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Comment by imonabout | Hacker News Reader

I don't think the fact that GitLab is free for basic users is very discoverable from the site. You've got the "features" tab, which leads to what seems to be the option of downloading a community edition, which makes it look like GitLab is only offering the code itself but not hosting from their, and the enterprise edition for some licensing fee (I suppose). Then you've got "sign in", but no "sign up", which leads me to ask "but then how do I sign up", which most naturally (for me) leads me to the "pricing" tab. Now this page only shows "trial" and the different priced tiers.

But if I press "sign in", I am able to sign up, with no notice about it being just a limited (45 day) trial. So so far I'm assuming that this is a perpetually free account, though I'm not completely sure yet...

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Visiting www.gitlab.com redirects me to https://about.gitlab.com/. There are three big options:

1. Community edition 2. Enterprise edition 3. On our server

The 3rd option has this text: Free hosting for private repos? Sign up to get unlimited repos and collaborators.

Clicking on Sign up takes me to https://gitlab.com/users/sign_in which has clear options to sign in or sign up. It also has the text: GitLab.com offers free unlimited (private) repositories and unlimited collaborators, please sign up or in on the right.

In lesser words, it seems pretty clear-cut to me. They offer unlimited free hosting for your repos. I did not see any trial period anywhere. Maybe you went to the Enterprise option?

I'm sorry.

Hmm, the front page (https://about.gitlab.com/) lists "GitLab.com — On Our Server — Free hosting for private repos? Sign up to get unlimited repos and collaborators. — Sign Up", but I get that it's a bit confusing that the features and pricing pages don't mention anything about it.

To clear things up: GitLab.com is completely free, with unlimited projects and collaborators. GitLab CE is open source and completely free. GitLab EE costs money and has a 45-day trial.

I definitely think there's a discoverability issue there.

1. The Hosted CTA is the right-most one. People don't read that one. Eyes naturally go to the first CTA, and then compare it to the 2nd one. Based on the first 2, I expect the 3rd one to be another downloadable package, not a hosted option, so I don't read it.

2. The top nav-link is "gitlab.com" not "hosted service". If I don't know that gitlab.com is a git hosting service, I'll never look there.

3. As mentioned, features + pricing don't mention gitlab.com, so once you get off the front page, you lose any hints of a hosted option unless you know what the "gitlab.com" link is for.

4. The first headline that my eyes go to below the fold is:

  Self-hosted, scalable and updated monthly

That implies to me that "gitlab" is (exclusively) a self-hosted product, and isn't available as a SaaS option. Yes, it does also say "Or use our free SaaS GitLab.com" but you can't really expect people to read the text immediately below a headline that (effectively) says "not what you're looking for"

Right now, since you're advising people to go self-hosted rather than gitlab.com, that might all be working in your favour. But when you get the performance + reliability of gitlab.com sorted out, I'd strongly advise you to make the SaaS option a lot clearer.

(I realise that I could submit a patch to index.html, but I don't think my 10 minutes of hacking is going to get you to the best outcome)

I think you've described better than me why one might overlook certain things. I was far from clear on that when I originally wrote my post.

Your account on gitlab.com is completly free and permanent unless you decide to delete it yourself.

The 45 day trial is for the case when you want to host gitlab-ee yourself on your own server.

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