[HN Gopher] Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscriptio...
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Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model
Author : alexrustic
Score : 182 points
Date : 2021-01-26 17:33 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (about.gitlab.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (about.gitlab.com)
| CraftThatBlock wrote:
| This is a great move forward, but compared to GitHub, this is
| still very high.
|
| Free -> 9$/m -> 49$/m seems like a much more reasonable pricing.
| I'm sure more users would pay if fhe price is better.
| Dayshine wrote:
| $4/m to $20/m? That's a pretty steep increase.
|
| It's also really difficult to work out the impact of this. The
| feature comparison never really seems to include important git
| features, just headline sales features.
| john_cogs wrote:
| GitLab team member here. I think you will find these feature
| comparison pages to be pretty robust: -
| https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/gitlab-com/feature-comparis...
| - https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/self-managed/feature-
| compar...
|
| Let me know if there are specific features you have questions
| about.
| Dayshine wrote:
| This was a while ago, so I imagine things will have changed
| but:
|
| 1. As the dev of a code quality tool, it was (and still is)
| super unclear to me which tiers allow test reports, or custom
| reports.
|
| 2. For at least 6 months it was very unclear which tiers got
| true Jira "smart commits". The solution was simply to rewrite
| the docs to not use that wording, and push users to pay for a
| Jira extension rather than support it in Gitlab _shrug_.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Why on earth am I getting a cookie dialogue that includes a
| checkbox for "personalization" and asks for permission to track
| me "to personalize content and ads" on the pricing page of a
| company that makes money _selling an actual product_?
|
| Can't we do anything at all these days without pointless cookie
| dialogues and downright insulting behaviour?
|
| I like GitLab, but I don't like getting advertising cookies
| stuffed down my throat for showing an interest in your offering.
| logifail wrote:
| > Why on earth am I getting a cookie dialogue [...]
|
| Use NoScript. There is simply no reason for pages like that to
| [attempt to] stuff so many cookies and scripts for what is a
| simple page of static content.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| I had my browser without uBlock Origin for all of five
| seconds after a fresh install last month.
| disgruntledphd2 wrote:
| So they can retarget you as a potential customer.
|
| I totally get your annoyance, but they probably do mostly
| online marketing, so it makes sense for them.
| dharmab wrote:
| It's especially annoying because their competition does not
| use cookies.
|
| https://github.blog/2020-12-17-no-cookie-for-you/
| GordonS wrote:
| We're using Azure DevOps at the bank I'm currently working at.
| I've been a long-time user of it actually, and am a big fan - I
| just don't see how GitLab's new pricing can compete with AzDo, or
| even GitHub.
|
| $49/user/m for Premium seems really expensive compared to AzDo
| and GitHub. Does GitLab have some killer feature I'm not aware of
| that justifies spending 2-10x that of the competition?
|
| $99/m for Ultimate eds? It doesn't even explain on the pricing
| page what you get for that, beyond a couple of bullet points of
| biz-speak - it's almost like they think anyone who buys that kind
| of language has more money than sense. Might have a point there
| to be fair, but still hard to see the point of Ultimate - would
| be really interested to hear if anyone here pays for it, and why?
| zedpm wrote:
| > $49/user/m...
|
| The premium tier is $19/user/m, not $49. Still, I agree that
| even $19 is high relative to the competition. We're currently
| on the (soon to disappear) $4/user/m Gitlab plan and now I'm
| wasting time trying to figure out if we'll lose anything we
| care about by dropping down to the free tier.
| GordonS wrote:
| Sorry, $49 was just a typo.
| GordonS wrote:
| Whoops, $49 was a typo - I meant $19 of course (can no longer
| edit my comment).
| theptip wrote:
| Ultimate includes a bunch of bells and whistles - full k8s
| integration, static/dynamic security testing, deep monitoring
| integration, etc.
|
| I have considered it but ultimately at any given time, there
| are one or two features in the top tier that sound good, but
| usually you can get 80% of the way there with a FOSS
| alternative.
|
| For example wiring up ArgoCD to run your k8s deploys, or
| writing your SAST rules yourself.
| acdha wrote:
| Also it's all-or-nothing: the security tools are a good
| example where it could easily be worth paying a reasonable
| amount for either an optional feature or upgrades for
| specific users but when that applies a big up-front
| multiplier to your entire organization it becomes a much
| harder sale.
| harrisonjackson wrote:
| They push features down to the lower tiers pretty frequently.
| Easier to launch them on ultimate and then move them down
| than the other way.
|
| Silver got a lot of great project management features around
| roadmapping and epics last year that allowed our team to
| cancel jira sub, so that was sweet.
|
| edit: wouldn't count on the fancier devops tools getting
| moved through :/
| addicted wrote:
| That's not reassuring in a comment on an update where they
| are completely eliminating a tier.
| harrisonjackson wrote:
| My response was to someone considering the ultimate tier.
| I'd recommend they keep an eye on the premium (silver)
| tier for the functionality they want which may at some
| point become available.
|
| Premium was an easy sell for us as we were able to
| eliminate other subscriptions. Ultimate does not have
| features we'd be willing to pay an extra $80 per user per
| month for.
| deeviant wrote:
| They offer tons of benefits for Ultimate edition. How could you
| possibly run a business without _" Executive level insights"_?
| GordonS wrote:
| Yep, that's exactly the kind of language I'm talking about -
| wtf does that even mean?
