and figure things out as you go, you can then lower the price once you've worked the numbers and/or have to respond to competitive pressure.
But changing your model will upset your customers, no matter how well you intend it and there will always be a backlash, especially from developers for tools because there is always going to be someone else that does it cheaper. Rely on the 'cost too switch' once too often and you will shed users and users that leave will never come back. It is easier to attract a new user than it is to get someone that got burned to return.
Do what you can to get it right the first time and build in some room. And if you do have to change it be willing to grandfather in the users that got you there for ever.
But changing your model will upset your customers, no matter how well you intend it and there will always be a backlash, especially from developers for tools because there is always going to be someone else that does it cheaper. Rely on the 'cost too switch' once too often and you will shed users and users that leave will never come back. It is easier to attract a new user than it is to get someone that got burned to return.
Do what you can to get it right the first time and build in some room. And if you do have to change it be willing to grandfather in the users that got you there for ever.
Everything you said makes sense -- but at the same time, when building a SaaS offering, your initial product may have much less functionality than what you eventually plan to build.
If you start at the price you want to charge in the end, people will look at the product and say, you expect me to pay $X for that?
One thing that may work is to offer early adopters a lower price, and keep them at that price forever, while charging later customers more. But to do that, you need to raise the price for new customers early and often -- otherwise you'll end up with too many people at the lower price. And if your costs scale with the scope of your product, that could mean you're losing money on a large fraction of your users.
If you start at the price you want to charge in the end, people will look at the product and say, you expect me to pay $X for that?
One thing that may work is to offer early adopters a lower price, and keep them at that price forever, while charging later customers more. But to do that, you need to raise the price for new customers early and often -- otherwise you'll end up with too many people at the lower price. And if your costs scale with the scope of your product, that could mean you're losing money on a large fraction of your users.
There's a difference between changing the pricing model and raising prices.
gitlab is changing their pricing model; as near as I can tell, they want to be a source control / jira / CI all-in-one environment. My guess is the willingness to pay vs github for just plain source control isn't there.
:shrug:
This is the risk with saas though. Customers are adults; they can choose to continue using your product or not. If customers don't want the saas they buy to be able to change models or raise prices, their choices are (1) don't use it; or (2) sign annual or even multiyear agreements. And if a company evaluates software that won't make multiyear commitments to them, they should take that unwillingness into account when choosing which vendor to use.
gitlab is changing their pricing model; as near as I can tell, they want to be a source control / jira / CI all-in-one environment. My guess is the willingness to pay vs github for just plain source control isn't there.
:shrug:
This is the risk with saas though. Customers are adults; they can choose to continue using your product or not. If customers don't want the saas they buy to be able to change models or raise prices, their choices are (1) don't use it; or (2) sign annual or even multiyear agreements. And if a company evaluates software that won't make multiyear commitments to them, they should take that unwillingness into account when choosing which vendor to use.
In other industries for example gaming and desktop tools, people eventually just ship a new version that existing users have to buy again. For continuously deployed web products a repricing is the only way to frame it in customer's minds.
It’s a subscription, so you’re rebuying it every month/year whether you want the new features or not. I miss the days when you bought something and could use it forever, and only had to re-up if the next version was actually so much better as to be worth the cost.
Not so bad --
* Grandfather current customers, which gitlab did at near minimum here (current year / ~no changes ?). ~Lifetime / tier would be better, esp as a growing co should be fine here revenue wise. Better current customers sing your praises internally + externally than say you're yet another couldn't-care-less quarter-driven bigco / sales-driven vc co: growth wins.
* Put new stuff in new plans/tiers. Gitlab VPs seem to be choosing a weak balance here.
I'm all for offering higher prices. Trick is, when adding stuff, people should pay more for more, and same / less for standing still. Let hungrier/spendier teams spend more, and cost-sensitive ones happily spread the good word.
Not what happened here? Gitlab seems big enough that all this doesn't really matter though, they are probably reaching a customer size and capital-intensitive enough moat that they don't care toooo much.
---
A good contrast is github / microsoft, which also is way into clever pricing:
- Way cheaper per-user at all tiers. We got tier-shifted at some point, but don't recall any pricing funniness during that.
- Adding customer abilities to spend infinite amounts, but via new layers, like pay-as-you-go CI/CD offerings that do not gauge existing users. I expect the prices to go down, not up, as they figure out more scaling tricks / computing improves and they try to get users more addicted.
GH/MS is probably working on a much bigger timescale than GitLab, as GH doesn't need to look at juicing numbers to fundraise / sell while buyers are willing, and instead focus on being a friendly shift-left answer to AWS/GCP
* Grandfather current customers, which gitlab did at near minimum here (current year / ~no changes ?). ~Lifetime / tier would be better, esp as a growing co should be fine here revenue wise. Better current customers sing your praises internally + externally than say you're yet another couldn't-care-less quarter-driven bigco / sales-driven vc co: growth wins.
* Put new stuff in new plans/tiers. Gitlab VPs seem to be choosing a weak balance here.
I'm all for offering higher prices. Trick is, when adding stuff, people should pay more for more, and same / less for standing still. Let hungrier/spendier teams spend more, and cost-sensitive ones happily spread the good word.
Not what happened here? Gitlab seems big enough that all this doesn't really matter though, they are probably reaching a customer size and capital-intensitive enough moat that they don't care toooo much.
---
A good contrast is github / microsoft, which also is way into clever pricing:
- Way cheaper per-user at all tiers. We got tier-shifted at some point, but don't recall any pricing funniness during that.
- Adding customer abilities to spend infinite amounts, but via new layers, like pay-as-you-go CI/CD offerings that do not gauge existing users. I expect the prices to go down, not up, as they figure out more scaling tricks / computing improves and they try to get users more addicted.
GH/MS is probably working on a much bigger timescale than GitLab, as GH doesn't need to look at juicing numbers to fundraise / sell while buyers are willing, and instead focus on being a friendly shift-left answer to AWS/GCP
Agreed.
My last employer had been on the same GH tier for over 6 years or something like that, and was on a much older tier.
It lacked some of the new features, but the price-point was right for our team size, and we weren't yet at the point where the newer features (ci/cd stuff like Actions) were worth the cost hike.
We were planning on switching tiers to get the new features, which is exactly what you described. Let those who want the new things pay for them if/when they decide to make the switch.
My last employer had been on the same GH tier for over 6 years or something like that, and was on a much older tier.
It lacked some of the new features, but the price-point was right for our team size, and we weren't yet at the point where the newer features (ci/cd stuff like Actions) were worth the cost hike.
We were planning on switching tiers to get the new features, which is exactly what you described. Let those who want the new things pay for them if/when they decide to make the switch.
That's the correct way to do this.
Looking at their pricing page, it seems that the Ultimate tier, and even the premium tier, has a lot of features that many of their customers will never use.
I am assuming that the pricing plan is set by deployment and not by user, otherwise a company could buy 5 Ultimate seats, 20 Premiums, and the rest join for free. There is no point in buying Ultimate for 100 users when only 5 of them would ever want to use the Ultimate features.
I am assuming that the pricing plan is set by deployment and not by user, otherwise a company could buy 5 Ultimate seats, 20 Premiums, and the rest join for free. There is no point in buying Ultimate for 100 users when only 5 of them would ever want to use the Ultimate features.
From the FAQ on their pricing page:
"Can I acquire a mix of licenses?
No, all users in the group need to be on the same plan."
Which is frankly stupid. You make more money from 20 devs on ultimate and the rest of the company (100) on silver than you get from having 25 devs + essential managers on the ultimate plan and no one else using it at all. Let alone the number of customers who will look for 120 licenses for the entire company and dismiss the entire product suite as they can't afford it.
Which is frankly stupid. You make more money from 20 devs on ultimate and the rest of the company (100) on silver than you get from having 25 devs + essential managers on the ultimate plan and no one else using it at all. Let alone the number of customers who will look for 120 licenses for the entire company and dismiss the entire product suite as they can't afford it.
> You make more money from 20 devs on ultimate and the rest of the company (100) on silver than you get from having 25 devs + essential managers on the ultimate plan and no one else using it at all.
That only has to be true WRT revenue. Depending on the margins (which, in the case of loss-leaders, are negative), it might not be true for profits
That only has to be true WRT revenue. Depending on the margins (which, in the case of loss-leaders, are negative), it might not be true for profits
Their whole pricing scheme is ludicrous, which they defend as "its better for GitLab!"
One approach for solving that can be (but might not work always) to add new features only to more expensive packages. Of course the lower tier users won't be happy with that either, but if there are notable new features they can make an argument.
I generally agree. We've always taken the "grand-fathering" approach, but it can get a bit more complicated as your product and offerings grow. If someone was paying $XX /mo for your initial offering, and a few years later, you're able to provide a number of new features within that product, I don't think you necessarily need to continue providing those extra features simply because someone signed up earlier.
To your point, you may face a backlash. But it also costs a lot of time and $$ to support new development and features. Therefore, having some backlash may still be the right decision in the medium/long term. Can be hard to weather that storm initially, though.
To your point, you may face a backlash. But it also costs a lot of time and $$ to support new development and features. Therefore, having some backlash may still be the right decision in the medium/long term. Can be hard to weather that storm initially, though.
The features that they paid for in the first year have already been paid for by the customers. While it costs the vendor time and money for new features it doesn't cost them money for old features. Therefore under a subscription model that payment should be covering the cost of new features.
I think I'd reply to this with a "yes and no" kinda thing. For us, maintaining anything requires time and $$. This is, in part, because technology changes. Even in a vacuum with no new active development, money and $$ is required to ensure everything stays up and running.
eg. as our use base has grown, so too has our database. And so while the optics of it from the end-user POV is that the product has remain unchanged, we've had to invest in database and scaling services in order to continue to meet the initial offerings.
It's not as simple as that, but you probably get the gist of it.
A more relevant example might be a web service that emails you once a week. If the mailing service that powers this requires DNS or integration changes to help fight spam, over time that will require time (and perhaps $$).
If I'm misunderstanding your point, let me know :)
eg. as our use base has grown, so too has our database. And so while the optics of it from the end-user POV is that the product has remain unchanged, we've had to invest in database and scaling services in order to continue to meet the initial offerings.
It's not as simple as that, but you probably get the gist of it.
A more relevant example might be a web service that emails you once a week. If the mailing service that powers this requires DNS or integration changes to help fight spam, over time that will require time (and perhaps $$).
If I'm misunderstanding your point, let me know :)
I’m by no means a marketing expert, but showing your early users respect, courtesy, and-dare I say it-loyalty, seems intuitive to me but also less and less common in today’s Anything As A Service (pronounced like “ass”) tech environment. I don’t miss months-long sales cycles, prohibitive up-front costs, oppressive support contracts, etc., but I do miss having companies that will bend over backward to retain long-time customers. Everything has become a transaction, and every customer is just a fraction of a company’s overall revenue. I’m not dissing GitLab as I am not (yet) a paying customer, just commenting on the state of software in general.
I remember an in-person presentation by Unbounce talking about their pricing model. They realized that anyone paying less than $99/month was not worth their time, so they removed those plans, barely reducing their monthly revenue, and focused on the high-end customers.
