Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model
about.gitlab.com
about.gitlab.com
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.
Edit - we share why we prioritize annual pricing over monthly in our handbook: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/pricing/#annual-pricin...
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.
Buy the Premium tier and add Kubernetes or Security for an additional $4 / 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.
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.
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.)
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.
linear.app :-)
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.
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.
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.
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).
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
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.
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).
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.
Exactly! Lower tier users would solve many of the issues.
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.
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.
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.
https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/
So it's missing everything you'd pay GitLab for.
so far didn't miss anything from Github since our dev mostly use it as git server only.
Please remember that this description does not actually apply to Gitlab, it’s $1200/year or nothing. There is no monthly option.
I understand that this type of usage would only be suitable for small teams.
Also, making a thousand users learn a new userid and password is a support nightmare.
I'm not saying you want to add another $1200 a year to that. Just putting it in perspective to "artist" expenses
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
* 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.
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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
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.
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.
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.
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
To your point, you may face a backlash. But it also costs a lot of time and $$ to support new development and features. Therefore, having some backlash may still be the right decision in the medium/long term. Can be hard to weather that storm initially, though.
eg. as our use base has grown, so too has our database. And so while the optics of it from the end-user POV is that the product has remain unchanged, we've had to invest in database and scaling services in order to continue to meet the initial offerings.
It's not as simple as that, but you probably get the gist of it.
A more relevant example might be a web service that emails you once a week. If the mailing service that powers this requires DNS or integration changes to help fight spam, over time that will require time (and perhaps $$).
If I'm misunderstanding your point, let me know :)
Looking at their pricing structure today, I see $80 being the lowest tier, going all the way to $300
For instance, alienating customers who go on to become anti-evangelists for your 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.
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 totally get your annoyance, but they probably do mostly online marketing, so it makes sense for them.
Note that I'm not justifying the behaviour, just commenting on it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 :(
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Why are these two types of users costing me the same amount?
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.
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.
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...
$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?
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.
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.
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 :/
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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m sure that the executives may be happy with it, but I personally found it a bit of a letdown.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
edit: looks like for multi-user you need paid?
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.
Gitlab in many ways stays relevant by being “the nicer github” - if they become all about the money, they’ll die like bitbucket.
Honestly that is enough to retain me. I hope they open it up more widely as an intro offer.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
Let me know if there are specific features you have questions about.
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.
Very disappointed in this direction from Gitlab. I'll be advocating for us to switch platforms.
Edit: FYI starter was previously a paid tier.
It's such a glaring omission on GitHub - which only has personal access tokens which give apps full access to all your repos.
If so this would mean I would consider to moving to a platform where the repository owner can control the tokens.
[0]: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/settings/project_acc...
- 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.)
Different features at different levels between self-hosted and gitlab.com seem counterproductive in that regard.
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?)
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?
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.
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 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?
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
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.
>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.
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 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 $88,000/yr.
I understand they were losing money on Bronze subscriptions, but I'm hoping they did consider other options such as potentially scaling back some of the (many) features that are baked into the platform. For example out of the many GitLab installs I've seen - I've not once seen anyone use or care about the Kubernetes/Infa orchestration and monitoring features. From what I can tell people mostly care about MRs and the workflow around them, CI/CD, Security Scanning, code Issues and Kanban and Wiki functionality.
I feel like as a product - it's trying to do too much and really what most people want is an alternative to Github, Jira and Confluence.
We'll probably switch to Space or something else, considering that we only use merge requests, CI and the repo itself anyway.
Maybe they are just getting their clock cleaned by GitHub so are trying to be a pure enterprise play, and dump startups.
Free -> 9$/m -> 49$/m seems like a much more reasonable pricing. I'm sure more users would pay if fhe price is better.
This appears to be a simplification though, which works for me.
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.
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?
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.
Edit: Wow! I really appreciate everyone’s perspectives here!
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).
Preferably with an emphasis on speed?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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."
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
* https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/23166#note_494...
Not any more.
That price hike is nuts and well out of the grasp of many small startups watching their cashflow!
How about you leave that for the customers to decide?
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.
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 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...
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...
This page contains comparisons for the self-managed features: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/self-managed/feature-compar...
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...