Gitlab loses one-third of its value after company issues weak forecast
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Github Enterprise is only $21/mo and for most users it has all the same features of Gitlab.
Gitlab's main differentiator for a long time was CI, but now Github has its own equivalent (Actions).
It seems that Gitlab is only going to be left with 1) existing Gitlab users 2) users that want some enterprise feature set that doesn't exist on Github, and want it in a single platform without a third party
- I've had tons of issues with their kubernetes runners, hard to debug spurious system failures
- They still don't display the last N bytes of the logs when logs get long, just the first N bytes, which is entirely useless when a build fails
- It's awfully slow to navigate through pipelines, in particular child pipelines
- The `stages` things is just useless noise, I just wanna specify dependencies please, I don't want to be forced to also put each job in a stage, it's weird.
- You can't expose a secret only to a single job step; they don't really have finer granularity for job steps like Github Actions has -- they just generate a script.sh that's executed directly.
- Github has many more reusable actions from the community, I don't think Gitlab has that at all? At least not in a convenient way.
This is the big one.
Github’s ability and dominance in the social space means they have the most active actions ecosystems.
They made actions easier to import share and built marketplaces and now gobs of developers build value into it just for clout (and because they enjoy software of course).
If you think about it carefully, it’s actually a security nightmare. You have no idea what a random Github action you “uses:”d is doing, but in practice 90%+ of the time it doesn’t matter, you get good functionality and save time for free.
I mean in this particular case, it's unfair since microsoft would obviously favor github. But it's not like there's a marketplace where a community made version could be used as a replacement...
I think there a few things like this in GitLab (like the ability to run pipelines against both commits and pull requests) - GitLab give you a lot of flexibility... but so far it's all just been extra bother to deal with.
You don't have to. GitLab supports dependencies. Using the `needs:` keyword.
It was released in August of 2019.
https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2019/08/22/gitlab-12-2-rel...
> In GitLab 14.0 and older, you can only refer to jobs in earlier stages.
> In GitLab 14.1 and later you can refer to jobs in the same stage as the job you are configuring.
Why bother with stages at all?
Ultimately I constantly felt like everything was half baked when using Gitlab. I still kind of feel that way with Github, but to a much lesser extend.
More importantly, they allow me to pay my $21/month monthly which means they get my business instead of ‘only pay per year’ Gitlab.
Gitlab CI is a bunch of weird hard to understand bolt on conf, undergirded by a defunct docker-machine project
I tried debugging some problems I was having with a runners. Turns out the default Ubuntu AMI was like 6 years old. Does anyone use this thing?
My fear though is that GitHub will Jack up their prices once I’m running everything. Right now they give 50k minutes per month, but that could change at any point. GitHub enterprise started out at $8/month and now it’s $20+.
So far it did cost ~1 month of paying for github in dev time and I can't imagine it costing much more when we'll want to add some automation on top of the list of accepted pushes/ref updates, for which we did not have a need for so far.
Certainly beats installing 1GiB debian package of selfhosted gitlab and having to figure out why some stupid ruby service is eating increasing amounts of hundreds of MiB of RAM on an empty gitlab instance while doing nothing at all.
That's $2.5k/yr that can be put into something else.
When developers do operations... I guess. :D
49, 40 hour weeks a year = $127.55 an hour.
29* 7 * 12 / (127.55) = 19.09 hours
If it takes you more than 2.3 dev days (100% productive) you’re negative ROI doing it yourself.
This math doesn’t even factor in the opportunity cost of doing this.
And the cost of that has to be compared to cost of gitlab subscription and other gitlab related headaches.
Gotta love HN math. Calculations to two decimal places, starting with a number plucked from the high end of a distribution with standard deviation of at least 100K.
So annually you have to spend < 3*19 = 57 hours on your custom built source control and CI to come out on top.
Can’t be done outside of “we hired the OG devs of Gitlab/hub/etc”
we run ghe at work and I know we spend 8 hours 4+ times a year for a test upgrade and then an upgrade from an eng that makes above either of your estimates in salary alone.
None of this includes all the work we're not doing to build new integrations or features in the ci system that we get for pay for the product. But we're not a scrappy startup either. We're paying down much of the tech debt from being a scrappy startup, it's not been cheap.
What a dev costs is not the same as what an advertised salary for a dev is. This is closer to the middle of the distribution for dev costs in the US.
I currently cost more like 80K in euro's if I reason from my employer's side. So tell me, how are you getting to the 250K exactly?