Looking at their pricing structure today, I see $80 being the lowest tier, going all the way to $300
Looking at their pricing structure today, I see $80 being the lowest tier, going all the way to $300
Depending on your market, killing off cheaper plans might barely impact your revenue at all... right up until you stop getting bigger contacts because there's no on-ramp customers to try your services before going all-in.
If you increase the pricing by 475%, and only 400% customers left, it's still a net win.
In the short term, yeah. There might be long term consequences though.
For instance, alienating customers who go on to become anti-evangelists for your product.
For instance, alienating customers who go on to become anti-evangelists for your product.
I can't tell if this comment is meant sarcastically but if 100% of your customers leaves you are dead in the water. Most companies would not survive a 50% drop, especially not companies where network effects and evangelism are a strong factor in their survival. Gitlab is one of those.
Does this mean repository mirroring (pulling) can be incorporated into Gitlab CE?
* https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/23166#note_494...
* https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/23166#note_494...
why would it mean that?
$4/m to $20/m? That's a pretty steep increase.
It's also really difficult to work out the impact of this. The feature comparison never really seems to include important git features, just headline sales features.
It's also really difficult to work out the impact of this. The feature comparison never really seems to include important git features, just headline sales features.
GitLab team member here. I think you will find these feature comparison pages to be pretty robust:
- https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/gitlab-com/feature-comparis...
- https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/self-managed/feature-compar...
Let me know if there are specific features you have questions about.
Let me know if there are specific features you have questions about.
This was a while ago, so I imagine things will have changed but:
1. As the dev of a code quality tool, it was (and still is) super unclear to me which tiers allow test reports, or custom reports.
2. For at least 6 months it was very unclear which tiers got true Jira "smart commits". The solution was simply to rewrite the docs to not use that wording, and push users to pay for a Jira extension rather than support it in Gitlab shrug.
1. As the dev of a code quality tool, it was (and still is) super unclear to me which tiers allow test reports, or custom reports.
2. For at least 6 months it was very unclear which tiers got true Jira "smart commits". The solution was simply to rewrite the docs to not use that wording, and push users to pay for a Jira extension rather than support it in Gitlab shrug.
Do you have a list of features that were promoted from starter to premium or free? We invested a lot of time to evaluate features and decided on starter. Now it's confusing to understand what features we're gaining/losing if we go to premium or free.
We don't need all those features, what we need is a competitive alternative to bitbucket. Your Bronze plan although more expensive was that. I was able to make the argument to switch to gitlab even thought bronze was a bit more but I can't make that for going to this tier.
Never forget that there's a 4th tier plan: host it yourself. With containers it is really easy to setup a GitLab instance.
It isn't difficult to integrate GitLab with other tools. We are a Gov company and it is really easier to put man power to customize it than to climb all the bureaucratic hurdles to buy it.
It isn't difficult to integrate GitLab with other tools. We are a Gov company and it is really easier to put man power to customize it than to climb all the bureaucratic hurdles to buy it.
You can host it yourself at any of the tiers. Paying for GitLab doesn't necessarily imply SaaS GitLab.
There are multiple paid self-hosted tiers, one of which is being phased out.
Which features do you get with self hosted?
[deleted]
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Exactly the same as with the hosted version. All you would gain is unlimited CI minutes but you can configure the hosted one to use your own CI runner anyway.
What happened to the pricing for self-managed instances? We rather like our onprem setup.
Its the same i guess!?
Some time ago they made the pricing for hosted and on-prem the same.
GitLab Team Member here. The pricing is the same for both our SaaS and self-managed products - and the tiers are now identical as well.
This is not clear from the pricing page, which talks about CI pipeline minutes and other SaaS only stuff.
GitLab team member here. Thanks for the feedback. I'll relay that to the team who owns our pricing page.
This page contains comparisons for the self-managed features: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/self-managed/feature-compar...
This page contains comparisons for the self-managed features: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/self-managed/feature-compar...
What's the justification for the self-managed and SaaS products being priced the same? That isn't intended to be snarky but a legitimate question, by the way.
You can read a bunch about how we made that decision here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/pricing/#price-differe...
I assume they are hoping at least 1 out of 5 bronze users will transition to silver and increase net profits. But still... we just transitioned from BitBucket to GitLab because the $4 self-hosted tier was just too good a deal. $20 seems a bit steep considering we are using our own hardware for hosting, CI, etc. I really hope we don't transition back to BitBucket...
I'm trying to move away from bit bucket but now the price is again more and this is difficult to sell.
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Isn't there a free option? What were the main features pushing you to the $4 plan?
edit: looks like for multi-user you need paid?
edit: looks like for multi-user you need paid?
I'm pretty sure we'll just downgrade to free, or move away after this. We only use the MR approval features from bronze, and that's proooobably not worth the price of premium. But who knows, since we have to contact a sales rep to "guide you through your transition discount offers.
We are in the same boat. Probably going to downgrade to free.
GitLab Team Member here. If you could reach out to your account team, that would be great. We’d love to hear your thoughts and have an opportunity to understand what is valuable to you. We realize that this is a significant change for Starter/Bronze users, and we want to make sure we can provide you with the best possible service through the transition. We’re also offering a free upgrade to Premium for the first 25 users, which may help you get a better sense of Premium's value for your team.
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We're in the same situation. We're in bronze only because of approvals, team of 17. We picked Gitlab precisely for best price of this feature on the market. We've already paid for full year starting February, in December.
The best possible service through the transition: no change.
Why on earth am I getting a cookie dialogue that includes a checkbox for “personalization” and asks for permission to track me “to personalize content and ads” on the pricing page of a company that makes money selling an actual product?
Can't we do anything at all these days without pointless cookie dialogues and downright insulting behaviour?
I like GitLab, but I don't like getting advertising cookies stuffed down my throat for showing an interest in your offering.
Can't we do anything at all these days without pointless cookie dialogues and downright insulting behaviour?
I like GitLab, but I don't like getting advertising cookies stuffed down my throat for showing an interest in your offering.
> Why on earth am I getting a cookie dialogue [...]
Use NoScript. There is simply no reason for pages like that to [attempt to] stuff so many cookies and scripts for what is a simple page of static content.
Use NoScript. There is simply no reason for pages like that to [attempt to] stuff so many cookies and scripts for what is a simple page of static content.
I had my browser without uBlock Origin for all of five seconds after a fresh install last month.
There certainly is a reason for them to do it, just not one that you or I like.
So they can retarget you as a potential customer.
I totally get your annoyance, but they probably do mostly online marketing, so it makes sense for them.
I totally get your annoyance, but they probably do mostly online marketing, so it makes sense for them.
It's especially annoying because their competition does not use cookies.
https://github.blog/2020-12-17-no-cookie-for-you/
https://github.blog/2020-12-17-no-cookie-for-you/
Their competition is owned by MS, and doesn't need to worry about turning a profit on their activity.
Note that I'm not justifying the behaviour, just commenting on it.
Note that I'm not justifying the behaviour, just commenting on it.
We have a small development team (20) but 100+ clients that have reporter role.
We are in the process of moving out some clients so we could use Starter. Premium was too expensive because reporters count as a user and guests are only free in Ultimate.
So now we are looking for alternatives, which sucks because as a developer I really liked Gitlab.
Does anyone have any recommendations?
We are in the process of moving out some clients so we could use Starter. Premium was too expensive because reporters count as a user and guests are only free in Ultimate.
So now we are looking for alternatives, which sucks because as a developer I really liked Gitlab.
Does anyone have any recommendations?
Depends on your requirements to be honest. I’ve used gitea in the past and was very happy with it.
There is a feature that lets non users report issues via email which might be usable. It would prevent them participating in more advanced issue tracking and seeing other users issues though.
We tried it but it didn't work out for us.
You don't know what your issue description was after you send an issue through service desk. You just get a generic reply that starts as the email-chain.
The issue templating doesn't work obviously, the quality of created issues drop.
You don't know what your issue description was after you send an issue through service desk. You just get a generic reply that starts as the email-chain.
The issue templating doesn't work obviously, the quality of created issues drop.
We recently spent a couple weeks going over pricing with a GitLab regional Account Leader.
We already use GitLab for all our source repos, CI/CD pipelines, and had been using it for issue management as well — all fully self-hosted. The hope was to drop Jira, which was also being used for project planning, and fully adopt GitLab, but the costs were simply unjustifiable.
Basically GitLab ended up being a full order of magnitude more expensive. Even with discounts, which got things closer (but not all the way there), the fear was after a period of time, the discounts would be ended/phased out and we'd be stuck.
I'd love to see those features that compete directly with Jira (like roadmaps and multi-level epics) come down to the Premium level, which is more price/feature competitive.
We love GitLab, but find ourselves stuck using the free tier and paying for services we don't love, rather than supporting GitLab. I'd suspect we're not alone there, either.
We already use GitLab for all our source repos, CI/CD pipelines, and had been using it for issue management as well — all fully self-hosted. The hope was to drop Jira, which was also being used for project planning, and fully adopt GitLab, but the costs were simply unjustifiable.
Basically GitLab ended up being a full order of magnitude more expensive. Even with discounts, which got things closer (but not all the way there), the fear was after a period of time, the discounts would be ended/phased out and we'd be stuck.
I'd love to see those features that compete directly with Jira (like roadmaps and multi-level epics) come down to the Premium level, which is more price/feature competitive.
We love GitLab, but find ourselves stuck using the free tier and paying for services we don't love, rather than supporting GitLab. I'd suspect we're not alone there, either.
How was your experience with Jira?
I use a couple dozen tools on a regular basis. JIRA is by far the worst. The functionality is ok. Maybe it is a bit bloated. Maybe our process is a little over complicated. That's not a big deal. The thing that really gets me is performance.
The performance is absolute dog shit. Every interaction with it painfully slow. For example, the page to view a single issue is almost 20MB fetched over 100 HTTP requests and takes 10 seconds to load. This is without cache. With assets cached, it is still 4 seconds to render. This is the fastest interaction by the way. Everything else is worse.
Maybe some of this is my organization's fault. I really don't know. What I do know is that it is so slow that I dread every interaction with it.
The performance is absolute dog shit. Every interaction with it painfully slow. For example, the page to view a single issue is almost 20MB fetched over 100 HTTP requests and takes 10 seconds to load. This is without cache. With assets cached, it is still 4 seconds to render. This is the fastest interaction by the way. Everything else is worse.
Maybe some of this is my organization's fault. I really don't know. What I do know is that it is so slow that I dread every interaction with it.
Nope. We _just_ switched to Jira/Confluence from Notion+Trello (sigh), so we really don't have a complicated set up, and it is definitely "absolute dog shit" for performance. It is hands down the slowest tool I use. I've used it at large organizations with hundreds of devs and it's even worse. I regret not pushing back harder, since it is totally overkill for 1.5 PMs managing 3.5 devs.
Seconding the performance issues. This is obviously amplified when screen sharing, which makes certain types of collaboration difficult. (Remote grooming sessions, for instance.) I also find recent UI changes have made the product harder to use, at least for our version and processes, and have added nothing of value in return.
As far as how useful Jira is, a huge percentage of that is going to be your team's processes external to Jira. I have found it to be a very good mirror. If your team's processes are a mess, your Jira instance will quickly become one as well. But if your team is organized and is bringing an existing, functional system to Jira, I have found that it's a good enough value add to be worth it.
