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Comment by mgl | Hacker News Reader

Well, $30 mo is just $1 a day. Depending on where you live it can be nothing.

Those add up unless you can tie them to specific income. I've got enough "just $1 a day" subscriptions already that give me way more value.

HBO is like $15 and it’s for pure leisure and zero creative work.

Git(-|lab|hub) >> HBO

It's honestly amazing though how it can be nice to enjoy something. Sometimes I'll even eat some Reese's cups or wash my laundry with fabric softener.

This logic is simply not how you get money from ordinary consumers. If someone wants to support you at a level of $X for a service they're already getting for free, saying 'just give us $X*5' is not the right move.

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?'

And did they all leave the platform or just a dozen of members published some comments of dissapointment?

It was bad enough that the developers laid off all the discord moderators and made a public apology, but they didn't say how many people chose not to renew their monthly passes.

This really misses the mark. They compete with free also, which is always nothing.

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 :(

I feel your pain, we all get used to super cheap development services. But now - well - there is no free lunch as they say, and I think we should stop demanding much for nothing.

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.

But the cheaper competitors still exist…

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

I find it a mixture of frustrating and amusing the services (and software) that sell enterprise level packages but won't accept anything more than "free" from me either personally or my (tiny) business. I don't even need support - I just want to provide support. Just stick a Stripe charge form on there and say "best effort tech support" or even "no private support / forum only" and take my money damn it. :)

It's not necessarily about whether they're actually making money on those as opposed to covering their costs. Almost any successful company based around open source software (and often closed source) has a huge spread of customers sizes from the hobbyist who plays around with a few things all the way to Fortune 500 enterprises. By having a ramp up in terms of pricing it keeps folks invested in your platform. In cases where there's a big jump there's often quite a bit of hesitance to upgrade unless there's an overwhelming need.

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.

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/

The problem is that gitlab is just another service that add together to be a lot.

if you wouldn't pay 30 in a month why would you pay a dollar a day?

That's still a beans and rice burrito every 5 days. No thanks.

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