Europe exists as well and even in the US there are enough companies that don't pay FAANG salaries.
I'll be honest, it does sometimes blow my mind to see how low salaries are over there when I look at job postings and Who's Hiring and the like. I'm jealous of a lot of things Europeans take for granted, but it's wild to me to see senior positions in major European capitals paying the amount that I made two years out of a bootcamp.
There's a lot of companies paying 2/3rds of that cash.
Then there's the bad ones, that are still trying to pay half. Seriously. They're not places you even realize exist, and if you went in for an interview you'd instantly sense you're not where you want to be. Places where you watch managers basically bully interviewees to look for immediate subservience, because they want to ensure they'll "yessir" without hesitation. These places absolutely exist. In all of those markets. I've seen quite a number of them.
-- -----
I know, this isn't what we all try to aspire to here, but I say this as someone with far too much experience with Boston (very specifically), Denver and Austin over the past 20+ years. I've had the "good but not amazing" and many "bad" companies as clients of mine. I've talked to their staff. I've done my damnedest to ensure the good eggs know where they stand in the market, and help them move on if they wanted to.
HN very much looks at 75th percentile on up. But once you go down the ladder in the compensation offered, you'll encounter a ton of people where $170-200K salary or salary+bonus would be a 20-30% bump in their comp in those markets. Then you get to the bad places, where they're legit making half and feel thankful for it.
in the US
in specific rich cities in California, New York, Texas, Washington, and Colorado
at a handful of tech companies which are currently bedevilled by lay-offs
averaged across all roles
GitLab doesn't have regional pricing.
Average salary where I live is $21k/yr with average devs taking maybe $25-40k/yr. Top jobs being ~$65k
Maybe something like gitea+teamcity solution is better and cheaper and has less opportunity cost?
I like gitlab, but it feels they have been walking in the wrong direction for many many years and the consequences are starting to pile up.
Though I often don't take my own advice, I try to ask is what I'm about to build core to our ROI/product, is there an existing solution that gets us 80% there, and yes, what is the cost.
If it is not core to the business, won't drive revenue, and cost are not outrageous, which is a company by company truth, then I much prefer to spend X time building new product than recreating an existing product/tool.
One final point - don't forget to consider the maintenance costs, which in the long term often greater then the initial investment. If your CI goes down, you just blew away and savings you were planning on.
In general I agree with you off-the-shelf is usually better but sometimes a custom tailored solution rather than a generic system can be better.
GitLab has a CE version that’s free for commercial use. It sounds like you just want a pretty interface for git repos with some merge flow.
It doesn't sound like a 1-2hr/year self support software.
You can do self-hosted runners aaaand… welcome to infra/ops?
A little NIH syndrome would do the industry good. We need more stuff invented. The current stuff is mediocre.
[1]: https://docs.github.com/en/billing/managing-billing-for-gith...
[2]: I think it's only egress, and only from packages though?
We have a 400+ seats instance, with a decade worth of code and it just works 99.99% of the time, and upgrades are generally painless. Though our instance is pretty vanilla, and internal to our corporation. The runners are more finnicky and buggier, especially since we have tons of different build targets but that's besides the point if we are just talking about using it as a dumb git repo. And if you only need it for that purpose why even pay instead of using the community edition?
(I'm in the AI team but I sometimes help the devops team that takes care of the instance to customize our AI pipelines, so I'm familiar with gitlab and with my colleagues experience with it)
That said, I recall issues with the Gitlab Enterprise Support / whoever we contact about our license etc, mostly to do with slow or poor communication. Requests would sit for a month before we got a reply, often dismissive or generally unhelpful, though we _were_ on an outdated version so I don't blame them.
I vaguely recall an email about support ending on self hosted instances? I can't recall the details, but I know it triggered an internal investigation into moving away from Gitlab. EDIT: Pretty sure I'm remembering self hosted Jira, a quick Google search shows Jira EOL but no Gitlab.
All of that said, I largely blame my company for the failures here. I wouldn't expect any company to support self hosted, outdated versions. The support issues were annoying, but I'm also not sure how much I can blame Gitlab for that. I'm also struggling to remember the details, so take this as one mans hazy annecdote.
* film industry, security by obscurity in the worst ways, leads to incredibly outdated and neglected tech (we only _just_ transitioned to Python3, and that's only the core services)
I did find the support staff to be fairly responsive, but most of that time felt like me collecting diagnostic information with little actionable material, and sometimes I would have to explain the same thing multiple times in the same support ticket because it switched hands.