It's definitely an enabler, though, rather than a tool that will funnel you into good practices. (The same can be said for Confluence but it's even more true there IMO.)
As far as how useful Jira is, a huge percentage of that is going to be your team's processes external to Jira. I have found it to be a very good mirror. If your team's processes are a mess, your Jira instance will quickly become one as well. But if your team is organized and is bringing an existing, functional system to Jira, I have found that it's a good enough value add to be worth it.
It's definitely an enabler, though, rather than a tool that will funnel you into good practices. (The same can be said for Confluence but it's even more true there IMO.)
Same performance problems here. I hate it. I also need to access other JIRA boards with different email addresses occasionally. It takes forever to sign out, login again, navigate to board, find the issue. It puts me off using it so much.
One light at the end of the tunnel is the Mac app (for some reason there is no Windows or Linux version). It's much more lightweight and feels way faster than the web version. However, it is buggy in my experience, and a fair few things I do a lot can't be done in it and require the web interface, but for quickly checking stuff it mostly works.
One light at the end of the tunnel is the Mac app (for some reason there is no Windows or Linux version). It's much more lightweight and feels way faster than the web version. However, it is buggy in my experience, and a fair few things I do a lot can't be done in it and require the web interface, but for quickly checking stuff it mostly works.
Rather than signing in and out all the time, why not use Firefox's container tabs?
Truth. On Jira Cloud, most painful part of my day, daily. I wish I could say it was free. Far from it.
Hi - I'm coming from the Confluence team working on Performance, but I can say that we (all of Atlassian) are aware of performance is an area needing improvement, and we're working on it. Customer feedback (including logs, recordings, and exports of slow pages) is always very helpful to us. If you're open for followup over email to provide specific information, please let me know.
It's what you make of it. Most companies make it into a mess. And the UI is slow and bloated like a dead whale.
It is however not that expensive which matters especially when most of the company needs accounts and not just engineers. $7/user/month for basic or $14 for everything you reasonably care about. Gitlab is $19 or $99/user/month.
It is however not that expensive which matters especially when most of the company needs accounts and not just engineers. $7/user/month for basic or $14 for everything you reasonably care about. Gitlab is $19 or $99/user/month.
In my case, I´ve used JIRA for a long time (8 years) and consider myself a "power user" (I've connected Lambda's with its API and webhooks, later used their "actions" scripting, I've delved deep into workflow modification, projects, board, views the whole gamut). It is a very powerful tool that if you REALLY know how to use it (like, really make sense of permissions, workflows, hooks and other features) you get really good ROI.
Nevertheless... it is an absolute and horrible hog. It is so slow and clumsy that it is frustrating. Also, when they changed the interface they kind of hid a lot of stuff that used to be there. Also the free "Gantt" feature they have sucks, and the paid one is OK but does not justify upgrading 50+ users to the plan that makes it available.
Nevertheless... it is an absolute and horrible hog. It is so slow and clumsy that it is frustrating. Also, when they changed the interface they kind of hid a lot of stuff that used to be there. Also the free "Gantt" feature they have sucks, and the paid one is OK but does not justify upgrading 50+ users to the plan that makes it available.
Jira's performance is absolute garbage. It's painful and embarrassing.
I'd use GitHub if my team were willing to do non-technical project management with it as well. I wish GitHub would add features for non-technical users on projects. It would be a huge win.
Literally just spend some time on some docs features and provide a view of projects that isn't centered on code for those users that aren't involved in the code.
For a reasonably technical user, you can make it work, except that the views just aren't built for them, so it's a lot of visual clutter that isn't necessary and holds the product back.
Been looking at Clickup since, like Jira+Confluence, you can integrate wiki/web documents with your project management tooling. I've found that this is a pretty critical feature. I've tried repeatedly to get folks to rally around Google Drive or a folder of Office documents, and it's just not the same as working in a single, integrated web experience.
I'd use GitHub if my team were willing to do non-technical project management with it as well. I wish GitHub would add features for non-technical users on projects. It would be a huge win.
Literally just spend some time on some docs features and provide a view of projects that isn't centered on code for those users that aren't involved in the code.
For a reasonably technical user, you can make it work, except that the views just aren't built for them, so it's a lot of visual clutter that isn't necessary and holds the product back.
Been looking at Clickup since, like Jira+Confluence, you can integrate wiki/web documents with your project management tooling. I've found that this is a pretty critical feature. I've tried repeatedly to get folks to rally around Google Drive or a folder of Office documents, and it's just not the same as working in a single, integrated web experience.
GitLab team member here. Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. Will share with our team.
I also have a small dev team of 25 that wants to move to gitlab paid model but the upfront cost is too much. We need a monthly payment plan even if it costs more than annual one because I can't justify a high upfront cost to my ceo. We're rapidly expanding and expect to be 100 within 2021.
Thanks. I will share this, too.
Edit - we share why we prioritize annual pricing over monthly in our handbook: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/pricing/#annual-pricin...
Edit - we share why we prioritize annual pricing over monthly in our handbook: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/pricing/#annual-pricin...
Do you pay google yearly upfront for hosting?
Monthly is huge for our SaaS subscriptions. We usually go yearly later.
Many of these points come back to "it's easier or cheaper for gitlab this way" which isn't a great way to convince a customer. Some of which seem to actually be "due to our inability to onboard, manage and retain customers in an automated hands off way it's cheaper or easier this way" which is a terrible way to convince customers.
None of these is convincing, mostly because "its better for Gitlab".
I don't care. I want what's better for our company.
And right now, that is not paying for GitLab.
It sucks because I am an evangelist for GitLab, but I'm fighting a losing battle and we will be switching paid Github over free GitLab because of things like this.
I don't care. I want what's better for our company.
And right now, that is not paying for GitLab.
It sucks because I am an evangelist for GitLab, but I'm fighting a losing battle and we will be switching paid Github over free GitLab because of things like this.
How much are 25 individual paid accounts?
You can solve a lot of the pricing issues by offering add-ons.
Buy the Premium tier and add Kubernetes or Security for an additional $4 / month.
Buy the Premium tier and add Kubernetes or Security for an additional $4 / month.
Does GitLab have an option to pick the major cloud data center it hosts in? Cross data center network transfer is a no-go.
This is not a new issue. There is an issue somewhere on the Gitlab repo that I’ve been subscribed to for more than two years. At this point it seems unlikely to change.
Definitely not alone. We use the self-hosted GitLab that comes with MatterMost out of the box: great!
Now offer something to kill of Jira at a reasonable price and you've got another customer. The functionality is all there, it's just distributed awkwardly across tiers for many small outfits.
Now offer something to kill of Jira at a reasonable price and you've got another customer. The functionality is all there, it's just distributed awkwardly across tiers for many small outfits.
Same, we ended up pushing back our subscription for almost a year, in which we really could've used their service. Just because the upfront cost was so high. And when we finally got a subscription it was a silver subscription, which is great but doesn't let us drop Jira. The gold subscription cost is just insane. It might make sense if you're used to paying SV wages.
Same situation here.
We are are in a similar situation: We were using Github Team, paying I think $4 a month per account (between 10 and 15 users). I (head of the Eng group) love Gitlab and had used it for some time in personal/open-source projects. I managed to convince the team about Gitlab and we migrated, initially in the Free tier.
My first surprise was that Gitlab does not allow for Monthly payments...if I wanted to go into the Bronze tier, I would have had to pay a whole year in full. My startup doesn't do whole-year payments (quarterly or monthly) so that stopped me on my tracks.
I guess with the full weight of Microsoft, Github will out-price Gitlab. It's kind of sad because I prefer Gitlab CI/CD to Github actions (I just couldn't make sense of them).
My first surprise was that Gitlab does not allow for Monthly payments...if I wanted to go into the Bronze tier, I would have had to pay a whole year in full. My startup doesn't do whole-year payments (quarterly or monthly) so that stopped me on my tracks.
I guess with the full weight of Microsoft, Github will out-price Gitlab. It's kind of sad because I prefer Gitlab CI/CD to Github actions (I just couldn't make sense of them).
Invest time in GH actions, they are actually really good once you get over the initial hump.
I love GH Actions so much, though would love dive into GitLab's CI/CD too if anyone has good resources on that.
Here are some options depending on your learning preference:
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5705U8s_nQ
Docs: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/quick_start/
Slides and a demo exercise: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-de/swiss-meetup-2021-jan
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5705U8s_nQ
Docs: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/quick_start/
Slides and a demo exercise: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-de/swiss-meetup-2021-jan
Gitlab's CI/CD a minefield of bad design decisions piled upon each other. Not worth it unless you're stuck with it.
Honestly curious what bad decisions you’ve encountered? I’ve used Gitlab CI/CD on ~20 or so projects of varying complexity (small to enterprise) and have found it enjoyable to use each time.
Would be interested what are your current Problems ?
I'd be interesting in hearing more about some of these.
We're currently using GitLab's CI/CD for ~50 or so private repositories, covering ~7 different languages without any issues. That includes testing, Docker builds and documentation generation for most projects.
We only use private runners though, I don't know if any issues are related to their own runners.
We're currently using GitLab's CI/CD for ~50 or so private repositories, covering ~7 different languages without any issues. That includes testing, Docker builds and documentation generation for most projects.
We only use private runners though, I don't know if any issues are related to their own runners.
So runners are a good example:
The runner config is stored in a config.toml on the runner. If you want autoscaling runners, it gets very complex so you might want to version control it or back it up, but you have to store your AWS secrets in this config.toml. It also contains hashes that have to be matched with settings in the UI, and of course, tags, which need to be tied into your .gitlab-ci. UI configuration changes take places instantly and there's no undo. So you have configuration in 3 places, only one of which is version controlled. And lets say you have some new runners with new tags -- you aren't going to be able to run an old pipeline on the new runner.
Agreed with other commenters, we use gitlab CI extensively, and we find it great. That's the main reason we use gitlab, the code/repository part is not that great and we don't use the other stuff
Talking about bad design decisions, I prefer GitLab's way to handle Pages over GitHub. It's just strange to store generated artifacts in a (`gh-pages`) branch. Instead, in GitLab it's stored as separate files and removed automatically after a certain period.
This is not an uncommon complaint, but it is surprising, especially given their well below-market pay for employees. Where's all this money going?
The free tier users? I'm amazed actually at what the free tier offers to small startups. We have hundreds of gigabytes worth of docker images in the gitlab package registry that we can't even delete/cleanup properly (just keeping the last two would do for us), and Gitlab is keeping all that data for free.
In my unfortunate experience, having evangelized Gitlab in my company from the days when they made money through support and subscriptions, as expensive as Gitlab already is, it will only get more expensive a few years later.
It's nice that they keep adding these features, but in reality, we have already integrated most of the functionality they've added well before they get around to buying the company making the features they want to add.
So the actual practical effect on us is that we simply have to pay additional costs for those features that we don't use (or pay in time and money to migrate to those new features, with no real benefit and a massive downside of further increasing dependence).
It's nice that they keep adding these features, but in reality, we have already integrated most of the functionality they've added well before they get around to buying the company making the features they want to add.
So the actual practical effect on us is that we simply have to pay additional costs for those features that we don't use (or pay in time and money to migrate to those new features, with no real benefit and a massive downside of further increasing dependence).