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > $49/user/m for Premium seems really expensive compared to
| AzDo and GitHub
|
| Sure, but you know what else $49/user/month for "Premium" is
| really expensive compared to? GitLab Premium, which is
| $19/user/month. [0]
|
| > Does GitLab have some killer feature I'm not aware of that
| justifies spending 2-10x that of the competition?
|
| At least some of the described features seem to be closer to
| GitHub Enterprise ($21/user/mo) or AzDo Basic+Test
| ($52/user/mo) than the lower tiers on those, but that's not
| consistent across the board and the three don't describe
| features in a way which makes side-by-side comparison easy. But
| I don't see Premium as clearly overpriced compared to the
| competition.
|
| > $99/m for Ultimate eds? It doesn't even explain on the
| pricing page what you get for that, beyond a couple of bullet
| points of biz-speak
|
| There's a detailed feature breakdown of all three plans on the
| pricing page, with links to more details about each feature.
|
| Unfortunately, its in a stupid scrolling table that only lets
| you see a few lines at a time, though.
|
| [0] https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/
| mpreuss wrote:
| Thanks for catching that usability issue, we agree the double
| scrolling is not ideal. This wasn't the intended
| functionality and I can't imagine how long it would have
| taken for us to catch this. Here's the link to the MR
| https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-
| com/-/merge_request... we'll have a fix going live shortly
| wdb wrote:
| Most of the features you can get for $4 per month for at Github
| you need to pay $49/mo for at Gitlab, such as the integration of
| security dependency scanning, secret scanning, dependabot alerts.
| My understanding is that you need to pay the top tier to get UI
| integrations for these things.
|
| As the monorepo support could be better as it wouldn't support
| multiple reporter files, like junit xmls.
|
| Personally, if I had the choice I would go for Github Enterprise.
| Big chance with Gitlab you have to pay for hosting your own
| Gitlab runners anyways.
| bsjd wrote:
| Very sorry to learn about this very disappointing news about
| upselling a product that was worth every single penny and that I
| have been using professionally for the last four years. It is not
| really the price hike that worries here, but rather the
| realization that we're locked into a product with a volatile
| price that can double or even triple at any time.
| MrOxiMoron wrote:
| ok, this might suck. We are on bronze right now and yes there
| where some things in silver that would have been nice to have it
| was never worth the costs per user to upgrade (especially because
| a lot of features already in bronze are not things we actually
| use or need), this might mean we either switch to free or abandon
| gitlab if there is an alternative.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| > especially because a lot of features already in bronze are
| not things we actually use or need
|
| This has been my org's issue as well. We use dedicated,
| external products for project management, CI, binary asset
| storage, container registry, wiki, etc etc. I get that a one-
| stop shop might be really valuable for a small org with basic
| needs that align well to what GitLab supplies, but I don't know
| if it scales up all that well. I would worry about getting
| partly migrated and then discovering some functionality gap,
| and maybe finding out that the GitLab team that built that
| feature no longer exists and there was basically no one
| maintaining it any more.
|
| Spreading themselves so thin does have a real cost-- here's an
| example of recently-resolved ticket for something that I would
| consider core "repository" functionality (LFS content inclusion
| in the tarball) but that sat unfixed and unnoted-in-docs for
| almost four years: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
| org/gitlab/-/issues/15079
| wdb wrote:
| Yeah, there are a lot of these kind of tickets imho
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| What are the things in bronze you did need/want, vs free?
| thepill wrote:
| Multiple Issue Assignees for me
| rpadovani wrote:
| For me: - issue weights - iterations - multiple issue
| assignees - issue dependencies
|
| We did evaluate silver (now premium), and it wasn't worth it.
| We will probably upgrade, but this is a 5x increase on the
| price, and as a long term contributor of Gitlab, this does
| definitely make me angry.
| scaladev wrote:
| >multiple issue assignees
|
| >issue dependencies
|
| FWIW these are available in Gitea, along with some other
| Gitlab features that require payment.
|
| It's a much more lightweight alternative, though.
|
| https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/
| raro11 wrote:
| We have a small development team (20) but 100+ clients that have
| reporter role.
|
| We are in the process of moving out some clients so we could use
| Starter. Premium was too expensive because reporters count as a
| user and guests are only free in Ultimate.
|
| So now we are looking for alternatives, which sucks because as a
| developer I really liked Gitlab.
|
| Does anyone have any recommendations?
| riffic wrote:
| GitLab, I love you, but you aren't very consistent in your price
| structure.
|
| This appears to be a simplification though, which works for me.
| mattl wrote:
| > $0, $19, $99
| ashton314 wrote:
| Top tier is still ~$100/(user*month); that seems a little much...
| does anyone here pay to use the top tier?
|
| Edit: Wow! I really appreciate everyone's perspectives here!
| shagie wrote:
| The question for Premium to Ultimate is "are you using GitLab
| for project and requirements management?"
|
| For that, the ultimate tier is now competing with a Jira suite,
| or something that PMs use made by Microsoft or a similar type
| of product.
|
| The licensing for the project management tool can easily run
| $50+/month/user
|
| Add in the "business/customer access to the issue tracking" and
| if you've got Jira or similar, that adds on a gain a bit more
| $$.
|
| Next, adding the artifact scanning tools. Yes, you can get them
| 3rd party... but its another thing to set up.
|
| In the end, picture the 50-100 employee shop where the sysadmin
| is weighing in on "get GitLab Premium vs GitLab ultimate" and
| the reduction of additional installs and licenses that need to
| be managed.
|
| Yea, it it adds $80/user/month, but if it saves an hour or two
| per user per month in productivity gains - that can make a
| difference.
|
| In the organization I currently work for, we were considering
| the options of (GitLab Ultimate) vs (GitLab Premium + Jira +
| other tools) and ultimately went with the premium and other for
| a number of reasons... but GitLab Ultimate made a strong
| showing.
| jvalencia wrote:
| The thing that killed ultimate for us was the fact that there
| was no ticket manager only role. Why pay 100/mo for a product
| manager who just fills out tickets. It's absurd.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Especially considering GitHub enterprise is $21/month/user
| 0x008 wrote:
| Well but it seems gitlab offers a lot more value?
| easton wrote:
| I just looked through the feature list, the security stuff
| is interesting but it requires a strange scenario where
| your employees are pushing malicious code to the repo
| (maybe this happens often and I've just never heard of it).
| Much of the Agile/project tracking stuff is in
| Jira/Basecamp/Asana/TeamCity (or GitHub projects + issues
| can be used if your needs are small). Some of the other
| stuff is done by a myriad of GitHub actions/bots (you'd
| have to spend some time getting that the way you want it
| though)
|
| If you want everything integrated together this is probably
| fine, but GitHub Enterprise + Jira Premium is $35 per user
| per month (and every other project management tool is
| cheaper and better than Jira, just about). I don't know
| what the value add is here, other than self-hosting. (Or at
| least, the $65 value add).
