Tell HN: Gitlab Premium pricing increases incoming $19 to $29

I have the exact same experience.

I've been a huge fan of Gitlab in the past, first for their open source nature and second because I felt it was a great product. Their CI stuff was miles ahead of everybody else and was a no brainer. Their main UX was (IMHO) a bit inferior to Github's, but once you learned it it was perfectly acceptable. It was sometimes very slow, but it was tolerable.

But I have to agree with you. The pricing is outrageous. It was already way over-priced, now it is just insane. They shot themselves in the foot hard by making you buy all the things instead of some a la carte (which made incremental adoption highly expensive), and it is impossible to make a business case for adopting Gitlab. In addition Gitlab has gotten slower and less usable.

I still have warm feelings for Gitlab so I hope they will hear this plea: Please, make your prices more competitive and reasonable and don't force an "all or nothing" scenario because you're gonna lose a lot more than you win.

> Yes, they are adding features nobody asked for like crazy, just to be able to check more boxes in some feature matrix.

This.

If people want "DevOpsSec" then make it a feature or addon tier. I'm certainly in favor of more security and testing, but the few times I've reviewed this feature it doesn't work for our use case. We use external CI/CD services because Gitlab CI (and runners to some degree) don't do what we want. But now, we're forced to pay for this feature as if it helps us. Perhaps Gitlab can't imagine a company that doesn't build cloud connected software.

I moved our organization of hundreds of users from Bitbucket years ago after a week long internal API rate limit in Bitbucket's infrastructure crushed our CI/CD system and took them way too long to acknowledge and fix (of course it wasn't documented). I fear this is the build-up to a similar move again, and I dread it. At the time Gitlab was on a much more impressive trajectory then Github and hence motivated my decision, but this has changed and it's largely self inflicted wound for Gitlab.

Part that pains me the most is I championed the move to Gitlab and encouraged all the teams to double down on it over the years.

Not my experience at all, in a similarly sized premium on-prem GitLab. I git-push and the pipeline is running faster than I can get to my browser. Jobs queue basically instantly assuming you have enough runners for your workloads.

I have no experience with using the search. On both GL and GH I prefer to just pull the code and search with my preferred local tools.

Personally I find GitLab CI syntax better to work with than GitHub, particularly if using dependency-based versus using stage-based workflow.

> "Advanced" search is completely useless as you can't really search for code.

@deng - thanks for the feedback. I am on the Product team for our Search service, code search is not where we would like it to be.

We are in-progress on swapping out the backend for code search from Elastic to Zoekt, which should provide a much more reliable and complete set of search results. You can read more about our plans for fixing code search here: https://about.gitlab.com/direction/global-search/code-search...

This is the key deliverable for the team, and we are making efficient progress. If you have feedback on our plans, we would love to hear it. The epic is here: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/9404

> Yes, they are adding features nobody asked for like crazy, just to be able to check more boxes in some feature matrix. Meanwhile, absolute basic stuff is simply not working or buggy as hell.

Ain't that the perfect description of GitLab. I love GitLab, and do still find it better than GitHub, but because of all the old annoyances, it's really hard to justify to others.

We did an exhaustive comparison of GitLab vs GitHub, among a few other tools. We had a strong technical preference for GitLab. Performance of runners can be problematic at times but we still don't feel like GitHub is too competitive. However, a 50% price increase is LARGE. What are GitLab users doing to try and justify the cost? We have the ~800 seats and don't want to make a move to something else.

Personally, I'm willing to pay for it just to keep everything in one system.

Gitlab's aim seems to be to replace the mashup of multiple 3rd party systems into a central place for the company. The associated costs of each one of those systems, user management, etc that go with them adds up.

Plus, you have to consider any per-user pricing as part of your cost per employee. If you're paying somebody a salary who's accessing a system where they interact with the rest of the company...$29 is not a big deal when lumped in with the salary, benefits, taxes, etc.

If you're a few college students working in your spare time with no income, sure it's a problem. But even then Gitlab gives away plenty on the free tier and you can each setup a runner on your own laptops to avoid paying for CI minutes.

IMO, this pricing is very reasonable considering the variable quality of different integrated systems out there.

> If I add a user who just needs access to issue board I have to pay $348 upfront with Gitlab!

This is the same on GH, as per our sales rep.

Promoting Gitlab was the biggest mistake I made. Every team I promoted them to has been bitten time and again by their licensing, feature, and pricing changes.

Many other services I've promoted have also seen price changes, etc. but I've never felt genuinely frustrated with the changes in any of those like I have with Gitlab.

I mentioned this in the other thread, but the excuse vendors often use for not offering a self-hosting discount is that their support costs are often much higher for self-hosted customers. I've never been provided direct evidence of this, but that's what they say.

