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Comment by PaywallBuster | Hacker News Reader

I think the most painful point is that they removed the 5$ plan and require their _anual_ subscription to be paid upfront.

Lots of people use only the basic features (git, issues, merge requests, maybe the CI with Gitlab runners or self hosted runners)

The premium package may be too much, for people who are not interested in the 100s of premium/enterprise features they Gitlab is building or where paying per seat quickly becomes uneconomical.

Shameless plug: I'm building a managed Gitlab hosting at https://hosted-git.com/. I'm still happy with the Gitlab product but I think there's a gap in their offering for SMEs/small teams who may otherwise jump ship and migrate to a competing offer given the very competitive landscape!

Hopefully paying per server will be a good alternative and give customers more control.

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GitLab has been upsetting their paying customers for a long time. Features are constantly being shifted to higher paying tiers and every time I had a problem with something I found an issue on their tracker that's 5 years old, with countless "Another paying customer with XXX seats requesting this..." comments from their staff.

We've had a hard time selling the price increase to upper management, the $5 per seat was perfect. We have tons of users who log in once or twice a month just to look at something and paying $20 for that doesn't make sense.

Also, we really don't care about 99% of the features they keep pumping out. They're great if you're a smaller company starting out, but larger ones already have other tools that are established and won't be going away. I don't need a half baked JIRA clone, or half baked GitOps, or any of the other myriad of strange features. I only want required merge request approvals, yet it's all in the same $20 version. Oh, and I'd also like to use the API to retrieve project avatars, but that's one of those issues that have been open for years.

This seems to be the classic and ever-present failure mode of young tech companies. Obsession with "product features" that are visible to a CEO and easy to report on a roadmap, and disregard of "UX features" that are individually small but collectively would lead to a smooth and polished UX. I get very nervous that my current employer will start doing the same.

Exactly, this is gitlabs whole problem. They are the confluence or SCMs. Build a bunch of half baked features that check boxes and then move on to building the next set.

You end up with a product developers hate, but VPs think looks good in their spreadsheets

I completely agree. For me, GitLab is primarily a place where I dump my personal code. Having a monthly $5 subscription for that is acceptable - an annual $228 payment is not, especially because I don't even _need_ the premium features!

I consume maybe a few megabytes of disk space. Why do they want to get rid of me so badly? In the past I have highly recommended GitLab because they are actually really good, but stuff like this does make me rethink that.

> I consume maybe a few megabytes of disk space. Why do they want to get rid of me so badly?

Isn't their max size announced a few days ago set to 5 Gigs? I also use it for a few personal projects that I want to make available to others and I also have a few megabytes. That's a very long way from 5 gigs.

There's other limits that he/you could be hitting and require an upgrade

> Having a monthly $5 subscription for that is acceptable - an annual $228 payment is not, especially because I don't even _need_ the premium features!

For my usage, a $5/month VPS running Gitea will suffice. If I have to pay more than $5/month for git hosting then I'll just do it myself.

But if you care about discovery and making it easier for others to contribute, selfhosting is not really an option.

Removing a cheap tier is not a nice, though I still think that if the premium price is too much then you're better off on the free tier. And if that's really not enough you really were lucky all these years profiting from gitlabs growth hack.

The premium tier still provides a ridiculous amount of value for it's price.

For truly open source projects, they have a really generous program giving seats that normally cost 100 dollars a month away for free.

If you have more than 5 users, the free tier is not an option.

We liked and paid for Gitlab, but the price hike from $4 to $19 per user is absurd. Forcing an annual subscription on us was the motivation we needed to migrate away.

To get just one single thing we need would be $100/month. It’s for some 100’ish people, so it’s $10k per month, and since they don’t do monthly, it’d be $120k in one go.

I just… I can’t present that to management as a good deal. There is no way whatsoever that that’s worth it. We can get all of the things Gitlab does separately, better and at a lower price…

Gitlab gained millions of users by boasting their OSS offering and generous free tier on the managed service.

It's a market economy and as a startup, Gitlab took a strategy to differentiate and grow.

Wouldn't say users are taking advantage of "Gitlab Inc"

This exactly.. we literally use it for simple git and a little bit of issues (only because gitkraken has it integrated, so it's convenient sometimes). Not paying $20/mo PER DEVELOPER per month for that.

We have a small enough repo so will just stick with the free version I guess. They should have like $10/mo (for up to 5 developers) to cover small teams that just use basic features. I would happily pay that, but anything else is just stupid for simple git storage.

The premium is indeed too much features -- a normal use-case is just the hosting and the issue tracker. Due to the 5 user/limit this will now cost 1000s per year for a couple dozen users -- the expense can't be justified

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