Variation of the same here. We did try to show, for example, that we could roll off some contractors if we shut down all of the various jenkins instances. But that wasn't enough to justify the "ultimate" tier, we went with "premium".
And the business case still had to include fluff to make it sound at all like a good idea. Note that it IS a good idea in this case, but for reasons that are hard to show as dollars.
It seems like they need something (low base + ala cart add ons?) to have a better pitch for Jira/Bitbucket self-hosted customers to switch.
One thing they could do is reduce the cost for non-developer seats. Lots of people need access to the issues, or builds/deploys, etc, without needing to commit code.
And the business case still had to include fluff to make it sound at all like a good idea. Note that it IS a good idea in this case, but for reasons that are hard to show as dollars.
It seems like they need something (low base + ala cart add ons?) to have a better pitch for Jira/Bitbucket self-hosted customers to switch.
One thing they could do is reduce the cost for non-developer seats. Lots of people need access to the issues, or builds/deploys, etc, without needing to commit code.
"One thing they could do is reduce the cost for non-developer seats. Lots of people need access to the issues, or builds/deploys, etc, without needing to commit code."
Exactly! Lower tier users would solve many of the issues.
Exactly! Lower tier users would solve many of the issues.
This is what I like about azure devops. Stakeholder licences are available for free with access to boards and wiki but not code repos.
Yea. Love gitlab but the pricing does add up quickly. Even if with all the features, it's really hard to get value out of Gold/Ultimate.
When I add up all the major SaaS apps an average user has: SSO, Email, Chat, Storage, Zoom, Support. Combined, GitLab Ultimate costs 2-3x that. And I promise you that as much as we all hate a messy inbox, email is more broadly useful than GitLab.
The other problem with ultimate is that it strongly incentives you to NOT let anyone else on the platform. At $1200/year there is no way in heck I'm letting the artists use Git, they can stick to their terribly Dropbox hacks. Marketing team working on assets with developers? Use email, no way you're getting access to GitLab. The $100/user/month model makes sense if they are a core developer (still too expensive, but makes sense) using every single feature in the system, but nothing else.
When I add up all the major SaaS apps an average user has: SSO, Email, Chat, Storage, Zoom, Support. Combined, GitLab Ultimate costs 2-3x that. And I promise you that as much as we all hate a messy inbox, email is more broadly useful than GitLab.
The other problem with ultimate is that it strongly incentives you to NOT let anyone else on the platform. At $1200/year there is no way in heck I'm letting the artists use Git, they can stick to their terribly Dropbox hacks. Marketing team working on assets with developers? Use email, no way you're getting access to GitLab. The $100/user/month model makes sense if they are a core developer (still too expensive, but makes sense) using every single feature in the system, but nothing else.
> The other problem with ultimate is that it strongly incentives you to NOT let anyone else on the platform.
This is my biggest problem as their pricing model discourages collaborative development.
We use GitLab to generate docs that are read by hundreds of internal users. On the free tier, if a user wants to suggest a change it’s no problem. Even though that is a very rare user and might only create one issue a year. Or maybe they add a tutorial or something to a project.
They aren’t developers, but having them involved in the git lifecycle is really helpful. Also data scientists who just want to archive their pipelines.
But with the ultimate tier those users suddenly cost $1200/year for minimal features. We can’t upgrade for free for the developers because we’ll disconnect all those “casual users.”
The suggestion to run two instances is stupid and confusing to users who now have to learn about mirroring, etc.
It’s weird that they don’t allow individual users to have tiers, we would buy more GitLab.
As of now, we will likely have to switch off of GitLab because there’s not a clear dividing line between software developers who need GitLab features and staff who write software who just need git, issue tracking, wikis and pages.
This is my biggest problem as their pricing model discourages collaborative development.
We use GitLab to generate docs that are read by hundreds of internal users. On the free tier, if a user wants to suggest a change it’s no problem. Even though that is a very rare user and might only create one issue a year. Or maybe they add a tutorial or something to a project.
They aren’t developers, but having them involved in the git lifecycle is really helpful. Also data scientists who just want to archive their pipelines.
But with the ultimate tier those users suddenly cost $1200/year for minimal features. We can’t upgrade for free for the developers because we’ll disconnect all those “casual users.”
The suggestion to run two instances is stupid and confusing to users who now have to learn about mirroring, etc.
It’s weird that they don’t allow individual users to have tiers, we would buy more GitLab.
As of now, we will likely have to switch off of GitLab because there’s not a clear dividing line between software developers who need GitLab features and staff who write software who just need git, issue tracking, wikis and pages.
> The $100/user/month model
It's not a high number of accounts before you can have a person dedicated 50% of the time to just running a local gitlab setup with any options you want. Including infra costs + on-demand CI/CD.
It's not a high number of accounts before you can have a person dedicated 50% of the time to just running a local gitlab setup with any options you want. Including infra costs + on-demand CI/CD.
How would that help? You still have to pay the license fee...
Is the price for self-hosted usage the same as SaaS? I could not find a clear answer.
Yes, I'm fairly certain it is. We switched to the SaaS because of that, it wasn't worth the hassle of self-hosting when you get all the responsibility and still pay the same price.
What? I thought the draw of GitLab is that it’s open source. Anyone can download it and run it on a server without paying a dime.
> The open source distribution is available to dowload here and contains all the same features as our Free tier.
https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/
So it's missing everything you'd pay GitLab for.
https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/
So it's missing everything you'd pay GitLab for.
You would also need to reimplement the paid features yourself. Only the core (free) gitlab is open source.
we move from github to self hosted Gitlab for ~10% of what we paid for Github.
so far didn't miss anything from Github since our dev mostly use it as git server only.
so far didn't miss anything from Github since our dev mostly use it as git server only.
I don't think that's the case, it's pretty set and forget for 100-2000 user installs, generally you're only touching it during upgrades as required.
> $100/user/month
Please remember that this description does not actually apply to Gitlab, it’s $1200/year or nothing. There is no monthly option.
Please remember that this description does not actually apply to Gitlab, it’s $1200/year or nothing. There is no monthly option.
Can you create an account e.g: [email protected] and get all your Gitlab users to use/share that account?
I understand that this type of usage would only be suitable for small teams.
I understand that this type of usage would only be suitable for small teams.
You're being dowvoted but you're right, this is useful for teams of 1
Ugg. I've seen that system used at other places and it's miserable. Devs had accounts but users and interns used a shared account. You get a vague ticket opened and they forgot to add their name. Also, would updates get blasted to everyone at the company? I'm pretty sure our's just turned them off for that account. So they don't get pinged when the ticket is resolved or needs feedback.
This is confusing to users. Seeing who made changes and who opened issues is really important. Having all users share an account would be confusing to see the same person asking and answering questions.
Also, making a thousand users learn a new userid and password is a support nightmare.
Also, making a thousand users learn a new userid and password is a support nightmare.
$1200 a year is expensive but you mentioned artists. Autodesk Maya is $1600 a year, 3DSMax is $1600 a year, Houdini is $500 a year, Zbrush is $900 a year, Adobe creative suite is $630 a year.
I'm not saying you want to add another $1200 a year to that. Just putting it in perspective to "artist" expenses
I'm not saying you want to add another $1200 a year to that. Just putting it in perspective to "artist" expenses
The argument here is that if you want an artist to have access to your instance - even if only to occasionally use features that are available in the free tier - you have to shell out the full $1200/year.
Something like Maya or 3DSMax is something an artist can reasonably be expected to use a lot of the functionality of the product pretty often. Expecting an artist to use the majority of a gitlab license on a daily basis is a bit of a stretch.
Something like Maya or 3DSMax is something an artist can reasonably be expected to use a lot of the functionality of the product pretty often. Expecting an artist to use the majority of a gitlab license on a daily basis is a bit of a stretch.
I don't use gitlab but github has issue and project planning. I'd expect every team member to use those. Further, github issues supports easy images and videos. Great for artists, and designers to track things. Assuming gitlab does the same I'd expect the same there.
Maybe there are better solutions and so you don't want your artists do that there.
It goes the same the other way. As a programmer I've always needed a license to the same 3d software the artists are using even though I don't use it daily I might need to write or debug an exporter or script.
Maybe there are better solutions and so you don't want your artists do that there.
It goes the same the other way. As a programmer I've always needed a license to the same 3d software the artists are using even though I don't use it daily I might need to write or debug an exporter or script.
Yep. We upgraded from free to starter to get one feature. Now everyone is really careful about who to let on Gitlab because too many would bump us up to the next pricing bracket. We might even go back to free.
The only price tier that is worth it is the silver. The gold/ultimate is just way too expensive. It's a shame that the jump is so crazy for a team of 10, from paying 3K a year to paying over 14K a year.
In theory we have this x,y coordinate system that shows the cost of a feature and the value of the feature. Which is great if you are living in a bubble by yourself, or some similar products. Making someone decide between CI and shared document writing is a terrible choice to have to make.
The other way to present this graph is the classic triangle, Cheap, Good, Fast, but the way we typically use that triangle suffers the same failure mode, because 'expensive' is some weird variant on cheap vs fast, as represented by Brook's Law.
I think the Discord Team has a different interpretation of this - the maintenance cost of the feature matters more to the user than the initial development cost. I can deliver you a feature now that will cost $X a month to operate, or I can deliver you that feature in a couple of months and it'll cost 1/10th that amount. Which means we can offer it to users at a price point they can afford.
It feels like Gitlab has, like so many of us, a bunch of features that create opportunity costs that the customers can't stomach.
The other way to present this graph is the classic triangle, Cheap, Good, Fast, but the way we typically use that triangle suffers the same failure mode, because 'expensive' is some weird variant on cheap vs fast, as represented by Brook's Law.
I think the Discord Team has a different interpretation of this - the maintenance cost of the feature matters more to the user than the initial development cost. I can deliver you a feature now that will cost $X a month to operate, or I can deliver you that feature in a couple of months and it'll cost 1/10th that amount. Which means we can offer it to users at a price point they can afford.
It feels like Gitlab has, like so many of us, a bunch of features that create opportunity costs that the customers can't stomach.
What on earth is a "regional Account Leader?"
they lost to azure devops on price at my organization
What’s the solution if you are Gitlab? It takes revenues to sustain this. Is there a better model?
Not surprised. I rail on this all the time. One of my major problems is only the Ultimate allows free guest users.
Its a big reason we haven't paid for GitLab. And we are also looking to go toward Github for that reason and some others too (and those others might be solved if we paid for support, but see the first reason).
Its a big reason we haven't paid for GitLab. And we are also looking to go toward Github for that reason and some others too (and those others might be solved if we paid for support, but see the first reason).
We're using Azure DevOps at the bank I'm currently working at. I've been a long-time user of it actually, and am a big fan - I just don't see how GitLab's new pricing can compete with AzDo, or even GitHub.
$49/user/m for Premium seems really expensive compared to AzDo and GitHub. Does GitLab have some killer feature I'm not aware of that justifies spending 2-10x that of the competition?
$99/m for Ultimate eds? It doesn't even explain on the pricing page what you get for that, beyond a couple of bullet points of biz-speak - it's almost like they think anyone who buys that kind of language has more money than sense. Might have a point there to be fair, but still hard to see the point of Ultimate - would be really interested to hear if anyone here pays for it, and why?