If you do still opt to self-host, dig into their documentation: there are little nuggets and hacks they use internally that you'll want to use to get the right performance out of it.
I will admit I'm probably overly harsh on the support staff, and misrepresenting the support issues we had. I wasn't directly involved in most of it so I'm parroting what I've heard from coworkers that were more involved, which isn't the whole story. Though the times I was directly involved (in support requests) the experience mostly matched yours, with a couple (albeit rare) cases of slow replies.
In terms of self hosting I 100% agree, and anyone who is thinking of setting up their own self hosted instance should take note of your comment.
(and I know it might contradict my earlier comment saying that Github's release velocity is a plus, but it doesn't. Most gitlab releases don't introduce useful features, they mostly patch security issues and regressions. For example, the Runners are in a dire need of tons of features and an outright rework of some parts, but barely get any. Which is sad since they were so far ahead of the competition not so long ago.)
That just reminded me of my least favorite thing about their releases: they brag about releasig on time for however many months in a row, but they're always quickly followed up with bug and security fixes. I felt their presentation of consistency was misleading at best.
Gitea is fun and all, but it's not in debian repo, so would require manual updates. Annoying.
Ultimately, having a simple, well-integrated, industry standard stack that includes the same tooling every other company uses is a perk of working at a well-funded or profitable company. People leave for less.
My company has already made this crystal clear by switching to MS Teams.
Shortly after the ritual is complete you hear a cacophony of "fucking teams wouldn't find my headset/camera", and the day begins.
Of those things that I like more in Gitlab, it is deploy tokens: an easy way to be able to dole out permission to clone code where needed without having to bother with key management or user management. As far as I can tell GitHub has something like this but it requires setting up an app to talk to the API and isn’t nearly simple as the button available in Gitlab.
https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/connecting-to-gith...
(disclosure, former GH)
> Deploy keys only grant access to a single repository. More complex projects may have many repositories to pull to the same server.
As nice as this one feature of Gitlab is it is not a major show-stopper. Almost everything we need is available in most git services. So to GGP's point: we are likely to go for the most affordable option even if there's some tradeoffs.
[1]: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/security-guides/automatic... [2]: https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/keeping-your-accou...
And then you have people like GitKrakken who ask 19$ for a git client, or Teleport who ask 36$ for a ssh client.
Add in 3) people who want a reasonable option to self-host that's not charging you to oblivion.
Q1: -49%
Q2: -65%
Q3: -50%
Q4: -38%
So what you want is a business model where the company runs purely on VC money instead of on actual profit. SaaS companies like Gitlab usually can't operate at a profit with only free-tier and cheap-tier users - their overhead is way too high. Those tiers are a gateway drug offered at a loss to get people on board so that eventually the actually-profitable enterprise accounts will stack up enough to make up the loss. It's kind of a standard bait-and-switch pushed by the whole VC model. I'm personally hoping we see less of it now that the money spigot is drying up.
https://culturalgutter.com/2023/01/25/the-enshitification-of...
Come on GitLab, I want to keep using you and see you succeed. Let me pay $5 for some token feature like extra GB of space and to vote with my money to keep you going. I'll even do it for a "supporter" badge on my profile.
I recently watched a video game community melt down because (due to exchange rate shenanigans) the pricing of a monthly pass was $5.99 instead of $4.99, and people got furious when (a non-employee) moderator said the equivalent of 'you don't have one dollar?'
Git(-|lab|hub) >> HBO
Github by comparison lets me pay like 5$/mo for LFS and 4$/mo for a team of one, bitbucket even lets you do up to 5 users for a total of 15$/mo , gitlab has nothing like that :(
Would they make money on $5 accounts? Does github make money on $4 accounts? Is it a sustainable pricing model or more like a “growth grab” which is not valued that much in 2023.
One thing I think is underrated is convincing students/hobbyists/personal users who then take those preferences/skills into the work place, that funnel seems especially useful when it comes to tooling. Gitlab seems to be missing that price point/market
Basically, it's aligning the success of your business to the success of your users. Most of what's offered in Gitlab Premium[1] would be of little value for a small development shop, yet if you have 5 users you're looking at $1000/yr for features that are unlikely to be used. It just doesn't make sense.
That being said if I were a CTO I would not buy their services, I think they are too expensive.
One of its major issues is not displaying merge conflicts in some scenarios, just tells you of the existence of a conflict and you need to figure it out outside the UI.
Everything and the kitchen sink just will never be as good as best of breed.
