That said, this move seems 100% reasonable. I care about having a free tier. If they were killing the free tier, I'd be sad. But if I'm not paying anything, I'm okay being required to make my CI/CD pipeline efficient for my benefactor. I'd even take less than 400, gladly.
I don't think he feels guilty. I think he feels the risk of becoming dependent upon a service when the service is clearly unprofitable.
Paradoxically, a lower free tier makes me a lot more likely to use Gitlab CI now, since I now know they know their costs and limits, and from now on, not eating the cost for a future drop of the hammer in an undetermined timeframe.
The idea is that instead of paying Google/Facebook to display adds in the hopes that it will convert people as leads and hopefully down the line as a paying customer, it's usually much much cheaper to provide a free plan instead, which helps out as a "trial" of the final product.
Despite the sales factor, it also helps you get real users early on which can provide invaluable feedback to you, and help you prioritize the parts of the software that has real need versus what you imagine that people would want instead.
To be clear, you store all your code on Gitlab's servers (i.e. not self-hosting git instance) but just "outsource" the CI/CD work to your homelab? That's my ideal.
The omnibus-installer (for gitlab itself) works - but knowing a bit about rails (gitlab is a ror monolith) - it's a bit terrifying.
But the runner is very nice.
The runner will start jobs that do the real building (or whatever you have coded in your CI). Again you can choose to have jobs executed in docker containers. Also documented by gitlab, easy to set up. Of course you need to provide a suitable Docker image where your build can work. Nobody can do that for you. In simple cases you can pull something existing from Docker hub without further additions.
I think for CI/CD having a generous free tier is great because it makes it easier for people to get started and really dig into a project, not to mention the obvious benefit to open source that works as a continuous PR machine. Practically everyone knows what Travis CI and CircleCI are.
I still agree that it can be unnerving at times. I worry about services that seemingly offer no paid tiers. Like, draw.io. Thankfully draw.io actually seems to be sustainable, but you wouldn't guess it based on their very unobtrusive app!
[0]: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1210933/draw-io-diagr...
This describes how I've felt about Discord for years.
On the other hand Slack's pricing is pretty crazy.
There's a lot of audits and regulation, in addition to tighter security, that Slack needs to prove to its enterprise customers that they can trust their employees blasting confidential information on it every day of every year.
Nitro is for individual accounts and provides features for you as a user, boost is for the server and provides features for every user of the server.
Maxing out a server takes 30 boosts but the level 3 perks seem pretty… thin on the ground:
- +100 emoji (from 150 to 200)
- 384Kbps audio (from 256)
- 100MB uploads (from 50)
- custom URLs
Only the third one is somewhat useful, but 15 boosts for that doesn't really seems worth it.
As to price, a boost is $5 so a level 3 server is indeed $150 (level 2 is half), however Nitro ($10) provides 2 boosts and 30% off all boost purchases, meaning you can max out a server for $108, or 55.5 for a level 2. Nitro classic is only $5 and also provides 30% off of boosts, but doesn't include the free boosts, so it comes out at $110 to get a level 3 server on your own.
Is it worth the cost? Probably not. But I'd put it above larger uploads in terms of importance, and my discords hit the upload limit pretty often.
The impedance mismatch brings a lot of the cost to software, in many different forms.
I agree that free tier is moderately reckless, as it invites people like me who bookmark https://free-for.dev to devour your service with no gain.
The pricing question though is tough. How much would an instance in AWS cost you for 4000 minutes? Two dollars? Pretty sweet markup if you can find a buyer.
But you are right: Such model is not sustainable for very long.