$49/user/m for Premium seems really expensive compared to AzDo and GitHub. Does GitLab have some killer feature I'm not aware of that justifies spending 2-10x that of the competition?
$99/m for Ultimate eds? It doesn't even explain on the pricing page what you get for that, beyond a couple of bullet points of biz-speak - it's almost like they think anyone who buys that kind of language has more money than sense. Might have a point there to be fair, but still hard to see the point of Ultimate - would be really interested to hear if anyone here pays for it, and why?
Ultimate includes a bunch of bells and whistles - full k8s integration, static/dynamic security testing, deep monitoring integration, etc.
I have considered it but ultimately at any given time, there are one or two features in the top tier that sound good, but usually you can get 80% of the way there with a FOSS alternative.
For example wiring up ArgoCD to run your k8s deploys, or writing your SAST rules yourself.
I have considered it but ultimately at any given time, there are one or two features in the top tier that sound good, but usually you can get 80% of the way there with a FOSS alternative.
For example wiring up ArgoCD to run your k8s deploys, or writing your SAST rules yourself.
Also it's all-or-nothing: the security tools are a good example where it could easily be worth paying a reasonable amount for either an optional feature or upgrades for specific users but when that applies a big up-front multiplier to your entire organization it becomes a much harder sale.
Agreed, this is the problem with Gitlab's bloat; the more features they add, the harder it is to justify a cheap price-point like the old $5/month -- and everybody's idea of what should go into the $20/month tier is going to be different. You can't disaggregate the offerings to pay for just the pieces you are interested in.
If they are focusing more on the Enterprise side of things, I could see it being a good idea for them to split out the licensing and billing for different offerings; see Datadog for an example of the opposite extreme, where every service is optional, and you pay (handsomely) for whatever you use.
If Gitlab split their offerings into a few packages, say $10/mo for k8s integration, $10/mo for security, $10/mo for the Jira replacement that I've never touched, and so on, they could potentially get more stickiness - users would be using the top-tier functionality for the modules that they care about, instead of missing a few killer features that are stashed away in the gold tier. I'm not paying $100/mo for a Gitlab seat, but I would have considered $20-30/mo extra for the k8s/prometheus CD integration without having to pay for all the rest of the top-tier features I'm not interested in.
This might help Gitlab to focus a bit more, too, as they would be able to see exactly what product lines are bringing in the most revenue, and focus on making those better.
If they are focusing more on the Enterprise side of things, I could see it being a good idea for them to split out the licensing and billing for different offerings; see Datadog for an example of the opposite extreme, where every service is optional, and you pay (handsomely) for whatever you use.
If Gitlab split their offerings into a few packages, say $10/mo for k8s integration, $10/mo for security, $10/mo for the Jira replacement that I've never touched, and so on, they could potentially get more stickiness - users would be using the top-tier functionality for the modules that they care about, instead of missing a few killer features that are stashed away in the gold tier. I'm not paying $100/mo for a Gitlab seat, but I would have considered $20-30/mo extra for the k8s/prometheus CD integration without having to pay for all the rest of the top-tier features I'm not interested in.
This might help Gitlab to focus a bit more, too, as they would be able to see exactly what product lines are bringing in the most revenue, and focus on making those better.
It's especially tricky with some competitors' choices: for example, Github's free dependency update service is a HUGE chunk of the day-to-day security value for most projects and there's not much room to say you can justify a double-digit dollars-per-user-per-month to get the other tools.
They push features down to the lower tiers pretty frequently. Easier to launch them on ultimate and then move them down than the other way.
Silver got a lot of great project management features around roadmapping and epics last year that allowed our team to cancel jira sub, so that was sweet.
edit: wouldn't count on the fancier devops tools getting moved through :/
Silver got a lot of great project management features around roadmapping and epics last year that allowed our team to cancel jira sub, so that was sweet.
edit: wouldn't count on the fancier devops tools getting moved through :/
That's not reassuring in a comment on an update where they are completely eliminating a tier.
My response was to someone considering the ultimate tier. I'd recommend they keep an eye on the premium (silver) tier for the functionality they want which may at some point become available.
Premium was an easy sell for us as we were able to eliminate other subscriptions. Ultimate does not have features we'd be willing to pay an extra $80 per user per month for.
Premium was an easy sell for us as we were able to eliminate other subscriptions. Ultimate does not have features we'd be willing to pay an extra $80 per user per month for.
If you want your SAST tool to be worth a damn you need to write your own rules, at a minimum configure sources and sinks manually especially in an app that has a lot of dependencies.
Last time I checked the security scanning tools that GitLab provides don’t really allow you to do that, SAST is expensive and also require manpower to manage well I guess if you only want to tick a box it might be worth it but I wouldn’t call the security features of GitLab worth the money you’re paying for especially with a large number of users.
Last time I checked the security scanning tools that GitLab provides don’t really allow you to do that, SAST is expensive and also require manpower to manage well I guess if you only want to tick a box it might be worth it but I wouldn’t call the security features of GitLab worth the money you’re paying for especially with a large number of users.
> $49/user/m for Premium seems really expensive compared to AzDo and GitHub
Sure, but you know what else $49/user/month for “Premium” is really expensive compared to? GitLab Premium, which is $19/user/month. [0]
> Does GitLab have some killer feature I'm not aware of that justifies spending 2-10x that of the competition?
At least some of the described features seem to be closer to GitHub Enterprise ($21/user/mo) or AzDo Basic+Test ($52/user/mo) than the lower tiers on those, but that's not consistent across the board and the three don't describe features in a way which makes side-by-side comparison easy. But I don't see Premium as clearly overpriced compared to the competition.
> $99/m for Ultimate eds? It doesn’t even explain on the pricing page what you get for that, beyond a couple of bullet points of biz-speak
There’s a detailed feature breakdown of all three plans on the pricing page, with links to more details about each feature.
Unfortunately, its in a stupid scrolling table that only lets you see a few lines at a time, though.
[0] https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/
Sure, but you know what else $49/user/month for “Premium” is really expensive compared to? GitLab Premium, which is $19/user/month. [0]
> Does GitLab have some killer feature I'm not aware of that justifies spending 2-10x that of the competition?
At least some of the described features seem to be closer to GitHub Enterprise ($21/user/mo) or AzDo Basic+Test ($52/user/mo) than the lower tiers on those, but that's not consistent across the board and the three don't describe features in a way which makes side-by-side comparison easy. But I don't see Premium as clearly overpriced compared to the competition.
> $99/m for Ultimate eds? It doesn’t even explain on the pricing page what you get for that, beyond a couple of bullet points of biz-speak
There’s a detailed feature breakdown of all three plans on the pricing page, with links to more details about each feature.
Unfortunately, its in a stupid scrolling table that only lets you see a few lines at a time, though.
[0] https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/
Thanks for catching that usability issue, we agree the double scrolling is not ideal. This wasn't the intended functionality and I can't imagine how long it would have taken for us to catch this. Here's the link to the MR https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_request... we'll have a fix going live shortly
If you click the "View More" option at the bottom the scroll region expands to fill the view...but still a confusing UI
> $49/user/m...
The premium tier is $19/user/m, not $49. Still, I agree that even $19 is high relative to the competition. We're currently on the (soon to disappear) $4/user/m Gitlab plan and now I'm wasting time trying to figure out if we'll lose anything we care about by dropping down to the free tier.
The premium tier is $19/user/m, not $49. Still, I agree that even $19 is high relative to the competition. We're currently on the (soon to disappear) $4/user/m Gitlab plan and now I'm wasting time trying to figure out if we'll lose anything we care about by dropping down to the free tier.
Sorry, $49 was just a typo.
They offer tons of benefits for Ultimate edition. How could you possibly run a business without "Executive level insights"?
Yep, that's exactly the kind of language I'm talking about - wtf does that even mean?
Whoops, $49 was a typo - I meant $19 of course (can no longer edit my comment).
> $99/m for Ultimate eds?
There's a single bullet in that table that makes it all make sense:
> Free Guest users
Guest users can: * Create issues * Leave comments * Clone or download the project source
That sounds like it covers the use case for a substantial portion of people who currently have paid accounts.
So Basic -> Bronze -> Silver pricing pays for the increase in features. Ultimate/Gold/whatever includes price increases for features, as well as not having to pay for accounts for people who don't really use GitLab much at all.
I strongly suspect the Ultimate tier is geared towards large companies who's primary line of business is not technology. They have a lot of people who need minimal access to GitLab, and a small number of people who need to access GitLab a lot. It wouldn't be super surprising to me if the difference in cost between Silver and Gold is minimal for someone like Walmart or P&G because they can stop paying for accounts for PMs, helpdesk workers, the people that actually use the software, etc.
It's probably not really of much interest to a tech company because so many people need access to GitLab that you get very little gain from free Guests.
There's a single bullet in that table that makes it all make sense:
> Free Guest users
Guest users can: * Create issues * Leave comments * Clone or download the project source
That sounds like it covers the use case for a substantial portion of people who currently have paid accounts.
So Basic -> Bronze -> Silver pricing pays for the increase in features. Ultimate/Gold/whatever includes price increases for features, as well as not having to pay for accounts for people who don't really use GitLab much at all.
I strongly suspect the Ultimate tier is geared towards large companies who's primary line of business is not technology. They have a lot of people who need minimal access to GitLab, and a small number of people who need to access GitLab a lot. It wouldn't be super surprising to me if the difference in cost between Silver and Gold is minimal for someone like Walmart or P&G because they can stop paying for accounts for PMs, helpdesk workers, the people that actually use the software, etc.
It's probably not really of much interest to a tech company because so many people need access to GitLab that you get very little gain from free Guests.
Azure Devops is such a good product.
I’m really surprised it doesn’t get more love to be honest.
And the CLI is fully featured and well supported, and makes automating stuff, and building your own UIs ridiculously simple.
I’m really surprised it doesn’t get more love to be honest.
And the CLI is fully featured and well supported, and makes automating stuff, and building your own UIs ridiculously simple.
Because Microsoft isn’t signing big clients on to it anymore, as they are slowly trying to transition (it’s very early days still) to GitHub Enterprise. They probably won’t talk much about it until the missing features are replicated, but it’s coming. (Based on anecdotes on previous threads about Azure DevOps, and the fact that GitHub is a bit more user friendly).
Which is such a shame, because Azure DevOps is honestly better (apart from the CI system).
What don't you like about AzDo's CI system?
While technically you can do anything, there's no community discovery of CI scripts like with GitHub.
Afaik there isn't a Checks API equivalent, or it's not uses by the limited range of built-in CI functions.
And finally, the caching is terribly slow. It's faster to reinstall packages than to cache them, meaning you can't run a build in less than 3/4 minutes.
Afaik there isn't a Checks API equivalent, or it's not uses by the limited range of built-in CI functions.
And finally, the caching is terribly slow. It's faster to reinstall packages than to cache them, meaning you can't run a build in less than 3/4 minutes.
This is a surprising move to me. Seems like they are further deprioritizing trying to win small companies, which might make sense based on their revenue split, but I do wonder if it’s going to hamper them in the long term.
For enterprise users, $20/mo is not going to move the needle. But for a startup, that is actually a material spend, particularly given that Gitlab still don’t support monthly billing on subscriptions like most SaaS services do. (I would not be surprised if they lost a number of cost-conscious customers to GitHub due to the “annual only” pricing model.)
