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Comment by chbrosso | Hacker News Reader

I've struggled to understand how the ultimate plan can be priced as high as $99/user/month. What kind of company can afford this service price?

It's the only way to have access to epics, a feature quite standard for Ajile project management. As a result, we're sticking to the Community Edition, so it's a loss of business for GitLab.

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This.

Here's the story - I'm a dev, I discovered GitLab ~4 years ago, been using it since, we paid for Enterprise plan immediately and are self-hosting it (for internal use).

I work with code. I can't context switch between an app for code, app for CI, app for CD, app for orchestration, app for issues, JIRA, mail, Slack (you get the idea) AND be productive. There's just too much white noise. I want to use a few tools, minimize context switching and do my work.

I'd like to use GitLab alone, focus on business logic I've to code and keep an agile board that my team and I can use.

And here comes GitLab - with a price of $99 per user. It'd cost us $25 000 a month. Just to get an agile board.

So what we did was - we said "screw that, they completely missed the point", I started playing with Gogs: https://gogs.io/ and I decided we can develop a tiny agile board within a few days to suit our needs, integrate it with gogs and ditch GitLab.

I understand there's business around GitLab, I know there are bills to pay and appetites to satisfy but seriously guys - when a dev's bullshit meter goes off (and mine did), you can tell someone made a bad call.

As much as I got used to GitLab's quirks and everything, I'm really now looking forward to replace it - simply due to the fact I felt like they want to rip me off for a meager feature.

It would have been AMAZING if I could get an agile board and have GitLab help me with 60% of the extra-tooling besides my IDE, but nope - someone was too greedy.

I saw many people complaining about this RIDICULOUS pricing, and even more people defend it - that made me give up arguing. From my POV, pricing is ridiculous, GitLab's been marked as yet another company that started off good and started turning evil (hi Google), I'm looking into alternatives - just like I found GitLab when I looked for GitHub alternative.

The features you mention (code editing, CI, CD, orchestration, issues, Web IDE, agile board) are available in all tiers of GitLab, including the free open source version and the one for $4 per user per month (paid annually).

What are the top features what you get with other software that are not in the free version of GitLab?

IMHO, this is the biggest feature that should be considered for the smaller paid tiers:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/issues/2105

The kind of people I would like to have as free users wouldn't even label issues. They'd submit an issue and I'd have to deal with it. Think entry level issue tracking, not a JIRA competitor (for my needs).

Also, being able to mix tiers would be great. The way Microsoft does Office 365 is awesome. Each user is on a plan that gives them exactly the features they need.

GitLab is really weird in a way. I think it's a really good product, but, at the same time, I don't want to invite anyone to use my self-hosted instance and I don't bother learning about the features in the paid tiers. The big issue for me is that I'm a long way off from being able to pay $1200/year per user, so there's no point in learning about any of the "expensive" features.

I know I'm not worth having as a customer in terms of profit, but I know people who are. I'm also a lot more willing (and able) to experiment with new features and workflows. There's got to be _some_ value on the low end to make an open core product practical.

If you ever decide to allow mixing of tiers for self-hosted, maybe you could include some free licenses. 1 Ultimate, 2 Premium, etc. would have almost no impact on revenue from large instances, but would be a significant help to small developers in terms of the cost average of their first 5-10 users. I think it would also be beneficial for the first several users to have access to most features because that makes it more likely someone like me will build using those features.

For comparison, the first 10 full features users in a self-hosted Atlassian setup are very inexpensive.

> The kind of people I would like to have as free users wouldn't even label issues. They'd submit an issue and I'd have to deal with it.

I would just create a web-form with simple auth, which would post issues onto GitLab via API call.

Obviously correct me if I'm wrong, but hasn't some of the stuff mentioned by the poster migrated from a higher tier to a lower tier over time? I get the impression that the poster's experience was a while ago...

All of these have been in free/core since they got released as far as I remember.

Oh, ok, fair enough. I was just thinking back to an evaluation we did on GitLab, but it seems I may have misremembered.