> there's no discount pricing for self-hosting your gitlab instance, so you may as well use Gitlab's resources on the SaaS platform, which is more expensive for gitlab themselves

I think organizations that self-host aren't looking to save money so much as have more control.

I'm also unsure how much money Gitlab would save by not paying the SaaS costs. Yes, servers cost money, but it also costs money to make something available for self-hosting. When you're running SaaS, you can do continuous deployments and don't have to worry about cutting releases and the development slowdown that incurs. You don't have to do the same level of testing for SaaS because any issue can be much more quickly resolved since you control the deployment - you can even just ungate a small amount of traffic to new things to test them and make sure they're working well. With on-prem, there's likely a decent amount of work to be done making sure it works well in a lot of different environments, a lot of work testing various different things, and a lot of work supporting and debugging the on-prem deployments.

Plus, that doesn't even go into the cost of slowing down your development cycle or eliminating potential avenues for greater efficiency. For example, if you're a SaaS-only company, you can decide that a message broker from Google Cloud or AWS is going to save your developers a lot of time so they can focus on your core product. Instead, now you need people to run a Kafka cluster and you need a way to spin up a Kafka cluster for the on-prem deployments which isn't really why people are buying your product - or maybe the SaaS uses a message broker for things and you build the on-prem to just poll the database every minute; either way, you're having to do extra work. Instead of having people advancing your product, you have people spending time on learning how to launch Kafka clusters in lots of different on-prem environments and providing pluggable storage options instead of just S3.

As such, I'd argue that on-prem deployment is a feature that you're paying for rather than a way to save money. If you're deploying on-prem, you're paying Gitlab for all the work that goes into making the service something that can be stood up in an on-prem environment. I'm not saying that the price hike is good, but I think there are definitely costs in making a product that can be deployed for both on-prem and SaaS.

There are two reasons that self-hosted is expensive, both having no relation to real costs.

1. If you are self-hosting, you have now segmented yourself into the customer category with the government, military, and large corporates concerned about security. This segment will pay more and so will be charged more. In an enterprise software company the vast majority of revenue comes from the larger customers vs many small customers, so these are the users that pricing gets optimised for.

2. Gitlab wants to be seen in the market as a SaaS company as subscription revenue is far preferable to licence revenue from a churn perspective, and also from a general trend perspective where self-hosted, hard to maintain solutions get replaced by cloud solutions.

In 2021[0], GitLab removed the lowest paid tier of $4/user, meaning you either paid $19/user or nothing.

In 20222[1], GitLab removed features from the free tier.

[0]: https://www.theregister.com/2021/01/27/gitlab_removes_starte... [1]: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/03/24/efficient-free-tier...

Does it support github actions? To me, that's the killer feature...

I've been really impressed with gitea. What I'm most excited about though is their plans for federation. The idea of running my own gitea instance and being able to fork repos and make PRs with other instances really feels like what Git hosting services should be doing.

https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/issues/18240

Has too many roots in China for me to ever even think about putting my source code on it.

I agree. GitLab was arguably a better product for a while back when GitHub didn't even have integrated CI, but at this point most of the features they are adding just feel pointless to me. I primarily just want a place to store my code, track issues, and run automated tests.

GitLab was already a bit of a tricky sell due to most open source code being on Github, but now it is either $48 / year for Github or $348 for GitLab. The math just isn't mathing.

This seem more like Wallstreet is reacting to a company projecting to increase revenues by 52% (from $19->$29) YoY.

I'm sure they have spreadsheets and math to back this up, and I'm going to wager that they decided that less customers in a higher tier is beneficial. The smaller customer base is not only made up for by the higher prices, but also the lesser overall customer acquisition costs and the typical lower cost to support this smaller group of customers, lots of whom may have staff of their own to field some of the basic support questions, before hitting up GitLab's support team.

But it _does_ make me sad that there's just no step in-between. I don't need to be a complete free-loader, but you quickly exceed the 5-user limit of the Free plan, after which $12x12=$348 per user/year is a steep jump up, for which I wish (and have pleaded with them) there to be an intermediate option.

And this is when Microsoft swoops in at the executive level and starts offering massive 1/2 year volume discounts including freebees like GitHub. Easy sell... or so I've heard.

Its difficult to quantify a best strategy as there a many more variables at play than just what the customers can afford. There is usually a "sweet spot" for every type of customer that is a careful balance between price and amount of customers that maximizes profit. I'm doubtful that this price change will motivate more than 34% (1 - $19/$29) of their customer base to move elsewhere that would negate extra profits from price hike. Mostly due to the time required for customers to move elsewhere and the sunk investment of moving onto gitlab in the first place (a form of vendor lock in). There are also likely savings in other areas such as support that roughly scale with number of customers like sverhagen suggested.

From a financial perspective, it seems likely that gitlab will profit from this change. They may be able to profit more and mitigate hobbyist/very small business business loss by introducing another tier but gitlab is the only one that has enough information to determine if that is worthwhile from their perspective.

