Hacker News Reader

Comment by deng | Hacker News Reader

Did anyone actually use the open version? I dimly remember that I looked into it like 2-3 years ago, but all the really interesting stuff was not included in that. The pricing for enterprise was absolutely bonkers, something like 100$ per month&developer, which already made it clear that they are obviously only targeting big players with infinite budget. Seems the pricing is now changed, and it "starts at 5k/year" for some "Enterprise Starter" edition, but despite lots of bullet points it is very unclear to me what the limitations really are. I'm actually really interested in this product and it might be a good addition to our tool set, it's a shame the pricing is so opaque.

View on HN

OSS version didn't have official Docker images prebuilt, you had to build them yourself and for a long time the OSS build was broken. A year or two ago they promised they'll fix it or even provide official OSS image, this didn't happen.

One person finally created a working release train on github and was releasing OSS containers, Docker Hub reports it as 10k+ pulls, which is a lot for unofficial image.

I tend to stay away from any 3rd party tool that's not really a main part of infrastructure and requires sales contacts. It's wasting my company time to deal with sales when it comes to a few licenses, just give me a number input and buy button. I also lost some confidence regarding Sourcegraph, as it seems they change their direction, pricing and rules multiple times per year

Yes, I remember the Docker thing, but I also remember that at least the language parsers we were interested in were only supported through some kind of plugin mechanism, which the OSS version did not support, so it was useless for us, so I didn't ever bother testing it.

So basically their "open source" offering wasn't really open source, it wasn't even open core, as you had to build it yourself, the build wasn't working for a long time and even if you managed that, some languages were enterprise-only.

Nice. How to get free marketing by strapping Open Source to your product and writing a bunch of announcements.

I’ve had a few consulting calls with companies where they (or their VCs) want to call their software open source but have no interest in community development and want to block competitors from taking any advantage of it.

I remember looking for Sourcegraph submissions on HN, their CEO's (sqs) first submission to HN was titled "Which Open Source License Should Your Project Use If You Want to Raise VC$?"

QED.

It is a good product, so we're tying to put our org in a position to pay for it. But I really don't like this model of intentionally frustrating or obfuscating whether it is open source or not, or not listing/hiding what is or isn't in enterprise vs OSS versions. For example, the fact that starting off open source (assuming you succeeded running the maze of figuring out how to run it), explicitly blocked the path to goto enterprise is a shame, and seems like a bit of a missed business opportunity.

We'll probably see more of these faux OSS projects who hoped for some community/network effect from being OSS to translate into either strong donations or considerable uptake of their enterprise/cloud/managed versions go this route.

To be clear, fully support charging for and paying for SaaS. Would just like be able to know what is in front of me when making build/buy decisions.

I've tried finding out if they still offer the free tier now that the OSS is gone, because one of their employees mentioned it on Github, but failed to find anything. I can see they have a free trial. Their own website is full of broken links and contradicting information due to the frequent licensing/product changes.

I've even found a page still mentioning the OSS version and telling you how easy it is to fire it up.

They shot themselves in the foot majorly on this one.

When you realize that one of your products isn’t being heavily used and is OSS, you don’t close source it, you keep it open!

This shows that the value add of the paid product is actually worth it to customers.

Now?

Not so much.

I installed the opensource version for fun at work, and synced about 750 repositories. I applied some patches to support OAuth2 proxy and removed the telemetry. It's great software, very fast and it works as intended.

A few months later and 70 registered users, I have a total of 3 users who used it a few times.

Maybe you could create some short demo for people?

I've done a demo and created documentation, 80% of the developers at $MY_COMPANY used Sourcegraph Code Search at least a few times in the past month, some of them are doing a dozen searches per day.

What do people use?

My company lives in code search. Most bug fixes and small enhancements start by investigating code search, and clicking a link from code search to start editing the file.

They don’t use anything for internal codebases.

However it’s not that bad because we work mostly on short lived research projects and it’s not that much to reuse. Public code search and ChatGPT are used much frequently.

Oooooops. That sounds like New Relic's $400/month per full user...

Or Gitlab pricing.