I speak from direct experience, at a company that had the mid level, liked the features, but was forced to eventually jettison them for the free tier to cut costs while broadening internal support.
And we reported this problem to them, this basic lack of a mixed tier system, something many customers want. But Gitlab can't seem to get it through marketing's head that being nearly everywhere is better than just running for few large companies. Running everywhere means that many devs would just bring along an expectation of having gitlab as a matter of course, spreading adoption like a beneficial contagion. Instead, any useful level is being priced into irrelevance from a smaller organization's perspective, something many devs will see at prohibitively expensive, and be the fomites for that perspective instead as they move between companies.
The result is terrible. Our company switched to Git on Microsoft Azure. Good job, Gitlab sales (heavy sarcasm). Hey, Gitlab management, have you checked to make sure your sales team isn't secretly taking kickbacks from Microsoft? (yes, I'm probably kidding, right?)...
snippet: https://twitter.com/OnodaCapital/status/1635379330498060289
wishing him the best of health. he inspires me constantly.
It's a business, their goal is to make money. I kind of like that they're willing to let everyone see into the nitty gritty details of how they do that.
And that makes it less awkward.
We have a free premium open source developer account, plus Red Hat runs all the CentOS infra through gitlab and pays a ton of money to them. I received emails from a salesperson demanding that I book an appointment with them to discuss my account. (It sounded like a meeting which had real this could be done by email energy, or else was going to be a high-pressure sales pitch.)
I asked them which account they were talking about and if we could do this on email, but they literally wouldn't say what account it was related to, and just kept saying I must visit some (non-gitlab) site to book this appointment for a video call.
After several rounds of this and following up with someone who works with gitlab to check it wasn't an actual scam (it wasn't), I just ignored the guy.
Conclusion is they sounded desperate to make the numbers last quarter.
1. They had a generous organization free tier, which was handy for stealthily moving companies to it (move a few repos, get people used to it, then move more repos, then when everyone recognizes the value, start paying). They ruined that as soon as they put a limit on the number of people that can be in an org for free. Moving stealthily was good because...
2. GitLab CI was best-of-breed, but GitHub Actions is really good too now (maybe better? I haven't used it enough to answer that).
3. The price is really high now, so it doesn't really make sense to even move a company over to it.
4. The community is (and has always been) on GitHub, so there was always a big reason to be there. Now that the rest of the GitLab offerings aren't as competitive, this wins.
It just doesn't produce 29 worth value for me pm. Probably does for a corporate user though so i can see why they're doing it
The developer experience of GitHub and CircleCI feels better in every way from my perspective.
GitHub actions has significantly reduced the gap, and at least for me that was GitLab’s killer feature.
Ironically GitHub actions are now the vastly superior experience, despite the lack of bullshit checkbox features. Turns out you don't need so many of them beyond the basic "run something on a worker" flow.
Thanks for pointing that out!
As others have pointed out in comments, their features seem to be incomplete but I think it's their higher price points that pushed users away.
Gitlab spent 310M of their total 580M$ of operational costs in sales in 2022.
Those seem crazy numbers, I see similar ratios in other financial reports (such as Cloudflare's).
On one side it means that those companies are essentially cash positive the moment they cut sales expenses, on the other hand GitLab imho does not provide enough over some competitors such as GitHub to make me bet on them 10 years from now.
This only works if you have no competition.
I couldn't figure out how could they spend more than a million per business day in sales.
Interestingly gitlab pricing influenced us to rethink our own pricing and we spent a month building out granular permission controls to allow sales to craft licenses bespoke to a client needs and charge less.
After a year our revenue has 2x and there's a nice upsell flow towards enterprise.
I'm moving to GitHub. I've always championed the small guy, but the last couple of years have been terrible for Gitlab users.
A lot of companies want and try to move off OracleDB, but it's really, really hard. I don't think that's the case for moving off Gitlab.
And since my opinion often matters they continue to lose business.
Yes, but that's not a good thing; IMO they've hit the point where they're dying by papercuts. If one user in a million has a completely awful show stopper bug, the product/business will probably be fine. If one in ten users has a fairly serious bug, they're in a bad spot. Obviously they're not at either of those extremes.... but I think they're closer to the latter than the former.
call me old fashioned but these online git-o-matic sites just seem more like rent-seeking during a recession.
Then, because everyone has a GitHub account and knows how to use it, and everyone is already on it, everyone else goes on it too.
Not to mention that I don't need to maintain CI/container registries/asset hosts/pages myself.
