Tell HN: Gitlab just downgraded my premium subscription without warning | Hacker News Reader

Tell HN: Gitlab just downgraded my premium subscription without warning

28 pointsbradwood7 comments

Today I got to the office to find lots of the Premium features of Gitlab disabled. No iterations, no incident management, and as a result, a broken system.

I got no warning from them that this would happen. Communications from the account manager assured me that my subscription was not at risk. Yet, I was still downgraded.

I am now in a world of ticket-tennis and email ping-pong with Gitlab Support and my account manager, neither of which are able to resolve anything and, as a result, many of our processes are broken.

What used to be a system that I really liked has definitely lost it's sheen for me over the last year or so -- piss-poor customer service, bugs that languish in their backlog for years, and rising prices to boot.

Not happy.

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Their reply would probably be something like

"We have investigated the issue and found that you did not respond to our email of March 24th where we warned users that the Docker Teams plan will be discontinued. Please check your Spam folder. Hence, the automated downgrade was initiated. If you wish to resubscribe to the premium features again, please contact our support team on AOL Messenger between the hours of 1 AM and 7 AM PST. Thank you for your understanding".

GitLab team member here.

Thanks for your feedback, and sorry for the trouble. I have shared it with our teams to escalate and come back to you as soon as possible.

Tech support via hacker news was and always will be negative publicity. It says nothing but: "Our support is dysfunctional. People need to find non-standard, "based on luck" and "based on loudness" support escalation channels."

More neutral might be individual escalation behind the scenes.

And lastly, positive one would be an explanation of what went wrong and what steps are taken to prevent it from happening again. (Or writing a defense from your view, which is fair game since the "accuser" went public already.)

It's still better than nothing ain't it?

I really did not know what to respond to this rhetorical question. It's similar to what they call "orphan crushing machine", as in: "Every heartwarming human interest story in america is like "he raised $20,000 to keep 200 orphans from being crushed in the orphan-crushing machine" and then never asks why an orphan-crushing machine exists or why you'd need to pay to prevent it from being used."

Since I didn't know how to respond, I fed ChatGPT with all of it and now I can say with confidence:

While any form of support is better than no support, relying on a public forum like Hacker News for technical support is not a sustainable solution for any business. It may provide temporary relief, but it ultimately undermines the credibility of the company and shows a lack of commitment to providing proper support channels for their customers. It's essential for companies to invest in building reliable support infrastructure that enables their customers to have their issues resolved in a timely and efficient manner.

> Tech support via hacker news was and always will be negative publicity.

Negative feedback is good feedback imho. It helps to understand what went wrong, what to improve, and which actions should be taken.

https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati... has more insights.

> More neutral might be individual escalation behind the scenes.

Agreed, and this happened. For transparency, I went ahead and posted a comment here. It would be unfair to not respond publicly to the immediate concerns. This happens on all channels when necessary - Hacker News, community forums or social media - outside of the regular support channels, and will need a response to users.

> And lastly, positive one would be an explanation of what went wrong and what steps are taken to prevent it from happening again. (Or writing a defense from your view, which is fair game since the "accuser" went public already.)

In this case, I forwarded the message internally, and asked to escalate, which already was put into action. I do not have updates on what caused the problems, but can follow up tomorrow if it is safe to share, and does not contain confidential customer data.

From past experience a couple of years ago, I recognise this. I don't know how things are now, but their billing system was siloed off from everything else. They were, IMHO, too ready to cut off features when there were billing hiccoughs.

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