| htrp wrote:
| Recommendation for Jira replacement?
|
| Preferably with an emphasis on speed?
| enra wrote:
| Depends on your needs, Jira has lots of features and
| plugins.
|
| We're building Linear, focusing on speed and providing
| sane defaults that sense for software companies. The app
| offline first so all interactions are <100ms. Sprints,
| projects, roadmaps, multiple teams, GitHub/Gitlab/Sentry
| supported etc supported. Lot of YC startups and growth
| companies (100-300 engineers) use us.
|
| https://linear.app
| teekert wrote:
| Zenhub?
| keithnz wrote:
| We migrated away from Jira to YouTrack, which is quite
| flexible. Speed wise it's not too bad, could be snappier.
| But it is really flexible with full APIs. Jetbrains also
| has "Spaces" which is more simplified but has other toys.
| ArchOversight wrote:
| Security stuff is interesting even in the case where all
| your employees are saints.
|
| If you are building a docker image for example, you
| likely are doing a pull from docker hub, the security
| scanning software can help you catch security issues
| there.
|
| It can also help with things like dependencies in your
| node projects, python projects and more (at least, that
| is what the security scanning software we use at $work
| does, I assume gitlab is similar).
|
| It's not about employees pushing malicious code, it's
| about catching issues with dependencies further up the
| stack, to make sure that the end result you are pushing
| to your servers/users is not vulnerable.
| wdb wrote:
| Github Actions, Github Checks API already offers more ways
| to extend it than GitLab. GitLab is really disappointing in
| that regard. Even for $99/mo you don't get it. There is
| also barely an ecosystem around GitLab.
| Jonnax wrote:
| I'm under the impression that GitHub Enterprise's on prem
| ci/cd pipelines isnt available yet
| wdb wrote:
| The v3 release candidate got it:
| https://github.blog/2021-01-15-github-enterprise-
| server-3-0-...
|
| Today, we're making GitHub Enterprise Server 3.0 available
| as a release candidate. Announced in the GitHub Universe
| Keynote, it's the biggest ever change to Enterprise Server,
| bringing customers:
|
| * Actions - developer-first workflow automation and CI/CD *
| Packages - publish and consume packages together with code
| * Mobile Apps (beta)- iOS and Android apps for
| collaborating from any device
|
| For companies interested in automating code security with
| GitHub Advanced Security, we're also bringing:
|
| * Code scanning - scan every pull request for known
| vulnerabilities with CodeQL * Secret scanning (beta) -
| detect credentials in code before they hit production
| sdesol wrote:
| When I took a break from my startup, I ended up working for a
| fintech company and you will be surprised by
|
| a) how much money they have
|
| b) how little understanding of tech they have
|
| For many non-traditional tech companies, they feel spending
| more money, will help offset tech deficiencies. In the same way
| that, novice golfers equate spending more money on golf
| equipment will make them better golfers.
| randompwd wrote:
| Great. Why should tech companies (and by extension software
| engineers) provide discounted service to non tech businesses?
|
| No other industry has made themselves so available at such
| affordable pricing than tech has?
|
| Where are all the blog posts/free software/free advise from
| those finance companies?
|
| Where is all the free legal/free court counsel info from all
| lawyers?
|
| It's about time tech started charging for commercial use.
|
| Software engineers worldwide deserve more of the pie and
| letting traditional industries eat Michelin quality food at
| fast food prices has to end.
|
| Retailers don't sell at cost - they never have. They sell at
| as much profit as they can get (and yet free ERPs exist/cheap
| e-commerce exists).
|
| All so the non-tech business people can have greater profit?
| Fuck that.
| toyg wrote:
| Is this satire? Have you noticed that the richest companies
| in the world are tech companies?
| ssully wrote:
| The place I work is on Premium currently. I was starting to
| look into using some of their application security tools until
| I realized like 90% of them are Ultimate/Gold features. It was
| a huge bummer, especially because I don't have the case yet for
| getting us to upgrade to Ultimate just for those features.
| O5vYtytb wrote:
| We just recently purchased a license (~200 users) for self-hosted
| "starter". There was no mention of a change to the pricing
| models, and this forced change to "premium" doesn't add any value
| for us. The things that would give us value include multi-level
| epics, but "ultimate" is just way too expensive.
|
| Very disappointed in this direction from Gitlab. I'll be
| advocating for us to switch platforms.
| jhasse wrote:
| Is it 10000 CI minutes per user?
| harrychin2 wrote:
| Just host your own runners
| https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/install/
| easton wrote:
| That requires on-prem hardware (or I guess you could spin VMs
| up in the cloud, but I doubt that works out cheaper than
| hosted CI).
| rpadovani wrote:
| It definitely is. On AWS, you can run it on spot instances
| with autoscaling. Including also networking price, it is an
| order of magnitude cheaper.
| dnsmichi wrote:
| Hi, GitLab team member here. You can spin up a cloud
| instance, or dive deeper into auto-scaling the GitLab CI/CD
| runner: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2017/11/23/autoscale-
| ci-runner...
|
| Depending on your needs, automatically managing and
| deploying this could also be interesting. We have started a
| new project called the "5 min production app":
| https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/12/15/first-code-to-ci-
| cd...
|
| Alternatively, partners provide hosted runners, if that is
| an option for you: https://partners.gitlab.com/English/dire
| ctory/search?f0=Serv...
| john_cogs wrote:
| Hi! GitLab Team Member here. Our Premium tier comes with 10,000
| minutes per organization per month. You can also buy additional
| minutes or use your own infrastructure as runners (which would
| be at no charge from GitLab).
| neves wrote:
| Never forget that there's a 4th tier plan: host it yourself. With
| containers it is really easy to setup a GitLab instance.
|
| It isn't difficult to integrate GitLab with other tools. We are a
| Gov company and it is really easier to put man power to customize
| it than to climb all the bureaucratic hurdles to buy it.
| nemetroid wrote:
| There are multiple paid self-hosted tiers, one of which is
| being phased out.
| thepill wrote:
| This doesnt change what features you can use, does ist?
| mikewhy wrote:
| It does not, no.
| daxelrod wrote:
| You can host it yourself at any of the tiers. Paying for GitLab
| doesn't necessarily imply SaaS GitLab.
| umvi wrote:
| Which features do you get with self hosted?
