Why won't Gitlab support monthly billing? | Hacker News Reader

Why won't Gitlab support monthly billing?

gitlab.com

39 pointsethanwillis18 comments

Gitlab has the most baffling billing policy. Since they removed their lowest tier, they have nothing in between $0 and $228/user/year, basically offering no easy onramp for smaller customers. Enterprise or go home I guess.

Since they’re still here, it must be working for them somehow, but seems nuts to me.

Yeah, and their ultimate pricing is bananas.

We're on the premium tier and like some of the security related stuff that's only available in ultimate - but the price jump is so insane it's just not even remotely going to happen.

Since guests are free in ultimate, we could probably go from 150 to 50 licenses. However that requires us to do a cleanup of repo roles and limit who can contribute. We also have a divide between pure developers and IaC users, but can only have one kind of license. It's fragmenting our users, and in order to justify Ultimate we need to force all users on GitLab for everything, even when a team has an alternative they are happy with (like security scans).

I guess it may work in situations where their support / extra feature cost is high enough where it's not worth for them to elevate you above free/no-support. But I've found the same thing annoying with multiple services. Zoho desk, zoho meeting, datadog apm from recent memory where I'm in a position where I want to give them money, but the initial step is just not worth it for me. I'm going to have like 5 support cases item, or organise 4 meetings a month, or I want to send you maybe 100mb of tracing data - I want just the feature itself - take my money, but not $30/mth for service I barely ever use. I don't even want your support available.

lol i remember when jira and confluence.. 10 users $10, 11 users? 50k and sign a contract?

I've been a premium account holder for over a year with about 20 users.

I don't even have ready access to an account manager. And support is no more prioritised than if I was any old user raising a bug/issue in their public repo.

It's not great.

Scrolled through the issue. I’m still clueless as to why monthly billing is unavailable.

Seems like it simply boils down to compensation and OKRs based on yearly cycles[0], weirdly. Seems most of the comments after that are just unhappy with the lack of a monthly option.

[0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/5595#note_8088...

Wow that takes “optimizing for the metric” (aka fudging data to hit objectives ) to a whole new level :)

And so publicly matter of fact about it too. Usually there's some attempt to hide that metrics are being gamed but they seem to just embrace it. Not sure what that says.

Ah, missed that comment.

Seems to me that not being able to add a rather in demand feature because of OKR/KPI/etc highlights a flawed reality. Where stats are more important that making more money.

Who says they'll make more money? Based on this thread alone, it sounds like monthly customers would spend very little money while whining and demanding more support time.

In a good business, the metrics are set by somebody who knows better what will actually make money.

> Who says they'll make more money? Based on this thread alone, it sounds like monthly customers would spend very little money while whining and demanding more support time.

Based on that thread there were multiple people saying there 30-50 sized dev team wanted to signup but couldn’t get approval for the whole sum in one go. One even said they followed the issue for 3-years before going to GitHub because they can pay monthly.

> In a good business, the metrics are set by somebody who knows better what will actually make money.

Who said it was a good business? They just stated they couldn’t accept an extremely standard and probably most the used payment option because they work out employee compensation based on year subscriptions. To me, that is a red flag and makes me wonder what goes on there.

GitLab team member here, Our pricing model page (https://about.gitlab.com/company/pricing/#annual-pricing-is-...) details our pricing strategy and why we prioritized monthly over annual pricing.

At first look that page is a mess.

A minor correction above, the last phrase is supposed to read "why we prioritized annual over monthly pricing", as described on the linked GitLab handbook page.

At a previous job we were told that true-up would be gone by the end of the year. Such a shame to see that years later it's still around.

Giving customers a tool to manually limit the number of users the instance supports is just a band-aid for their antiquated billing system.

Wow didn’t know that! A bit odd for such a SaaS / online product service

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