For user acquisition, broadly speaking you can acquire big customers in two ways; either you convince a big company to switch to your product, or you win a small company that then grows into a large one. The latter requires you to have mindshare and GitHub clearly wins on this count.
The risk with just trying to win large companies is that there is significant inertia involved in core tooling like CI/CD; to convince someone to switch off their current system will require a lot of benefit, and the amount of work only increases as the company gets bigger. It’s way easier to convince a startup to use Gitlab from the get-go than to convince someone to convert a 100-1000 person org.
So talking all of this through, I can see why Gitlab doesn’t want to scrap with GitHub over supporting all of the low-margin $5/mo companies, and wants to focus on higher margin enterprise deals. If they are seeing better performance in that segment, then jettisoning the $5/mo plan might let them focus on fewer customer profiles, and make the product more polished there. But it seems potentially risky, going all in on one sales strategy vs. having a diversified approach that gives some hedging.
For enterprise users, $20/mo is not going to move the needle. But for a startup, that is actually a material spend, particularly given that Gitlab still don’t support monthly billing on subscriptions like most SaaS services do. (I would not be surprised if they lost a number of cost-conscious customers to GitHub due to the “annual only” pricing model.)
For user acquisition, broadly speaking you can acquire big customers in two ways; either you convince a big company to switch to your product, or you win a small company that then grows into a large one. The latter requires you to have mindshare and GitHub clearly wins on this count.
The risk with just trying to win large companies is that there is significant inertia involved in core tooling like CI/CD; to convince someone to switch off their current system will require a lot of benefit, and the amount of work only increases as the company gets bigger. It’s way easier to convince a startup to use Gitlab from the get-go than to convince someone to convert a 100-1000 person org.
So talking all of this through, I can see why Gitlab doesn’t want to scrap with GitHub over supporting all of the low-margin $5/mo companies, and wants to focus on higher margin enterprise deals. If they are seeing better performance in that segment, then jettisoning the $5/mo plan might let them focus on fewer customer profiles, and make the product more polished there. But it seems potentially risky, going all in on one sales strategy vs. having a diversified approach that gives some hedging.
Well, this ruined my teams Tuesday. We are on the Bronze plan with over 300 users company wide.
My department of 40 does the vast majority (90% plus of all commits/MRs) of the coding in the company, but we enrolled everyone within operations as well so that they could contribute on occasion.
The rest of those users are never going to be worth spending $19 a month on, but it really sucks having to put up barriers from people who do like to contribute on occasion. Feels like we're going in the wrong direction here, so much for devops :(
My department of 40 does the vast majority (90% plus of all commits/MRs) of the coding in the company, but we enrolled everyone within operations as well so that they could contribute on occasion.
The rest of those users are never going to be worth spending $19 a month on, but it really sucks having to put up barriers from people who do like to contribute on occasion. Feels like we're going in the wrong direction here, so much for devops :(
Same for us - only a few users really need the subscription at all. The most only use basic features
You only need a user licenses to log in. Can't you just make the repos public (assuming you are self hosting) so that way anonymous users can still see everything?
Yeah, we are self hosting and everyone could have read access without much hassle. We are losing that long tail of contributors though as they won't be able to push any new commits with guest access.
Email a diff to someone who has access?
GitLab team member here. We are currently researching the non-developer use case. You can follow along here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/213185
If I can give you a strong hint: grandfather in everybody at todays rates and prices and simply drop the bronze plan from your new signup page. That way you keep your existing users happy. The last thing you want is to kill off your early adopters. Besides the very bad PR. I'm a huge gitlab advocate and this move sits wrong with me. Your 'bronze' users did not ask you to develop features that they probably won't use anyway so your justification to force them to pay more sounds hollow at best and disingenuous at worst. Fix it while you still can.
I'm struggling to see why you need further research 9 months down the road on such an obvious issue.
Just to put it in perspective, your lowest non-free tier is 50% more expensive than the standard Office365 Business subscription... for which non-dev does this make any kind of sense?
The fact that you then proceed to launch the new prices regardless of having a solution for this obvious issue is to me a really strong indicator that GitLab is not the way to go once we're moving away from the self-hosted JIRA later this year.
Just to put it in perspective, your lowest non-free tier is 50% more expensive than the standard Office365 Business subscription... for which non-dev does this make any kind of sense?
The fact that you then proceed to launch the new prices regardless of having a solution for this obvious issue is to me a really strong indicator that GitLab is not the way to go once we're moving away from the self-hosted JIRA later this year.
At this point we might as well switch to Jetbrains Space and drop Jira/gitlab all together.
I'm glad you're considering this.
We're an organisation that builds and runs products (mostly in the open but with occasional confidential issues). We are a silver member with about a dozen developers but 3x as non-developers who need to participate on issues.
Although most issues are open, there are occasionally confidential issues that staff need to be able to view and comment on. The entire annual seat license is required for every member, to work on only a handful of tickets. It's very poor value for money.
For the devs the license is reasonable value for money (we use CI, git, docker repos etc).
But for the majority of staff, and therefore the whole org, value for money is very bad. The GitLab pricing model gives us no option.
It's made it a more difficult sell in the organisation. Boasting about dev features leaves a bad taste in the mouth when only the minority of seat licenses actually need to use them.
We're an organisation that builds and runs products (mostly in the open but with occasional confidential issues). We are a silver member with about a dozen developers but 3x as non-developers who need to participate on issues.
Although most issues are open, there are occasionally confidential issues that staff need to be able to view and comment on. The entire annual seat license is required for every member, to work on only a handful of tickets. It's very poor value for money.
For the devs the license is reasonable value for money (we use CI, git, docker repos etc).
But for the majority of staff, and therefore the whole org, value for money is very bad. The GitLab pricing model gives us no option.
It's made it a more difficult sell in the organisation. Boasting about dev features leaves a bad taste in the mouth when only the minority of seat licenses actually need to use them.
You've been researching it for 5 years. How about stop researching and just do the easy thing that will bring GitLab lots of money?
100% this.
A large number of our users on GitLab are Ops, Artists, Marketing or similar groups that can utilize GitLab a little (like leaving comments, or doing straight commits, no ci/cd/security/etc). $20/mo/user means some don't get access and the Ultimate plan at $100/mo/user? Oh hell no. No one would have access to GitLab except for maybe a dozen core devs.
A large number of our users on GitLab are Ops, Artists, Marketing or similar groups that can utilize GitLab a little (like leaving comments, or doing straight commits, no ci/cd/security/etc). $20/mo/user means some don't get access and the Ultimate plan at $100/mo/user? Oh hell no. No one would have access to GitLab except for maybe a dozen core devs.
It seems like they could fix this by defining pricing based on active users.
I use a SaaS product and they only count users with 10 logins and changes per month as an actual user. This has let us “grow” infrequent users into frequent users.
I think having few barriers between internal user customers and dev is good. Making someone email their ticket in, or not letting someone watch an issue to see when it builds unless they pay $1000/year makes me find products with compatible license models.
I use a SaaS product and they only count users with 10 logins and changes per month as an actual user. This has let us “grow” infrequent users into frequent users.
I think having few barriers between internal user customers and dev is good. Making someone email their ticket in, or not letting someone watch an issue to see when it builds unless they pay $1000/year makes me find products with compatible license models.
Ruined our day as well.
This price hike in combination with the change of how they count users made it a 1100% price increase for us.
It went from having active devs in the organization being paid users to "anyone with guest access to a subproject" requiring a seat.
It also went from "you can have guests at no cost" to "you must pay seats for guest access".
And it wants payment on bot accounts as well, as they ALSO use a seat.
So, our organization went from 7 active users and 14 in the organization, to suddenly requiring 30+ seats. This includes us paying for people who are ONLY involved in the Open Source projects we have.
And then the price hike on top of that.
Let me just say it leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.
This price hike in combination with the change of how they count users made it a 1100% price increase for us.
It went from having active devs in the organization being paid users to "anyone with guest access to a subproject" requiring a seat.
It also went from "you can have guests at no cost" to "you must pay seats for guest access".
And it wants payment on bot accounts as well, as they ALSO use a seat.
So, our organization went from 7 active users and 14 in the organization, to suddenly requiring 30+ seats. This includes us paying for people who are ONLY involved in the Open Source projects we have.
And then the price hike on top of that.
Let me just say it leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.
The page mentions 89% of the features available in Starter being available in the free tier. Is there a good enumeration anywhere of what those features are and what they 11% that would be lost is?
I'll need to evaluate this for my company in the next year and that would be extremely helpful, as the new pricing grid of course does not include the phased out tier for comparison, which is the specific direct comparison I actually need to make here.
I'll need to evaluate this for my company in the next year and that would be extremely helpful, as the new pricing grid of course does not include the phased out tier for comparison, which is the specific direct comparison I actually need to make here.
Most of the features you can get for $4 per month for at Github you need to pay $49/mo for at Gitlab, such as the integration of security dependency scanning, secret scanning, dependabot alerts. My understanding is that you need to pay the top tier to get UI integrations for these things.
As the monorepo support could be better as it wouldn't support multiple reporter files, like junit xmls.
Personally, if I had the choice I would go for Github Enterprise. Big chance with Gitlab you have to pay for hosting your own Gitlab runners anyways.
As the monorepo support could be better as it wouldn't support multiple reporter files, like junit xmls.
Personally, if I had the choice I would go for Github Enterprise. Big chance with Gitlab you have to pay for hosting your own Gitlab runners anyways.
I see Gitlab's point about all the extra features they have built, but the problem for me is that I just don't need them.
What I do need is a reliable remote git repo, a container registry, a CI system, and about 2500-5000 CI minutes per month. $50 a year for that seemed very reasonable or even a bit too cheap, but $250 is kind of stretching it a bit.
I think the problem here is actually the existence of the free plan. It probably isn't bringing in customers that Gitlab would want, and it is taking up space where an effective starter plan should be. Why not replace it with a slightly beefed up "basic" plan at about $120/year? They could throw in a 3 month trial at the start to ease the barrier of initial sign-up.
What I do need is a reliable remote git repo, a container registry, a CI system, and about 2500-5000 CI minutes per month. $50 a year for that seemed very reasonable or even a bit too cheap, but $250 is kind of stretching it a bit.
I think the problem here is actually the existence of the free plan. It probably isn't bringing in customers that Gitlab would want, and it is taking up space where an effective starter plan should be. Why not replace it with a slightly beefed up "basic" plan at about $120/year? They could throw in a 3 month trial at the start to ease the barrier of initial sign-up.
Yeah, I'm in favor of axing the free plan in favor of a beefed up basic tier that's cheaper than premium. A lot of free users would probably be livid though.
Does it matter? GitHub are the inevitable winners of any race to the bottom. GitLab would be better off trying to retain actual paying customers like me, instead of encouraging me to read https://docs.github.com/en/actions/learn-github-actions/migr....
Gitlab only established a foothold thanks to free users, when Github did not have free private repos. Free users sooner or later upgrade to paid plans, when they really want this or that feature.
Gitlab in many ways stays relevant by being “the nicer github” - if they become all about the money, they’ll die like bitbucket.
Gitlab in many ways stays relevant by being “the nicer github” - if they become all about the money, they’ll die like bitbucket.