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| I think we're still on Free, which is awesome and works for us
| /shrug/. Like they said, we really only need the VCS hosting,
| though the free static page hosting is nice too.
| jeswin wrote:
| I cannot find if project-scoped access tokens (which was a
| Bronze+ feature) are available in the Free tier, or whether they
| require Silver.
|
| It's such a glaring omission on GitHub - which only has personal
| access tokens which give apps full access to all your repos.
| 0x008 wrote:
| So they give full access to all repos you have access to (I.e.
| organizational repos) or only the ones you own?
|
| If so this would mean I would consider to moving to a platform
| where the repository owner can control the tokens.
| leipert wrote:
| GitLab employee here. Just asked the Product Manager
| responsible. Project Access Tokens [0] will be available on
| Premium for GitLab.com and available on Free for self-hosted.
|
| [0]:
| https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/settings/project_acc...
| mdaniel wrote:
| > I cannot find if project-scoped access tokens (which was a
| Bronze+ feature) are available in the Free tier, or whether
| they require Silver.
|
| The manual says "Bronze and above" for gitlab.com
| https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/user/project/settings/project_acc...
| but I tried the open-source "CE" docker container earlier this
| week and found that they worked there (maybe that's what "Core"
| means?)
| zmmmmm wrote:
| It's interesting, Gitlab is one of the products I most want my
| organisation to pay for but am constantly defeated by their
| pricing plans.
|
| It sort of maps onto this decision because what I consistently
| found was that Bronze offered almost no value in terms of
| features but the step up to Silver was so big that there was no
| way we could dive in at that level. So we just lived on the free
| tier and by and large get by with that.
|
| Part of the problem is having a lot of users who interact with
| the system at a fairly casual level. To license everyone at
| Silver/Premium would be really prohibitive. But licensing a small
| number up to Premium and leaving the rest on free or bronze
| doesn't work either.
|
| Gitlab is one of my favorite products so I really want it to
| succeed.
| theptip wrote:
| This is a surprising move to me. Seems like they are further
| deprioritizing trying to win small companies, which might make
| sense based on their revenue split, but I do wonder if it's going
| to hamper them in the long term.
|
| For enterprise users, $20/mo is not going to move the needle. But
| for a startup, that is actually a material spend, particularly
| given that Gitlab still don't support monthly billing on
| subscriptions like most SaaS services do. (I would not be
| surprised if they lost a number of cost-conscious customers to
| GitHub due to the "annual only" pricing model.)
|
| For user acquisition, broadly speaking you can acquire big
| customers in two ways; either you convince a big company to
| switch to your product, or you win a small company that then
| grows into a large one. The latter requires you to have mindshare
| and GitHub clearly wins on this count.
|
| The risk with just trying to win large companies is that there is
| significant inertia involved in core tooling like CI/CD; to
| convince someone to switch off their current system will require
| a lot of benefit, and the amount of work only increases as the
| company gets bigger. It's way easier to convince a startup to use
| Gitlab from the get-go than to convince someone to convert a
| 100-1000 person org.
|
| So talking all of this through, I can see why Gitlab doesn't want
| to scrap with GitHub over supporting all of the low-margin $5/mo
| companies, and wants to focus on higher margin enterprise deals.
| If they are seeing better performance in that segment, then
| jettisoning the $5/mo plan might let them focus on fewer customer
| profiles, and make the product more polished there. But it seems
| potentially risky, going all in on one sales strategy vs. having
| a diversified approach that gives some hedging.
| mikl wrote:
| Eliminating the bronze-tier sounds foolish to me. I'm a bronze
| customer, and I'm definitely not going to opt to pay for a 5x
| price increase, because I don't need all those extra bells and
| whistles.
|
| Getting funding to pay for something that has free alternatives
| is already difficult in corporate settings. Having your cheapest
| (non-free) option be $228 per user per year is a pretty hard
| sell, especially for those self-hosting Gitlab.
|
| Super annoying to have all the bells and whistles they keep
| adding being used as a justification to jack up the prices when
| you don't actually _use_ those bells and whistles.
| devicenull wrote:
| What happened to the pricing for self-managed instances? We
| rather like our onprem setup.
| thepill wrote:
| Its the same i guess!?
| boleary-gl wrote:
| GitLab Team Member here. The pricing is the same for both our
| SaaS and self-managed products - and the tiers are now
| identical as well.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| This is not clear from the pricing page, which talks about CI
| pipeline minutes and other SaaS only stuff.
| john_cogs wrote:
| GitLab team member here. Thanks for the feedback. I'll
| relay that to the team who owns our pricing page.
|
| This page contains comparisons for the self-managed
| features: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/self-
| managed/feature-compar...
| scoodah wrote:
| What's the justification for the self-managed and SaaS
| products being priced the same? That isn't intended to be
| snarky but a legitimate question, by the way.
| boleary-gl wrote:
| You can read a bunch about how we made that decision here:
| https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/pricing/#price-
| differe...
| adamtulinius wrote:
| Some time ago they made the pricing for hosted and on-prem the
| same.
| crb002 wrote:
| GitLab doesn't own Azure - they rent. Either they get repos in
| every major cloud data center or they lose on network transfer
| latency/cost.
| TonyTrapp wrote:
| So many projects we use at work (including Qt and GitLab) seem to
| change their subscription plans to something that is much less
| favorable for smaller development teams. I wonder where this will
| lead to in the big picture, when more and more small companies
| can simply no longer justify paying for those subscriptions.
| izacus wrote:
| Probably into another cycle of cheap products to which you'll
| migrate to, which will then increase prices and again and again
| until someone realizes that running sustainable services costs
| money.
