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Comment by godtoldmetodoit | Hacker News Reader

Well, this ruined my teams Tuesday. We are on the Bronze plan with over 300 users company wide.

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 :(

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It seems like they could fix this by defining pricing based on active users.

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.

100% this.

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.

GitLab team member here. We are currently researching the non-developer use case. You can follow along here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/213185

If I can give you a strong hint: grandfather in everybody at todays rates and prices and simply drop the bronze plan from your new signup page. That way you keep your existing users happy. The last thing you want is to kill off your early adopters. Besides the very bad PR. I'm a huge gitlab advocate and this move sits wrong with me. Your 'bronze' users did not ask you to develop features that they probably won't use anyway so your justification to force them to pay more sounds hollow at best and disingenuous at worst. Fix it while you still can.

I'm struggling to see why you need further research 9 months down the road on such an obvious issue.

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.

At this point we might as well switch to Jetbrains Space and drop Jira/gitlab all together.

I'm glad you're considering this.

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.

You've been researching it for 5 years. How about stop researching and just do the easy thing that will bring GitLab lots of money?

Ruined our day as well.

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.

You only need a user licenses to log in. Can't you just make the repos public (assuming you are self hosting) so that way anonymous users can still see everything?

Yeah, we are self hosting and everyone could have read access without much hassle. We are losing that long tail of contributors though as they won't be able to push any new commits with guest access.

Email a diff to someone who has access?

Could skip source control entirely and just mail diffs around all day

Skip the hassle, move prod to an NFS share

Same for us - only a few users really need the subscription at all. The most only use basic features

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