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.
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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