| mchusma wrote:
| Wow, this is so expensive. Really glad we don't use gitlab, which
| appears to be approximately 10x the per user price pay for these
| products on a standalone basis. I think if this was billed
| monthly and cost about 1/5 the level, it would be in the
| ballpark.
|
| Maybe they are just getting their clock cleaned by GitHub so are
| trying to be a pure enterprise play, and dump startups.
| xrd wrote:
| One of my favorite Mad magazine cartoons has this patient sitting
| with his dentist. The dentist tells him the cost of the dental
| work, and the payment plans for it. The patient says "sounds like
| I'm buying a car!" The dentist replies: "Yes, I am!" I think some
| of the comments here are confused about how pricing works and why
| GitLab is doing it. And, IMHO, there is so much value in even the
| free open source version that they'll have to do a lot worse to
| lose my business.
|
| Does anyone know if the open source (totally free) version, under
| these new pricing guidelines, permits you to charge people for
| accounts on a self-hosted GitLab instance? Am I able to run a
| business based on GitLab without paying a penny to GitLab as long
| as I use the open source features?
| Macha wrote:
| In the past, I considered buying a subscription to show some
| support but the silver tier was too much for that and the bronze
| tier had nothing compelling. To be honest even silver/premium
| only had "pull mirroring" that seemed relevant to my individual
| use cases.
| iFire wrote:
| I second this, the only thing from starter was "pull
| mirroring", and now I'm priced out of even thinking buying
| Gitlab premium.
| bsmith4 wrote:
| F*k you all gitLab team members who are here. F*k you Sid. We're
| 1000+ in your Starter and that was a mistake you move to gitlab.
| Bad support ever and a bad company that is managed by kids who
| have no understanding in pricing. Shame on you. You never go to
| IPO.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Remember when you make a pricing model for your company: you can
| never change it without some kind of backlash unless you can make
| things _cheaper_. So it 's fine to charge a bit more initially
| and figure things out as you go, you can then lower the price
| once you've worked the numbers and/or have to respond to
| competitive pressure.
|
| But changing your model will upset your customers, no matter how
| well you intend it and there will _always_ be a backlash,
| especially from developers for tools because there is always
| going to be someone else that does it cheaper. Rely on the 'cost
| too switch' once too often and you will shed users and users that
| leave will _never_ come back. It is easier to attract a new user
| than it is to get someone that got burned to return.
|
| Do what you can to get it right the first time and build in some
| room. And if you do have to change it be willing to grandfather
| in the users that got you there for ever.
| ppeetteerr wrote:
| I remember an in-person presentation by Unbounce talking about
| their pricing model. They realized that anyone paying less than
| $99/month was not worth their time, so they removed those
| plans, barely reducing their monthly revenue, and focused on
| the high-end customers.
|
| Looking at their pricing structure today, I see $80 being the
| lowest tier, going all the way to $300
| jonas21 wrote:
| Everything you said makes sense -- but at the same time, when
| building a SaaS offering, your initial product may have much
| less functionality than what you eventually plan to build.
|
| If you start at the price you want to charge in the end, people
| will look at the product and say, you expect me to pay $X for
| _that_?
|
| One thing that may work is to offer early adopters a lower
| price, and keep them at that price forever, while charging
| later customers more. But to do that, you need to raise the
| price for new customers early and often -- otherwise you'll end
| up with too many people at the lower price. And if your costs
| scale with the scope of your product, that could mean you're
| losing money on a large fraction of your users.
| x0x0 wrote:
| There's a difference between changing the pricing model and
| raising prices.
|
| gitlab is changing their pricing model; as near as I can
| tell, they want to be a source control / jira / CI all-in-one
| environment. My guess is the willingness to pay vs github for
| just plain source control isn't there.
|
| :shrug:
|
| This is the risk with saas though. Customers are adults; they
| can choose to continue using your product or not. If
| customers don't want the saas they buy to be able to change
| models or raise prices, their choices are (1) don't use it;
| or (2) sign annual or even multiyear agreements. And if a
| company evaluates software that won't make multiyear
| commitments to them, they should take that unwillingness into
| account when choosing which vendor to use.
| afterwalk wrote:
| In other industries for example gaming and desktop tools,
| people eventually just ship a new version that existing users
| have to buy again. For continuously deployed web products a
| repricing is the only way to frame it in customer's minds.
| lmeyerov wrote:
| Not so bad --
|
| * Grandfather current customers, which gitlab did at near
| minimum here (current year / ~no changes ?). ~Lifetime / tier
| would be better, esp as a growing co should be fine here
| revenue wise. Better current customers sing your praises
| internally + externally than say you're yet another
| couldn't-care-less quarter-driven bigco / sales-driven vc co:
| growth wins.
|
| * Put new stuff in new plans/tiers. Gitlab VPs seem to be
| choosing a weak balance here.
|
| I'm all for offering higher prices. Trick is, when adding
| stuff, people should pay more for more, and same / less for
| standing still. Let hungrier/spendier teams spend more, and
| cost-sensitive ones happily spread the good word.
|
| Not what happened here? Gitlab seems big enough that all this
| doesn't really matter though, they are probably reaching a
| customer size and capital-intensitive enough moat that they
| don't care toooo much.
|
| ---
|
| A good contrast is github / microsoft, which also is way into
| clever pricing:
|
| - Way cheaper per-user at all tiers. We got tier-shifted at
| some point, but don't recall any pricing funniness during
| that.
|
| - Adding customer abilities to spend infinite amounts, but
| via new layers, like pay-as-you-go CI/CD offerings that do
| not gauge existing users. I expect the prices to go down, not
| up, as they figure out more scaling tricks / computing
| improves and they try to get users more addicted.
|
| GH/MS is probably working on a much bigger timescale than
| GitLab, as GH doesn't need to look at juicing numbers to
| fundraise / sell while buyers are willing, and instead focus
| on being a friendly shift-left answer to AWS/GCP
| ajford wrote:
| Agreed.
|
| My last employer had been on the same GH tier for over 6
| years or something like that, and was on a much older tier.
|
| It lacked some of the new features, but the price-point was
| right for our team size, and we weren't yet at the point
| where the newer features (ci/cd stuff like Actions) were
| worth the cost hike.
