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Comment by ShakataGaNai | Hacker News Reader

Yea. Love gitlab but the pricing does add up quickly. Even if with all the features, it's really hard to get value out of Gold/Ultimate.

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.

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> The other problem with ultimate is that it strongly incentives you to NOT let anyone else on the platform.

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.

> $100/user/month

Please remember that this description does not actually apply to Gitlab, it’s $1200/year or nothing. There is no monthly option.

> The $100/user/month model

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.

How would that help? You still have to pay the license fee...

Is the price for self-hosted usage the same as SaaS? I could not find a clear answer.

Yes, I'm fairly certain it is. We switched to the SaaS because of that, it wasn't worth the hassle of self-hosting when you get all the responsibility and still pay the same price.

What? I thought the draw of GitLab is that it’s open source. Anyone can download it and run it on a server without paying a dime.

> The open source distribution is available to dowload here and contains all the same features as our Free tier.

https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/

So it's missing everything you'd pay GitLab for.

You would also need to reimplement the paid features yourself. Only the core (free) gitlab is open source.

we move from github to self hosted Gitlab for ~10% of what we paid for Github.

so far didn't miss anything from Github since our dev mostly use it as git server only.

I don't think that's the case, it's pretty set and forget for 100-2000 user installs, generally you're only touching it during upgrades as required.

Yep. We upgraded from free to starter to get one feature. Now everyone is really careful about who to let on Gitlab because too many would bump us up to the next pricing bracket. We might even go back to free.

Can you create an account e.g: gitlab@mycompany.com and get all your Gitlab users to use/share that account?

I understand that this type of usage would only be suitable for small teams.

Ugg. I've seen that system used at other places and it's miserable. Devs had accounts but users and interns used a shared account. You get a vague ticket opened and they forgot to add their name. Also, would updates get blasted to everyone at the company? I'm pretty sure our's just turned them off for that account. So they don't get pinged when the ticket is resolved or needs feedback.

This is confusing to users. Seeing who made changes and who opened issues is really important. Having all users share an account would be confusing to see the same person asking and answering questions.

Also, making a thousand users learn a new userid and password is a support nightmare.

You're being dowvoted but you're right, this is useful for teams of 1

$1200 a year is expensive but you mentioned artists. Autodesk Maya is $1600 a year, 3DSMax is $1600 a year, Houdini is $500 a year, Zbrush is $900 a year, Adobe creative suite is $630 a year.

I'm not saying you want to add another $1200 a year to that. Just putting it in perspective to "artist" expenses

The argument here is that if you want an artist to have access to your instance - even if only to occasionally use features that are available in the free tier - you have to shell out the full $1200/year.

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.

I don't use gitlab but github has issue and project planning. I'd expect every team member to use those. Further, github issues supports easy images and videos. Great for artists, and designers to track things. Assuming gitlab does the same I'd expect the same there.

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.

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