I suspect it's pressure from investors to increase profit that's going to backfire and lead to more layoffs and migration to GitHub.

I selfhost gitlab for years now. My preffered road.

How does Gitea compare? Likes/dislikes?

Also, did you ever look into Gogs?

> I've generally moved from Gitlab to Gitea + Drone.

Do you use actions with Gitea? If so - how does drone fit in with/replace nektos/act?

Personally I've read enough blog posts off that domain to not click that link. YMMV.

How do people like sourcehut.org for open source projects? For startups? For established "enterprise"?

I overall like GitLab for startups, especially since I can do my own flavor of Kanban with the scoped labels feature of their Premium account. So I'm leaning towards also moving my personal open source to gitlab.com, just to simplify. I would've already moved, but gitlab.com's CloudFlare setup is blocking my Firefox. And a couple times now GitLab has changed the pricing dramatically, and I won't like surprises like that after I've invested many hours to move there.

It doesn't even matter if you self-host or not. It's the same price either way. I have the same question as you.

Granted we are a large company but we went from GitLab's Premium to the Ultimate. The Ultimate was the $100/month per. We found the aggregate cost of the solutions, maintenance, infra, time, etc., that made up what Ultimate offered was far in excess of we were going to have to do. BTW, they will likely negotiate with you if you like the capability but not the cost. Per the other users comment, if its self hosted, Gitlab should be more flexible with the pricing. My 2 cents. :)

I don't work for GL but I'd be interested to hear what you think makes the GL pull request functionality inferior (my guess is you're going to say the number of "actions" available that target the GH API but it's just a guess)

> We use them because their Kanban is nice

Did you notice Github's improvements to "projects" over the past couple years?

I feel like they missed doing a big announcement, cause it was like gradually implemented as a "beta" and then slowly filled in. But it's much better kanban now. Might still not be as good as gitlab's, I couldn't say.

I still have the email

> Effective January 26, 2021, GitLab has phased out the GitLab Bronze/Starter subscription tier.

It was already $228 / year for GitLab vs $48 / year for Github. This rate hike raises it to $348 vs $48. I don't think anyone at Github is currently too worried about prices.

For me it was less the increase in price, what was bad enough, and more the shifting of functionality to higher tiers and basically the evisceration of the open source version.

Sounds like @dang should merge, those are exact duplicates

Out of curiosity, have you looked at some of the other hosted copies of GitLab? They have "marketplace" listings in AWS, Azure, and GCP, and I'd bet other cloud providers have a similar "click button, get GitLab" setup. This train of thought presupposes that the $10 you want to pay is to have someone else run the compute, "s3", database, and runners for you, versus "self-hosting"

That would be weird of them to merge them no ?

The community can maintain a fork, but I wouldn’t except any company to maintain code that compete with their business model.

Do you happen to have the URL to one of those MRs handy? I would enjoy seeing how that discussion played out

Well, gitlab seems to be the "Avocado Toast" of Code/Pipeline hosting. So I guess users maybe fine or in fact happy here.

Can someone explain to me why it jumped *that much*?

Agreed. GitHub is the only one I'd pay for if I had to. They're just too far ahead of everyone else.

Well that is a cloudflare ip address. These IPs get used by an enourmous amount of different websites. Blocking cloudflare IP adresses is very useless, it will block access to many other sites and the page that they wanted to block has probably another IP address by now/for someone on the other side of the world.

I have raised this issue internally and we will contact our vendor to work with them on having those IPs removed from the block list. Those IPs are only in use by us, so blocks targeting other Cloudflare properties should not have affected our IP.

gitlab is pretty nice mostly because of the CI system and runners, the groupings of things, the permissions (deploy tokens etc;) and the way it handles merge requests.

Jira is used mostly because it's "okay" at doing things the agile way, it's impressive how few things actually have the concept of a backlog or sprints (Asana for instance has neither despite costing 4x as much).

I can't honestly find a decent replacement for confluence that would allow non-techs to also write documents. :\

I would hate myself for saying all this 4 years ago, but unfortunately I am now in a position where I have the ability to inflict my personal tool choices on people and these are the least bad options sadly.

Does anyone use Bitbucket? Do you like it? I struggle to see the use case unless you only need a repo, or do they have CI/CD now too?

Bitbucket was reasonably good 8 years ago, but they have progressively fallen further and further behind.

I've seen lots of companies move away from their stack over the last few years.

The UI is a dog slow , bloated mess of Javascript and is unusable on big PRs, and that's just the most obvious flaw.

I personally would not recommend it.

GitLab has probably 5x as many features as Bitbucket. For example you still need a ticketing system with Bitbucket (Jira), but not with Gitlab since its issues system is self contained.

I would pay literally anyone else 10x that price per user just to not use Atlassian software.