|
| We were planning on switching tiers to get the new
| features, which is exactly what you described. Let those
| who want the new things pay for them if/when they decide to
| make the switch.
| itronitron wrote:
| Looking at their pricing page, it seems that the Ultimate
| tier, and even the premium tier, has a lot of features that
| many of their customers will never use.
|
| I am assuming that the pricing plan is set by deployment and
| not by user, otherwise a company could buy 5 Ultimate seats,
| 20 Premiums, and the rest join for free. There is no point in
| buying Ultimate for 100 users when only 5 of them would ever
| want to use the Ultimate features.
| ralmidani wrote:
| I'm by no means a marketing expert, but showing your early
| users respect, courtesy, and-dare I say it-loyalty, seems
| intuitive to me but also less and less common in today's
| Anything As A Service (pronounced like "ass") tech environment.
| I don't miss months-long sales cycles, prohibitive up-front
| costs, oppressive support contracts, etc., but I do miss having
| companies that will bend over backward to retain long-time
| customers. Everything has become a transaction, and every
| customer is just a fraction of a company's overall revenue. I'm
| not dissing GitLab as I am not (yet) a paying customer, just
| commenting on the state of software in general.
| onassar wrote:
| I generally agree. We've always taken the "grand-fathering"
| approach, but it can get a bit more complicated as your product
| and offerings grow. If someone was paying $XX /mo for your
| initial offering, and a few years later, you're able to provide
| a number of new features within that product, I don't think you
| necessarily need to continue providing those extra features
| simply because someone signed up earlier.
|
| To your point, you may face a backlash. But it also costs a lot
| of time and $$ to support new development and features.
| Therefore, having some backlash may still be the right decision
| in the medium/long term. Can be hard to weather that storm
| initially, though.
| itronitron wrote:
| The features that they paid for in the first year have
| already been paid for by the customers. While it costs the
| vendor time and money for _new_ features it doesn 't cost
| them money for _old_ features. Therefore under a subscription
| model that payment should be covering the cost of new
| features.
| onassar wrote:
| I think I'd reply to this with a "yes and no" kinda thing.
| For us, maintaining anything requires time and $$. This is,
| in part, because technology changes. Even in a vacuum with
| no new active development, money and $$ is required to
| ensure everything stays up and running.
|
| eg. as our use base has grown, so too has our database. And
| so while the optics of it from the end-user POV is that the
| product has remain unchanged, we've had to invest in
| database and scaling services in order to continue to meet
| the initial offerings.
|
| It's not as simple as that, but you probably get the gist
| of it.
|
| A more relevant example might be a web service that emails
| you once a week. If the mailing service that powers this
| requires DNS or integration changes to help fight spam,
| over time that will require time (and perhaps $$).
|
| If I'm misunderstanding your point, let me know :)
| ehutch79 wrote:
| I'm pretty sure people would be upset about price reductions as
| well
| gnfargbl wrote:
| I see Gitlab's point about all the extra features they have
| built, but the problem for me is that I just don't need them.
|
| What I _do_ need is a reliable remote git repo, a container
| registry, a CI system, and about 2500-5000 CI minutes per month.
| $50 a year for that seemed very reasonable or even a bit too
| cheap, but $250 is kind of stretching it a bit.
|
| I think the problem here is actually the existence of the free
| plan. It probably isn't bringing in customers that Gitlab would
| want, and it is taking up space where an effective starter plan
| should be. Why not replace it with a slightly beefed up "basic"
| plan at about $120/year? They could throw in a 3 month trial at
| the start to ease the barrier of initial sign-up.
| umvi wrote:
| Yeah, I'm in favor of axing the free plan in favor of a beefed
| up basic tier that's cheaper than premium. A lot of free users
| would probably be livid though.
| gnfargbl wrote:
| Does it matter? GitHub are the inevitable winners of any race
| to the bottom. GitLab would be better off trying to retain
| actual paying customers like me, instead of encouraging me to
| read https://docs.github.com/en/actions/learn-github-
| actions/migr....
| toyg wrote:
| Gitlab only established a foothold thanks to free users,
| when Github did not have free private repos. Free users
| sooner or later upgrade to paid plans, when they really
| want this or that feature.
|
| Gitlab in many ways stays relevant by being "the nicer
| github" - if they become all about the money, they'll die
| like bitbucket.
| umvi wrote:
| I assume they are hoping at least 1 out of 5 bronze users will
| transition to silver and increase net profits. But still... we
| just transitioned from BitBucket to GitLab because the $4 self-
| hosted tier was just too good a deal. $20 seems a bit steep
| considering we are using our own hardware for hosting, CI, etc. I
| really hope we don't transition back to BitBucket...
| [deleted]
| harrisonjackson wrote:
| Isn't there a free option? What were the main features pushing
| you to the $4 plan?
|
| edit: looks like for multi-user you need paid?
| sschueller wrote:
| I'm trying to move away from bit bucket but now the price is
| again more and this is difficult to sell.
| iFire wrote:
| Does this mean repository mirroring (pulling) can be incorporated
| into Gitlab CE?
|
| * https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/23166#note_494...