Why are companies isolating themselves from smaller clients?

Because they figure there's a bigger opportunity cost in the possibility of the big clients using cheaper tiers than in the possible lost customers who won't go for tiers at the current prices if an alternative is available.

You could always add seat limits at lower tiers, truth is that almost no company in my region is paying for Gitlab, but there are plenty that are paying for GitHub. There's also the problem with big customers, you can see it in Gitlab's case, namely they demand a lot of stuff and they have the leverage. I worked at a company like this, we couldn't stop focusing on niche custom dev for Mr Big Buck while our core offering was neglected and we stagnated.

It's really healthy for a company to have a whole spectrum of clients, from people that chip in 2-4$ per month for a minor bump in capabilities and without any support included to big companies that push for exploring new features.

In my opinion, Gitlab is a primary example of feature-creep and it will be the demise of the company.

>In my opinion, Gitlab is a primary example of feature-creep and it will be the demise of the company.

Gitlab was VC funded which means it had little choice but to take on a high risk/high reward approach. It worked fairly well since it IPOed at $12b while it's last round of funding was at under $3b. Good return for VCs. Of course the stock is down over 50% since IPO but that's someone else's problem.

The marginal cost per customer is not that different if it's a small customer or a massive one, so it's much interesting for you to go after the big ones that will generate much more revenue. You miss out on revenue from smaller customers, but your margins are higher (and it's totally possible that the revenue from smaller customers isn't financially directly worth it, if the support costs around them are too much).

Of course that skips the bigger picture like more people knowing and using your products and being happy with them leads to more champions for them doing your sales and marketing work for you, which can create lots of revenue in the long term; but it's pretty much impossible to quantify.

In lots of VC funded companies I always miss a basic pricing for users that don't need much but don't want to use a free tier that will probably dissapear in a year or two when the VC gets nervous.

$400?! Didn’t it use to be something like $20?

No wonder my enterprise is automatically kicking people off when they don’t use it.

And that's not even the enterprise version!

In every tier there are $49/month "core" users (basic dashboard viewing, no editing, no APM, no monitoring, no tracing...)

In the "Standard" tier you have $99/month "full" users, but you're limited to 5 total users, no SSO, and AFAIK very basic support.

In the "Pro" tier you have $418.80/month "full" users

In the "Enterprise" tier you have $658.80/month "full" users

No wonder people is paying for core users and then juggling generic full users. Although they limit you at 3 concurrent sessions at the same time, and monitor that, and will contact you if you login from different IPs and browsers to the same users.

The most interesting part for me is Pixie... but you can do that for free.

It also looks like they're now pivoting hard into AI bullshit, and barely want to acknowledge that the reading product even exists? Absolutely bizarre.

But it will be open source this time, pinky swear

I don’t think it’s fair to say that you need “infinite budget” to pay $100 per month? I pay more for several products and have a quite limited budget. But tools making me more productive or help my business is definitely worth to pay for.

100 USD per developer per month is 1/2 of our whole infrastructure cost at my company. You could get GitHub enterprise seats for 1/4 of that. Dealing with sales, contracts and licenses also has some non-zero opportunity costs.

There's life outside the United States, and $100/month is a decent chunk of a junior's salary in many parts of that. Two places I worked at migrated off Microsoft products to FOSS solutions for that reason alone (I was fortunate enough to initiate and complete this process for one of them) — something that has zero business sense according to most HN commenters.

For which products do you pay more than 100$ in license cost per month and developer? I only know prices like these for fairly specific niches, like development environments for very specific hardware/FPGA, or sophisticated physics simulation software. But this is a code search&navigation tool - a nice one, I'll admit, but still. That's 4x the price for GitLab Premium. Almost 2x of the whole Adobe Creative Suite.

Does it make you and all your peers $100 more productive each? Sounds a bit of stretch to me for code search. I don't even think I need to do a code search that bitbucket/GitHub/gitlab search aren't able to provide me every month. To be honest, I don't even think I'd be less productive even without those. Although they are helpful when discussing code that you don't have in your ide at the moment with other people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com