We actually ended up going with GitLab, but we cannot currently really justify the price tag for the Enterprise edition even though we want just a few of the features :/. FWIW, I think a high-but-fixed-price could work better, but that's obviously just from a customer perspective -- I'm sure you have a lot more information on what works wrt. monetization. I will say that we are actively looking for alternatives because we are a dev company and we want all the things, but realistically... it's not going to happen in the next year or two.

Thanks! What tier of the Enterprise Edition can't you justify the price tag of? Gold/Ultimate? Are you on Silver/Premium now?

The security testing should absolutely not be in the highest tier.

Share your work so others can use it, please.

I was at Gitlab Commit London and myself and colleagues raised this with a few Gitlab employees. They seem to be aware their jump from Premium to Ultimate is too big. At their feedback booth I passed on that it would be ideal to pay for what you use.

We use a separate issue tracker so any of that isn't relevant for us, but some of the security would be ideal.

Likewise, we have user accounts for non-development departments (Legal/Compliance/etc) that wouldn't be interested in SAST, for example. If we jumped to Ultimate we would have to pay monthly for those users to access features that never would use.

As I said, they do seem to be aware of this. I wouldn't be surprised if they came up with a different arrangement for Ultimate in the near future.

I’ve raised similar concerns as well, especially with the same argument about non-development departments.

However, with the Ultimate plan you also get free guest users, which could serve well for most users who are not developers.

Should look at Clubhouse for org wide project management . Integrates tightly with GitLab. Soon to release full Confluence replacement too

That's also part of the problem. They don't have a good strategy around these lite users.

We were able to justify it because the automation would have taken a FTE to impliment. The cost was more than half that for us.

That is the idea. We are allowing more automation in for example security testing https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/dev-sec-ops/ and portfolio planning https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/group/epics/

We used to discount our top tier heavily when we just introduced it while we were adding the features to create more value.

In our fiscal quarter that ended last month the average price per user for the top tier was above $1000 per year for the first time. And the top tier was 22% of our IACV https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/sales/#incremental-annual-... last quarter. I hope this makes it plausible that some of our users are starting to see the value.

I agree. 99 is a lot of money and basic things like epics should not be exclusive to a super expensive edition.

GitHub enterprise is much higher and doesn't even include CI/CD. In addition other CI tools I've seen quoted in the $300/seat range.

Gitlab is a steal at a $99 price point compared to other tools.

what? github enterprise is 1/5 that cost. and what about github actions? they provide 50k minutes/month for enterprise https://github.com/features/actions

To be fair, GitHub Actions is a relatively new thing and I'm not even sure it was already opened to the general public (that is, to anyone who didn't signed up for the beta). It's understandable if GitHub Actions isn't yet a part of the general public's mental landscape.

It's $250/user/YEAR, not per month.

I thought GitHub enterprise is $250/yr/user. Which is only around $21/month. My info is prob really old though. Guessing they changed.

exactly, the gap is too high, and while being a an absolute gitlab fanboy (been converting all the companies I've been since 2012 and gitlab 5), but here I've no traction to say "let's ditch Jira and switch to ultimate, (we're currently premium), because for 10,20 more dollar, we have both, and yes as other said, suddenly with these features you want to onboard much more people , so you both pay more , and you pay more :)

I agree. Their pricing needs fixed for sure. The lowest paid price isn't bad, and even the middle one, but the top one is way overpriced.

It would also be nice if they introduced some sort of pricing for small orgs, especially for one people shops.

Yes quite steep if you have enough devs you can pay for in-house gitlab server + admin

yeah atlassian pricing is way more affordable for small teams. (i.e. 10€/y for everything for a team of ten or below, but they have way higher server costs)

Atlassian starter pricing basically gives the product away to teams with a demonstrated ability to pay, so that they'll keep paying when they grow beyond the starter pricing. It's a false economy unless you could somehow guarantee that you'll never grow beyond 10 users.

But if you grow beyond 10 you are being successful. In other words. It is a nice problem to have if you are barely starting.

What kind of established company can’t afford that? For engineers, it represents less then 1% (often less then even .5%) of the fully loaded cost of an FTE.

Plenty of (in fact most) companies don’t pay SF/SV/NYC salaries, especially outside the U.S.

Depends on your market.

And your margins.

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