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| why would it mean that?
| time0ut wrote:
| I love GitLab. It has really won me over versus GitHub over the
| past couple of years. I've found it to be much more suited to
| enterprise use.
|
| That said, they really need to work on the pricing model. We have
| 1,000 potential users. But only 300 of them would really use all
| of the features. It is a tough sell to pay equally for all of
| them.
|
| I'd really love to use some of the features of ultimate, but the
| pricing model makes it a complete non-starter. It is an order of
| magnitude more expensive than the hodgepodge of tools it would
| replace if we have to pay ~100k a month for it. Our account exec
| has offered to talk about discounts and stuff, but it is just too
| far out there and too much risk since the lock-in would be so
| high.
| dak1 wrote:
| We recently spent a couple weeks going over pricing with a GitLab
| regional Account Leader.
|
| We already use GitLab for all our source repos, CI/CD pipelines,
| and had been using it for issue management as well -- all fully
| self-hosted. The hope was to drop Jira, which was also being used
| for project planning, and fully adopt GitLab, but the costs were
| simply unjustifiable.
|
| Basically GitLab ended up being a full order of magnitude more
| expensive. Even with discounts, which got things closer (but not
| all the way there), the fear was after a period of time, the
| discounts would be ended/phased out and we'd be stuck.
|
| I'd love to see those features that compete directly with Jira
| (like roadmaps and multi-level epics) come down to the Premium
| level, which is more price/feature competitive.
|
| We love GitLab, but find ourselves stuck using the free tier and
| paying for services we don't love, rather than supporting GitLab.
| I'd suspect we're not alone there, either.
| tentacleuno wrote:
| How was your experience with Jira?
| zeusk wrote:
| I had to deal with JIRA during an internship, it screams
| management bloat.
| hanniabu wrote:
| Yeah tbh trello is good for most
| time0ut wrote:
| I use a couple dozen tools on a regular basis. JIRA is by far
| the worst. The functionality is ok. Maybe it is a bit
| bloated. Maybe our process is a little over complicated.
| That's not a big deal. The thing that really gets me is
| performance.
|
| The performance is absolute dog shit. Every interaction with
| it painfully slow. For example, the page to view a single
| issue is almost 20MB fetched over 100 HTTP requests and takes
| 10 seconds to load. This is without cache. With assets
| cached, it is still 4 seconds to render. This is the fastest
| interaction by the way. Everything else is worse.
|
| Maybe some of this is my organization's fault. I really don't
| know. What I do know is that it is so slow that I dread every
| interaction with it.
| marcinzm wrote:
| It's what you make of it. Most companies make it into a mess.
| And the UI is slow and bloated like a dead whale.
|
| It is however not that expensive which matters especially
| when most of the company needs accounts and not just
| engineers. $7/user/month for basic or $14 for everything you
| reasonably care about. Gitlab is $19 or $99/user/month.
| Freak_NL wrote:
| Definitely not alone. We use the self-hosted GitLab that comes
| with MatterMost out of the box: great!
|
| Now offer something to kill of Jira at a reasonable price and
| you've got another customer. The functionality is all there,
| it's just distributed awkwardly across tiers for many small
| outfits.
| tinco wrote:
| Same, we ended up pushing back our subscription for almost a
| year, in which we really could've used their service. Just
| because the upfront cost was so high. And when we finally got a
| subscription it was a silver subscription, which is great but
| doesn't let us drop Jira. The gold subscription cost is just
| insane. It might make sense if you're used to paying SV wages.
| tyingq wrote:
| Variation of the same here. We did try to show, for example,
| that we could roll off some contractors if we shut down all of
| the various jenkins instances. But that wasn't enough to
| justify the "ultimate" tier, we went with "premium".
|
| And the business case still had to include fluff to make it
| sound at all like a good idea. Note that it IS a good idea in
| this case, but for reasons that are hard to show as dollars.
|
| It seems like they need something (low base + ala cart add
| ons?) to have a better pitch for Jira/Bitbucket self-hosted
| customers to switch.
|
| One thing they could do is reduce the cost for non-developer
| seats. Lots of people need access to the issues, or
| builds/deploys, etc, without needing to commit code.
| ShakataGaNai wrote:
| Yea. Love gitlab but the pricing does add up quickly. Even if
| with all the features, it's _really_ hard to get value out of
| Gold /Ultimate.
|
| When I add up all the major SaaS apps an average user has: SSO,
| Email, Chat, Storage, Zoom, Support. Combined, GitLab Ultimate
| costs 2-3x that. And I promise you that as much as we all hate
| a messy inbox, email is more broadly useful than GitLab.
|
| The other problem with ultimate is that it strongly incentives
| you to NOT let anyone else on the platform. At $1200/year there
| is no way in heck I'm letting the artists use Git, they can
| stick to their terribly Dropbox hacks. Marketing team working
| on assets with developers? Use email, no way you're getting
| access to GitLab. The $100/user/month model makes sense if they
| are a core developer (still too expensive, but makes sense)
| using every single feature in the system, but nothing else.
| prepend wrote:
| > The other problem with ultimate is that it strongly
| incentives you to NOT let anyone else on the platform.
|
| This is my biggest problem as their pricing model discourages
| collaborative development.
|
| We use GitLab to generate docs that are read by hundreds of
| internal users. On the free tier, if a user wants to suggest
| a change it's no problem. Even though that is a very rare
| user and might only create one issue a year. Or maybe they
| add a tutorial or something to a project.
|
| They aren't developers, but having them involved in the git
| lifecycle is really helpful. Also data scientists who just
| want to archive their pipelines.
|
| But with the ultimate tier those users suddenly cost
| $1200/year for minimal features. We can't upgrade for free
| for the developers because we'll disconnect all those "casual
| users."
|
| The suggestion to run two instances is stupid and confusing
| to users who now have to learn about mirroring, etc.
|
| It's weird that they don't allow individual users to have
| tiers, we would buy more GitLab.
|
| As of now, we will likely have to switch off of GitLab
| because there's not a clear dividing line between software
| developers who need GitLab features and staff who write
| software who just need git, issue tracking, wikis and pages.
| xtracto wrote:
| We are are in a similar situation: We were using Github Team,
| paying I think $4 a month per account (between 10 and 15
| users). I (head of the Eng group) love Gitlab and had used it
| for some time in personal/open-source projects. I managed to
| convince the team about Gitlab and we migrated, initially in
| the Free tier.
|
| My first surprise was that Gitlab does not allow for Monthly
| payments...if I wanted to go into the Bronze tier, I would have
| had to pay a whole year in full. My startup doesn't do whole-
| year payments (quarterly or monthly) so that stopped me on my
| tracks.
|
| I guess with the full weight of Microsoft, Github will out-
| price Gitlab. It's kind of sad because I prefer Gitlab CI/CD to
| Github actions (I just couldn't make sense of them).
| dkarlovi wrote:
| Invest time in GH actions, they are actually really good once
| you get over the initial hump.