Replying to my own comment: I see that GitLab are actually offering a pretty generous transition deal for existing Bronze customers with less than 25 customers ($6/$9/$15 in yr 1/2/3).
Honestly that is enough to retain me. I hope they open it up more widely as an intro offer.
Honestly that is enough to retain me. I hope they open it up more widely as an intro offer.
I’m not sure how pulling the rug out from under paying customers is helping retain paying customers.
And a race to bottom is creating an open source product “GitLab”, funding it with donations, creating a separate company “GitLab.com” which makes money by supporting GitLab, and at some point creating an entirely new product that isn’t open source but making that GitLab while letting the original open source version basically languish into something that is not useful at all.
I’m constantly surprised by why they don’t get more flak. I understand the developers are very active in the HN community and that is appreciated, but GitLab has been among the worse companies in how they’ve treated their open source, and now paying, users.
And a race to bottom is creating an open source product “GitLab”, funding it with donations, creating a separate company “GitLab.com” which makes money by supporting GitLab, and at some point creating an entirely new product that isn’t open source but making that GitLab while letting the original open source version basically languish into something that is not useful at all.
I’m constantly surprised by why they don’t get more flak. I understand the developers are very active in the HN community and that is appreciated, but GitLab has been among the worse companies in how they’ve treated their open source, and now paying, users.
I'd encourage you to take a fresh look at the Free tier. 89% of the features in Bronze/Starter are available in the Free tier - including the more than 450 new features that were added to Free in the last year.
This blog post highlights some of those features that were added to Free last year including Service Desk, Feature Flags, Code Quality, and more: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/03/30/new-features-to-cor...
This blog post highlights some of those features that were added to Free last year including Service Desk, Feature Flags, Code Quality, and more: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/03/30/new-features-to-cor...
> I think the problem here is actually the existence of the free plan.
Only because the next paid tier is expensive (even more so now).
I would absolutely pay $5 a month for a higher tier but GitLab doesn't like money I guess.
Only because the next paid tier is expensive (even more so now).
I would absolutely pay $5 a month for a higher tier but GitLab doesn't like money I guess.
Very sorry to learn about this very disappointing news about upselling a product that was worth every single penny and that I have been using professionally for the last four years. It is not really the price hike that worries here, but rather the realization that we're locked into a product with a volatile price that can double or even triple at any time.
Quintuple I think?
I guess the one thing I don't understand is why removing the tier does not split its features between the two adjacent tiers. In this case all features become the tier up. That makes me feel this is simply and effectively a price raise, pure and simple.
Wow, this is so expensive. Really glad we don't use gitlab, which appears to be approximately 10x the per user price pay for these products on a standalone basis. I think if this was billed monthly and cost about 1/5 the level, it would be in the ballpark.
Maybe they are just getting their clock cleaned by GitHub so are trying to be a pure enterprise play, and dump startups.
Maybe they are just getting their clock cleaned by GitHub so are trying to be a pure enterprise play, and dump startups.
One of my favorite Mad magazine cartoons has this patient sitting with his dentist. The dentist tells him the cost of the dental work, and the payment plans for it. The patient says "sounds like I'm buying a car!" The dentist replies: "Yes, I am!" I think some of the comments here are confused about how pricing works and why GitLab is doing it. And, IMHO, there is so much value in even the free open source version that they'll have to do a lot worse to lose my business.
Does anyone know if the open source (totally free) version, under these new pricing guidelines, permits you to charge people for accounts on a self-hosted GitLab instance? Am I able to run a business based on GitLab without paying a penny to GitLab as long as I use the open source features?
Does anyone know if the open source (totally free) version, under these new pricing guidelines, permits you to charge people for accounts on a self-hosted GitLab instance? Am I able to run a business based on GitLab without paying a penny to GitLab as long as I use the open source features?
Of course you can, it would not be open source / free software otherwise. (Yes, some people are attempting to redefine "open source" to other meanings, but gitlab does no such thing and Open Source GitLab is truly Open Source)
But to be clear, Open a source GitLab is not the same thing as Free GitLab.
It's interesting, Gitlab is one of the products I most want my organisation to pay for but am constantly defeated by their pricing plans.
It sort of maps onto this decision because what I consistently found was that Bronze offered almost no value in terms of features but the step up to Silver was so big that there was no way we could dive in at that level. So we just lived on the free tier and by and large get by with that.
Part of the problem is having a lot of users who interact with the system at a fairly casual level. To license everyone at Silver/Premium would be really prohibitive. But licensing a small number up to Premium and leaving the rest on free or bronze doesn't work either.
Gitlab is one of my favorite products so I really want it to succeed.
It sort of maps onto this decision because what I consistently found was that Bronze offered almost no value in terms of features but the step up to Silver was so big that there was no way we could dive in at that level. So we just lived on the free tier and by and large get by with that.
Part of the problem is having a lot of users who interact with the system at a fairly casual level. To license everyone at Silver/Premium would be really prohibitive. But licensing a small number up to Premium and leaving the rest on free or bronze doesn't work either.
Gitlab is one of my favorite products so I really want it to succeed.
I'm in the same boat, our organisation has about 500 potential users. However only a small number need the paid features.
If there was a way to assign licenses to groups or individual users in the self-hosted version we would be paying for it already.
Same as you I really want Gitlab to do well, but the lack of options with licensing makes it difficult to adopt. A lot of other enterprise software allows for per-user license assignment like Office 365, Salesforce, Jira, etc...
If there was a way to assign licenses to groups or individual users in the self-hosted version we would be paying for it already.
Same as you I really want Gitlab to do well, but the lack of options with licensing makes it difficult to adopt. A lot of other enterprise software allows for per-user license assignment like Office 365, Salesforce, Jira, etc...
Seems like there's too much bait-and-switch happening here to trust GitLab anymore. They enacted an account-locking change to their MFA reset policy without so much as an e-mail to effected users over the summer, and now they're increasing their pricing. There must be a way for GitLab to grow that doesn't involve them inconveniencing existing users like this.
I love GitLab. It has really won me over versus GitHub over the past couple of years. I've found it to be much more suited to enterprise use.
That said, they really need to work on the pricing model. We have 1,000 potential users. But only 300 of them would really use all of the features. It is a tough sell to pay equally for all of them.
I'd really love to use some of the features of ultimate, but the pricing model makes it a complete non-starter. It is an order of magnitude more expensive than the hodgepodge of tools it would replace if we have to pay ~100k a month for it. Our account exec has offered to talk about discounts and stuff, but it is just too far out there and too much risk since the lock-in would be so high.
That said, they really need to work on the pricing model. We have 1,000 potential users. But only 300 of them would really use all of the features. It is a tough sell to pay equally for all of them.
I'd really love to use some of the features of ultimate, but the pricing model makes it a complete non-starter. It is an order of magnitude more expensive than the hodgepodge of tools it would replace if we have to pay ~100k a month for it. Our account exec has offered to talk about discounts and stuff, but it is just too far out there and too much risk since the lock-in would be so high.
This is it. My engineering team needs all the features. My product manager only needs basic ticket creation access.
Why are these two types of users costing me the same amount?
Why are these two types of users costing me the same amount?
If you have 1000 users, your sales rep should be giving you discounts based on your usage scenario. What did they say?
"Our account exec has offered to talk about discounts and stuff, but it is just too far out there and too much risk since the lock-in would be so high."
We just recently purchased a license (~200 users) for self-hosted "starter". There was no mention of a change to the pricing models, and this forced change to "premium" doesn't add any value for us. The things that would give us value include multi-level epics, but "ultimate" is just way too expensive.
Very disappointed in this direction from Gitlab. I'll be advocating for us to switch platforms.
Very disappointed in this direction from Gitlab. I'll be advocating for us to switch platforms.
If you were on starter anyway, why would you this affect you? Just keeping using free?
Gitlab didn't make all starter features part of the free tier. Now we're forced to pay for premium without gaining any features relevant for our team.
Edit: FYI starter was previously a paid tier.
Edit: FYI starter was previously a paid tier.
Starter isn’t the free tier. It’s the self hosted equivalent of Bronze. And that’s also being removed.
Eliminating the bronze-tier sounds foolish to me. I’m a bronze customer, and I’m definitely not going to opt to pay for a 5x price increase, because I don’t need all those extra bells and whistles.
Getting funding to pay for something that has free alternatives is already difficult in corporate settings. Having your cheapest (non-free) option be $228 per user per year is a pretty hard sell, especially for those self-hosting Gitlab.
Super annoying to have all the bells and whistles they keep adding being used as a justification to jack up the prices when you don’t actually use those bells and whistles.
Getting funding to pay for something that has free alternatives is already difficult in corporate settings. Having your cheapest (non-free) option be $228 per user per year is a pretty hard sell, especially for those self-hosting Gitlab.
Super annoying to have all the bells and whistles they keep adding being used as a justification to jack up the prices when you don’t actually use those bells and whistles.
GitLab doesn't own Azure - they rent. Either they get repos in every major cloud data center or they lose on network transfer latency/cost.
I work in an organization which is part of a huge multinational. We've successfully managed to spearhead Gitlab into our giant company, and it's slowly making inroads.
until this price change
And now we're looking at alternatives. Sorry, the price hike for our case (~500 devs) is hefty, to the point where we're willing to eat crow and go with Gerrit+Jira+Confluence+Jenkins, and basically disentangle ourselves.
So like, I guess it makes financial sense in the short term? But definitely will hurt in the mid-long term. You've lost us at least as a customer. And no--we aren't going to talk to our account leader about this, or discuss any discounts or anything.
until this price change
And now we're looking at alternatives. Sorry, the price hike for our case (~500 devs) is hefty, to the point where we're willing to eat crow and go with Gerrit+Jira+Confluence+Jenkins, and basically disentangle ourselves.
So like, I guess it makes financial sense in the short term? But definitely will hurt in the mid-long term. You've lost us at least as a customer. And no--we aren't going to talk to our account leader about this, or discuss any discounts or anything.
Have they finally axed True Ups?
> For customers that require more control across their DevOps processes and support, the GitLab Premium tier is a better suited offering than Bronze/Starter.
How about you leave that for the customers to decide?
How about you leave that for the customers to decide?
They essentially said they are not at the top of the post because its not profitable enough to keep the bronze tier. I appreciate the honesty tbh
That seems unlikely to me. The marginal cost of Gitlab must be pretty near zero.
I agree with them that most people probably want the $240/year plan, but their existing customers clearly chose the bronze plan for a reason.
I agree with them that most people probably want the $240/year plan, but their existing customers clearly chose the bronze plan for a reason.
We are a small company and have been paying for GitLab's Bronze plan for about two years now.
We have about 5 devs, but the bulk of our GitLab users are non-technical (sales, customer support, etc.) who probably do not even know what git is. Those users are lurkers, but their input can be valuable and if possible I'd like them to be able to login onto GitLab.
Getting billed $228/users/year upfront is a harsh blow. I don't think I will ever be able to justify such cost to our CEO.
The way I see it now, we will renew our Bronze plan during the one-year grace period, while we are preparing the transition to another tool. Hopefully, we never really integrated our processes too much with GitLab, so we can transition whenever we need to.
If the "per user" subscription is to be that expensive, then I would suggest GitLab to provide a monthly subscription and/or a "per committer" subscription instead of a "per user" subscription.