Github but bring your own.
I believe the project died out but it was a good idea. All the benefits of Github without the lock in and single point of failure.
(full disclosure) I had written a proof of concept implementation that allows you to use the git-repo.info client to send PRs over git protocol, which you can find here https://github.com/pullreqr/pullreqr_githook
The primary impediment seems partially to be social/coordination where distributed git requires clients to be set up apriori, but it does work in cases where you are using it in house, etc.
I'd kind of be happy to spend more time on it, but with no one actually running the protocol publicly, there is no one to send/receive PRs to or from.
Ultimately a "pull request" is just that; a request for someone to pull your branch into theirs. You can already add Git remotes from different services, review the changes locally, and collaborate over email. GitHub et al simply add a nicer UI for this, but there's no reason why you couldn't make a PR from one service to another. If only they'd be willing to interoperate, which is the biggest hurdle.
I'm not familiar with why that Gitea project failed, but I imagine that making this work for multiple instances of a single OSS project would be much easier.
[1]: https://www.git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Distributed-Git-Contribut...
If you just go with Github or Gitlab, and something bad happens, nobody will blame you.
Yeah but what's the cost of a global developer social network?
It’ll work for a 5 person startup, but will get expensive fast for larger organizations.
What a weird list.
Working 50% freelance and 50% revenue-generating niche side-project, I always calculate my time costs. Assuming I earn $80 an hour as a freelancer and a hosted git costing $10 a month, if I estimate I will need an additional 15mins a month if I go self-hosted, then I'll pay for the hosted version.
I've seen enough projects, where they decided to self-host gitlab, only to have issues like disk full, updates needed, deployments not initiating.
When suddenly a team of 10 can't push or deploy for a day, there's additional costs there as well.
I now work in a start-up of 40 people, we don't have any servers or dedicated IT or DevOps staff. All admin gets done in the spare time of a couple of engineers, who have no desire to further lose their development time to admin/ops. It makes more sense to pay a subscription and let someone else deal with it. Even for the backend guys running that kind of service is more operationally complex than most of what they do - no-one has the experience of operating 'pets' class servers.
Git forges should be expendable.
It most likely will explode.
We were developers trying to do everything then we hired project managers who wanted JIRA.
Then we outgrew autodevops and lately it just feels like Gitlab aren't aligned with our requirements at all.
We're paying $19/user/mo for 36 users and just to get status checks for screenshot regression testing we need to upgrade to $99/user/mo?
To get that with github and much more we can pay $24/user/mo.
It's always felt like they're trying to spread themselves too thin and add a billion half features. Like monitoring our GKE cluster from within Gitlab... Why wouldn't I just look at GCP when it's a billion times better and actually works
Should be enough to just double the free tier, and perhaps make purchasable extras available such as buy extra CI minutes or transfer.
Otherwise there is no way we can support you.
If the supreme court says the copilot is fully legal, I would probably just revert to using Github for personal projects(their free tier is just unbeatable), i still use it more than anything else, because everything is on Github.
I am excited about Gitea Actions[1], as I feel gitea is generally only missing a decent CI system, and codeberg is growing fast.
1. https://blog.gitea.io/2022/12/feature-preview-gitea-actions/
At work we use their hosted ultimate plan and we were looking to move to their premium but might instead go straight to a self hosted CE instance instead since there is nothing between free and $29/user/month (which is actually $348/user/year because they don't support monthly payments) and the free hosted plan is so crazy restricted.
* Fire the monetization team (yes this is a thing they have) and most of the sales team to reduce cost and hyperfocus on revenue * Go back to implementing user requests * Fixed the missed up pricing model, including guest accounts * Stop releasing half-baked features like the recent subtask debacle
Hopefully it's not too late.
Lot of the comments here complaining about pricing. Please remember that GitLab's core is open source. If you think the managed offering is too expensive, just host an instance yourself. This is what I have been doing at home for years, and my company at work for even longer.
Good luck trying to get buy in for the Ultimate tier (1200$ per year vs 300$ for the normal paid tier) when only a few users need or use the improved reporting/security featuresEven if it's not a huge cost per se, it makes most premium features a lot less attractive. And remember, you can self host Github Enterprise for a lot less than Gitlab now.
Again, I'm convinced they know how to price their product a lot better than us, but as an enduser, it's a bummer. Because Gitlab is still an amazing product, if just for their open source core alone. So I really hope they figure out a way to be sustainable.
[1] https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/guide/