| addicted wrote:
| In my unfortunate experience, having evangelized Gitlab in my
| company from the days when they made money through support and
| subscriptions, as expensive as Gitlab already is, it will only
| get more expensive a few years later.
|
| It's nice that they keep adding these features, but in reality,
| we have already integrated most of the functionality they've
| added well before they get around to buying the company making
| the features they want to add.
|
| So the actual practical effect on us is that we simply have to
| pay additional costs for those features that we don't use (or
| pay in time and money to migrate to those new features, with no
| real benefit and a massive downside of further increasing
| dependence).
| dataminded wrote:
| Same situation here.
| john_cogs wrote:
| GitLab team member here. Thanks for the thoughtful feedback.
| Will share with our team.
| threeseed wrote:
| You can solve a lot of the pricing issues by offering add-
| ons.
|
| Buy the Premium tier and add Kubernetes or Security for an
| additional $4 / month.
| Achshar wrote:
| I also have a small dev team of 25 that wants to move to
| gitlab paid model but the upfront cost is too much. We need a
| monthly payment plan even if it costs more than annual one
| because I can't justify a high upfront cost to my ceo. We're
| rapidly expanding and expect to be 100 within 2021.
| john_cogs wrote:
| Thanks. I will share this, too.
|
| Edit - we share why we prioritize annual pricing over
| monthly in our handbook:
| https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/pricing/#annual-
| pricin...
| crb002 wrote:
| Does GitLab have an option to pick the major cloud data
| center it hosts in? Cross data center network transfer is a
| no-go.
| pc86 wrote:
| This is not an uncommon complaint, but it is surprising,
| especially given their well below-market pay for employees.
| Where's all this money going?
| Maarten88 wrote:
| The free tier users? I'm amazed actually at what the free
| tier offers to small startups. We have hundreds of gigabytes
| worth of docker images in the gitlab package registry that we
| can't even delete/cleanup properly (just keeping the last two
| would do for us), and Gitlab is keeping all that data for
| free.
| iphorde wrote:
| Time to get the VPN back up, and put subversion back online.
| SomeHacker44 wrote:
| I guess the one thing I don't understand is why removing the tier
| does not split its features between the two adjacent tiers. In
| this case all features become the tier up. That makes me feel
| this is simply and effectively a price raise, pure and simple.
| godtoldmetodoit wrote:
| Well, this ruined my teams Tuesday. We are on the Bronze plan
| with over 300 users company wide.
|
| My department of 40 does the vast majority (90% plus of all
| commits/MRs) of the coding in the company, but we enrolled
| everyone within operations as well so that they could contribute
| on occasion.
|
| The rest of those users are never going to be worth spending $19
| a month on, but it really sucks having to put up barriers from
| people who do like to contribute on occasion. Feels like we're
| going in the wrong direction here, so much for devops :(
| thepill wrote:
| Same for us - only a few users really need the subscription at
| all. The most only use basic features
| ShakataGaNai wrote:
| 100% this.
|
| A large number of our users on GitLab are Ops, Artists,
| Marketing or similar groups that can utilize GitLab a little
| (like leaving comments, or doing straight commits, no
| ci/cd/security/etc). $20/mo/user means some don't get access
| and the Ultimate plan at $100/mo/user? Oh hell no. No one would
| have access to GitLab except for maybe a dozen core devs.
| umvi wrote:
| You only need a user licenses to log in. Can't you just make
| the repos public (assuming you are self hosting) so that way
| anonymous users can still see everything?
| godtoldmetodoit wrote:
| Yeah, we are self hosting and everyone could have read access
| without much hassle. We are losing that long tail of
| contributors though as they won't be able to push any new
| commits with guest access.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Email a diff to someone who has access?
| john_cogs wrote:
| GitLab team member here. We are currently researching the non-
| developer use case. You can follow along here:
| https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/213185
| jacquesm wrote:
| If I can give you a strong hint: grandfather in everybody at
| todays rates and prices and simply drop the bronze plan from
| your new signup page. That way you keep your existing users
| happy. The last thing you want is to kill off your early
| adopters. Besides the very bad PR. I'm a huge gitlab advocate
| and this move sits wrong with me. Your 'bronze' users did not
| ask you to develop features that they probably won't use
| anyway so your justification to force them to pay more sounds
| hollow at best and disingenuous at worst. Fix it while you
| still can.
| adamtulinius wrote:
| I'm pretty sure we'll just downgrade to free, or move away after
| this. We only use the MR approval features from bronze, and
| that's proooobably not worth the price of premium. But who knows,
| since we have to contact a sales rep to "guide you through your
| transition discount offers.
| aaukt wrote:
| We are in the same boat. Probably going to downgrade to free.
| boleary-gl wrote:
| GitLab Team Member here. If you could reach out to your account
| team, that would be great. We'd love to hear your thoughts and
| have an opportunity to understand what is valuable to you. We
| realize that this is a significant change for Starter/Bronze
| users, and we want to make sure we can provide you with the
| best possible service through the transition. We're also
| offering a free upgrade to Premium for the first 25 users,
| which may help you get a better sense of Premium's value for
| your team.
| [deleted]
| polskibus wrote:
| We're in the same situation. We're in bronze only because of
| approvals, team of 17. We picked Gitlab precisely for best
| price of this feature on the market. We've already paid for
| full year starting February, in December.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The best possible service through the transition: no change.
| itsbenweeks wrote:
| Seems like there's too much bait-and-switch happening here to
| trust GitLab anymore. They enacted an account-locking change to
| their MFA reset policy without so much as an e-mail to effected
| users over the summer, and now they're increasing their pricing.
| There must be a way for GitLab to grow that doesn't involve them
| inconveniencing existing users like this.
| relaxatorium wrote:
| The page mentions 89% of the features available in Starter being
| available in the free tier. Is there a good enumeration anywhere
| of what those features are and what they 11% that would be lost
| is?
|
| I'll need to evaluate this for my company in the next year and
| that would be extremely helpful, as the new pricing grid of
| course does not include the phased out tier for comparison, which
| is the specific direct comparison I actually need to make here.
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