Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

I have been a big fan of gitlab and have definitely promoted its use in the organisations I have worked (putting a $ amount on it, I'm probably responsible for $30,000/y in their revenue, which doesn't sound like a lot now that I'm typing it out).

But honestly I'm extremely displeased with this. I guess nobody is ever happy to pay more, but gitlab was already more expensive than github.

More staggering is that 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 -- yes, annoyingly, storage over a certain volume is an additional cost, but you'd pay it anyway if you self-host, so whatever.

I know there's a lot of features that I don't use and that I begrudge paying for, just like everyone else (who probably have a different set of things), and I know the cost is probably trying to be just under the cost to switch away, but 52% for features I don't care about mostly is steep.

This is also the second increase in 2 years, even though marketing says otherwise, because "Starter" and "Bronze" no longer exists and was absurdly cheaper than Premium. ($4/u/m)

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Look: Going from $4 to $29 per user in 2 years is terrifying as a person who is now writing checks on behalf of my company.

For context, Perforce is basically a market leader in Gamedev (and as a consequence using gitlab for me is a fight against normality) and it's considered "too expensive" (to the point google made their own) but a necessary evil because there's no alternative at $41,25/u/m

So my users who use gitlab and perforce (everyone using gitlab is also using perforce) is now going to be $70+.

If you are balking at the cost of hosting, give us a cheaper licensing plan for self-hosting. - the idea that CODEOWNERS, protected branches and approval rules is worth $29 per user (even if they're non-coders!) is just absurd.

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.

I'm a Support Engineer at GitLab, and based on my own experience that statement is definitely correct. There's entire classes of problems you simply don't have to deal with at all for SaaS customers.

I get into this argument inside my company, but as alternative point of view is that "hardening" the software for those 'I have seen some shit!' circumstances can be actually good for the overall health of the codebase and user experience. "It works on my machine" is all well and good until something goes off the rails (heh, so to speak), and if the software always assumes the happy path, debugging that is painful for an internal audience just as it is for external ones

Come to think of it, I would have though GitLab's fully-distributed workforce would make this true for you, too, since "I dunno what this error means, lemme just walk over to Jane's desk and ask" becomes expensive in that setup

I used to support a software package that could be self hosted or managed. The amount of work I had to do for managed customers was a 10th of the self hosted customers. We made way more money off the managed customers too!

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.

> 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.

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