We have about 5 devs, but the bulk of our GitLab users are non-technical (sales, customer support, etc.) who probably do not even know what git is. Those users are lurkers, but their input can be valuable and if possible I'd like them to be able to login onto GitLab.
Getting billed $228/users/year upfront is a harsh blow. I don't think I will ever be able to justify such cost to our CEO.
The way I see it now, we will renew our Bronze plan during the one-year grace period, while we are preparing the transition to another tool. Hopefully, we never really integrated our processes too much with GitLab, so we can transition whenever we need to.
If the "per user" subscription is to be that expensive, then I would suggest GitLab to provide a monthly subscription and/or a "per committer" subscription instead of a "per user" subscription.
Per comitter would be ideal, viewing source and interacting via tickets is something that is usually a secondary stakeholder community that is larger than the score development group (in every org I see adoptjng forge style tools)
I'm currently just using a single-user Bronze subscription for consulting work. I was previously thinking of adding customers and other end users to the plan, but it already gets far too expensive. None of these users would be developers; it would primarily be so they could download sources, read and comment on issues, and generally observe what was going on.
The one-size-fits-all fixed-tier subscription makes no sense from the point of view of an end user. I would love to have users/projects with differing access levels. Likewise, GitLab is too bloated; I might want one or two features from the higher tiers but I can't justify paying for them. Why not let people pay for the features they actually need selectively?
I've also not been too impressed by the inflexibility of GitLab's billing practices. Not only is it fixed annual subscription, if you don't pay by auto-renewal you have to renew the subscription on a specific week. You can't even pay them in advance! I was effectively forced into the auto-renewal due to not being around on that specific week, and in the following year when I was winding up the company and finalising the accounts, I got a surprise bill due to that coerced auto-renewal. I was not happy with that. They really need to get their billing system sorted out.
The one-size-fits-all fixed-tier subscription makes no sense from the point of view of an end user. I would love to have users/projects with differing access levels. Likewise, GitLab is too bloated; I might want one or two features from the higher tiers but I can't justify paying for them. Why not let people pay for the features they actually need selectively?
I've also not been too impressed by the inflexibility of GitLab's billing practices. Not only is it fixed annual subscription, if you don't pay by auto-renewal you have to renew the subscription on a specific week. You can't even pay them in advance! I was effectively forced into the auto-renewal due to not being around on that specific week, and in the following year when I was winding up the company and finalising the accounts, I got a surprise bill due to that coerced auto-renewal. I was not happy with that. They really need to get their billing system sorted out.
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.
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.
In the past few years, my org has gone from Gerrit to Jira, and recently Jira to Gitlab. I'm guessing we're in for another move with these pricing changes.
Wanted to see the pricing page, but the burger menu button isn’t working at all. Anyone else? I am on Safari, iOS 13.
Here's a link to the pricing page: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/
If you're still having issues with the menu, please create an issue using this template: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/issues/new?is...
If you're still having issues with the menu, please create an issue using this template: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/issues/new?is...
The big problem of gitlab you got free version and expensive one. I’d rather switch to GitHub , they offer subset but it’s much better connected with the rest of the world
Looked into gitlab (official instance) for an academic project, it is horribly painful to setup an educational account and requires lots of writing. Took a few minutes on github. I guess that will not help pushing their product to the next generation.
I'm an individual (hobby?) user. I switched to Gitlab and purchased a subscription not for features but as a hedge against them selling out to another major company with a conflict of interest, but at 4x the cost I can't justify that. So much for putting my money where my mouth is.
I looked around and nobody except Github has a non-free hobbyist tier AFAICT. Is "paid personal git service" just not a thing? It's either free or you're an enterprise customer?
I looked around and nobody except Github has a non-free hobbyist tier AFAICT. Is "paid personal git service" just not a thing? It's either free or you're an enterprise customer?
Sourcehut (https://sr.ht)?
There is a real need in the market for a nicely done Git frontend, with support for more advanced processes (approvals, etc.). Not everyone needs the devops stuff. Please reconsider your tiering @Gitlab.
Almost all the comments in this thread can be summarised as:
GitLab: your product is great; your pricing is madness.
This removal of Starter doesn’t seem to have helped anyone except GitLab. You really need to look at how you’re pricing your service and seriously consider much stronger user role management.
GitLab pricing is unworkable for many smaller teams, so we stay on Free and give you nothing at all. The pricing actively discourages whole-org adoption - no way are we paying $19/mo for a non-dev user who would rarely use the system. So we pay nothing at all and keep everyone on free, because that user does still need some access, so you get nothing at all.
To be clear - I love GitLab and I want to pay for more features. I don’t want Premium for nothing but the way it’s billed is completely impractical and hard to get value from for small dev teams, as we have to think very carefully about who gets an account.
I would love it if you’d think about allowing different users on an instance to have a different plan - like with Microsoft 365, where some users have the full works and others just have an email inbox. I need 5 Premium users, 3 Starter users and 2 Free users, for example. You’d now be getting payment for 8 users instead of 0 in my scenario!
Not all my users need Premium; some do. Consequently, we all stay on Free, because I can only justify/afford the pricing for the handful of Premium licenses I actually need.
I really hope this makes sense - there is money waiting for you, and I know many other small dev shop owners feel the same way, but you’re not doing anything to claim it!
You need to look within yourself and work out how you can sell your product to smaller teams in a way that makes sense for everyone. It kinda feels like you just don’t care about your roots anymore and that you only want Ultimate users on your service; I hope you don’t make the mistake of turning your back on the users who started you off and who vocally endorse and support your product.
GitLab: your product is great; your pricing is madness.
This removal of Starter doesn’t seem to have helped anyone except GitLab. You really need to look at how you’re pricing your service and seriously consider much stronger user role management.
GitLab pricing is unworkable for many smaller teams, so we stay on Free and give you nothing at all. The pricing actively discourages whole-org adoption - no way are we paying $19/mo for a non-dev user who would rarely use the system. So we pay nothing at all and keep everyone on free, because that user does still need some access, so you get nothing at all.
To be clear - I love GitLab and I want to pay for more features. I don’t want Premium for nothing but the way it’s billed is completely impractical and hard to get value from for small dev teams, as we have to think very carefully about who gets an account.
I would love it if you’d think about allowing different users on an instance to have a different plan - like with Microsoft 365, where some users have the full works and others just have an email inbox. I need 5 Premium users, 3 Starter users and 2 Free users, for example. You’d now be getting payment for 8 users instead of 0 in my scenario!
Not all my users need Premium; some do. Consequently, we all stay on Free, because I can only justify/afford the pricing for the handful of Premium licenses I actually need.
I really hope this makes sense - there is money waiting for you, and I know many other small dev shop owners feel the same way, but you’re not doing anything to claim it!
You need to look within yourself and work out how you can sell your product to smaller teams in a way that makes sense for everyone. It kinda feels like you just don’t care about your roots anymore and that you only want Ultimate users on your service; I hope you don’t make the mistake of turning your back on the users who started you off and who vocally endorse and support your product.
I have exactly the same issue.
BTW that seems to be a recurrent issue with Salas products, I often like something but can't transition to giving paid plans due terrible pricing models.
BTW that seems to be a recurrent issue with Salas products, I often like something but can't transition to giving paid plans due terrible pricing models.
Speaks so out of my heart: We really love Gitlab. But as small, pure development company the pricing of the commercial offerings is (and was) unfeasible for us.
We'd LOVE to have a cheap/free basic Git-Service for all our 100 developer & project participant and have on-demand additional, advanced features like full DevOps for the developers in smaller teams/projects (5~10).
Convincing management to pay $1200/yr – or even $230/yr for just everybody won't work.
We'd LOVE to have a cheap/free basic Git-Service for all our 100 developer & project participant and have on-demand additional, advanced features like full DevOps for the developers in smaller teams/projects (5~10).
Convincing management to pay $1200/yr – or even $230/yr for just everybody won't work.
You really hit the problem exactly.
Instead of doing that, they are removing the Starter tier.
I bet next they'll be double the price, then dropping the free tier.
Then five years later wonder why their company isn't doing well.
Instead of doing that, they are removing the Starter tier.
I bet next they'll be double the price, then dropping the free tier.
Then five years later wonder why their company isn't doing well.
Crazy price bumps.
I love open source and want to support GutLab but it is now significantly cheaper to use something like Azure DevOps instead: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/devops/azu...
I love open source and want to support GutLab but it is now significantly cheaper to use something like Azure DevOps instead: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/devops/azu...
Just last week I was starting the process of migrating a client (6 users total) from Bitbucket/Trello over to Gitlab Bronze.
Not any more.
That price hike is nuts and well out of the grasp of many small startups watching their cashflow!
Not any more.
That price hike is nuts and well out of the grasp of many small startups watching their cashflow!
You're pricing was off already anyway, considering we don't use most of the stuff you push upon us. Peculiar timing, Space was just released, you worsen your plans and get way too expensive. I kinda get the feeling you want to narrow down your target audience.
We'll probably switch to Space or something else, considering that we only use merge requests, CI and the repo itself anyway.
We'll probably switch to Space or something else, considering that we only use merge requests, CI and the repo itself anyway.
Okay this is bad. I had just convinced management to get us on Bronze Plan, now it's gone. Intially the whole team ~10 Dev's were in Bitbucket, was considering between GitHub and GitLab since Gitlab allowed importing pull request issues, whereas GitHub support just asked me to write my own plugin for the same.
So, who is considering what alternatives? We are using GitLab only for git ui, as I put a stop to using it any deeper due to a questionable open-core model.
I've been a big proponent of GitLab but this doesn't look at all good.
I work at a consultancy and the word over the past day from many of our clients after hearing this is that they're now looking to move off GitLab.
Going from $5.20AUD/user/month to $24.50AUD/user/month would be a huge price increase, especially when most of them only needed a paid license just to enable the MR approvals feature.
One of them has around 300 users, this will change their bill from around $18,000/yr to a $88,000/yr.
I understand they were losing money on Bronze subscriptions, but I'm hoping they did consider other options such as potentially scaling back some of the (many) features that are baked into the platform. For example out of the many GitLab installs I've seen - I've not once seen anyone use or care about the Kubernetes/Infa orchestration and monitoring features. From what I can tell people mostly care about MRs and the workflow around them, CI/CD, Security Scanning, code Issues and Kanban and Wiki functionality.
I feel like as a product - it's trying to do too much and really what most people want is an alternative to Github, Jira and Confluence.
I work at a consultancy and the word over the past day from many of our clients after hearing this is that they're now looking to move off GitLab.
Going from $5.20AUD/user/month to $24.50AUD/user/month would be a huge price increase, especially when most of them only needed a paid license just to enable the MR approvals feature.
One of them has around 300 users, this will change their bill from around $18,000/yr to a $88,000/yr.
I understand they were losing money on Bronze subscriptions, but I'm hoping they did consider other options such as potentially scaling back some of the (many) features that are baked into the platform. For example out of the many GitLab installs I've seen - I've not once seen anyone use or care about the Kubernetes/Infa orchestration and monitoring features. From what I can tell people mostly care about MRs and the workflow around them, CI/CD, Security Scanning, code Issues and Kanban and Wiki functionality.
I feel like as a product - it's trying to do too much and really what most people want is an alternative to Github, Jira and Confluence.
This appears to be a simplification though, which works for me.