Comment by lazypenguin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lazypenguin | Hacker News Reader

Interesting turn of events. For my team of about 10 users (5 just for access to wiki/issues) we recently moved to GitHub. When Gitlab first announced the price changes, annual billing and user restrictions on Gitlab.com we reluctantly went to self-hosted. Over time we got tired of the maintenance and the system was just slowly coming to a crawl. We switched to GitHub and we went from freeloaders on Gitlab to paying customers simply because they had a price appropriate tier for our team ($4/user vs. $19/user and now $29/user).

Actually we use LFS aggressively which can get pricey on GitHub but I’m happy to pay for usage rather than some arbitrary per user number. If I add a user who just needs access to issue board I have to pay $348 upfront with Gitlab! Multiply that by factors of 10 and the numbers creep up. Peanuts for an established business with revenue but not for a boot strapped venture or hobby project.

Strong signals who Gitlab’s target market is.

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.

I would be fine with this if the users who are not code oriented could have a purpose built UX, instead of having to face down all of the code stuff.

Interesting - what are your non-coding use cases?

I've seen people maintain a static website with Jekyll and GitLab. It was about a math-adjacent research field and the system was quite nice for this use-case.

Definitely not worth a paying subscription though. IIRC a public lab was hosting and maintaining the instance for all their employees.

From parent:

> Gitlab's aim seems to be to replace the mashup of multiple 3rd party systems into a central place for the company.

Outside of how we manage and release software, there are tons of small processes and projects that go on within an organization. Sometimes there are dedicated tools for these. Sometimes you pay for that, sometimes you don't. Sales, Support, IT Helpdesk, Marketing, Business Ops, HR, Admin... it runs the gamut.

Those things have nothing to do with code. You'll find folks using Jira, Trello, or any other "mashup of multiple 3rd party systems".

If GitLab or GitHub want to be "a central place for the company" that helps you eliminate that mashup, then they need to have a UX for people that are terrified by code listings and don't want to have to click through five things to get to the thing they care about.

So, really, GL and GH are good for your engineering organization, but they suck for the rest.

Do you think pricing based on features would be more reasonable for people that don’t currently have the need for the other 3rd party systems? I’ve heard that they don’t want to make pricing more complex but it does seem like a steep pricing if you only need say what GitHub offers for $4/user.

Which features are you looking for? Just curious because they have added a lot to the free tier too.

Yes. I'm a premium user and I got so pissed off with their runners that we ended up building a runner farm in AWS.

This is so much faster and better but as a premium user I cannot refuse to take the bundled CI minutes on their shitty SaaS runners.

That’s interesting do you have more details about the runner farm? In my small scale experiment it was difficult to have so many available runners at all times. We run a monorepo and there are changes that will hit several apps that need testing. So for example opening a PR might need 40 runners. Meanwhile other devs might need 1 or 2, etc.

We use AWS Fargate with a small ec2 box orchestrating the jobs.

There is a howto on Gitlab's docs that walks you through it all

It is unfortunately a mash up of mostly unfinished tools. It has a lot of features but there are many big holes in them.

My sentiments exactly. Sure, on paper they offer capabilities to "replace" other 3p tooling, but you can't replace fully fleshed-out products with half-baked features. Take Jira for example. Gitlab markets itself as having "comprehensive" (the highest kind) comparability to Jira's team planning, portfolio management, and service desk capabilities.

I would be interested in knowing how Gitlab handles some of the functionality my team relies on every day with regard to task management:

Does Gitlab have an automation engine that can trigger a set of user-defined rules based on events like issue creation, comments, transitions, etc etc?

Does Gitlab allow users to define custom issue and request types, custom fields, custom validations, custom screens and workflows?

Can I link issues in Gitlab? Can I create issue-type hierarchies?

> 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.

Even the most expensive enterprise plan with Github is only $231 per user per year (since we're talking about yearly upfront).

https://github.com/pricing

GHAE is not listed on that page.

What’s GHAE?

Yea but Github isn't competitive in all the SDLC stages like Gitlab. Gitlab is comprehensive platform for DevSecOps whereas Gitlab is more of a point solution that covers a few stages like SCM and CI/CD through GitHub actions which are complicated to use. Shops with excellent DevSecOps hygiene will still need to subscribe to multiple other point solution tools to get the same capabilities of Gitlab offered in a single platform for one price. Our shop saves money on OpEX using Gitlab after we cut the expense of lots of other tools and the overhead of maintaining them with consolidation into Gitlab.

Yeah but most of those features are broken or have large annoyances.

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