[HN Gopher] Why won't Gitlab support monthly billing?
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       Why won't Gitlab support monthly billing?
        
       Author : ethanwillis
       Score  : 22 points
       Date   : 2022-06-05 19:43 UTC (3 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (gitlab.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (gitlab.com)
        
       | TavsiE9s wrote:
       | At a previous job we were told that true-up would be gone by the
       | end of the year. Such a shame to see that years later it's still
       | around.
       | 
       | Giving customers a tool to manually limit the number of users the
       | instance supports is just a band-aid for their antiquated billing
       | system.
        
       | mikl wrote:
       | Gitlab has the most baffling billing policy. Since they removed
       | their lowest tier, they have nothing in between $0 and
       | $228/user/year, basically offering no easy onramp for smaller
       | customers. Enterprise or go home I guess.
       | 
       | Since they're still here, it must be working for them somehow,
       | but seems nuts to me.
        
         | viraptor wrote:
         | I guess it may work in situations where their support / extra
         | feature cost is high enough where it's not worth for them to
         | elevate you above free/no-support. But I've found the same
         | thing annoying with multiple services. Zoho desk, zoho meeting,
         | datadog apm from recent memory where I'm in a position where I
         | want to give them money, but the initial step is just not worth
         | it for me. I'm going to have like 5 support cases item, or
         | organise 4 meetings a month, or I want to send you maybe 100mb
         | of tracing data - I want just the feature itself - take my
         | money, but not $30/mth for service I barely ever use. I don't
         | even want your support available.
        
         | dflock wrote:
         | Yeah, and their ultimate pricing is bananas.
         | 
         | We're on the premium tier and like some of the security related
         | stuff that's only available in ultimate - but the price jump is
         | so insane it's just not even remotely going to happen.
        
           | tyldum wrote:
           | Since guests are free in ultimate, we could probably go from
           | 150 to 50 licenses. However that requires us to do a cleanup
           | of repo roles and limit who can contribute. We also have a
           | divide between pure developers and IaC users, but can only
           | have one kind of license. It's fragmenting our users, and in
           | order to justify Ultimate we need to force all users on
           | GitLab for everything, even when a team has an alternative
           | they are happy with (like security scans).
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | that_guy_iain wrote:
       | Scrolled through the issue. I'm still clueless as to why monthly
       | billing is unavailable.
        
         | cdubzzz wrote:
         | Seems like it simply boils down to compensation and OKRs based
         | on yearly cycles[0], weirdly. Seems most of the comments after
         | that are just unhappy with the lack of a monthly option.
         | 
         | [0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
         | org/gitlab/-/issues/5595#note_8088...
        
           | loloquwowndueo wrote:
           | Wow that takes "optimizing for the metric" (aka fudging data
           | to hit objectives ) to a whole new level :)
        
             | marcinzm wrote:
             | And so publicly matter of fact about it too. Usually
             | there's some attempt to hide that metrics are being gamed
             | but they seem to just embrace it. Not sure what that says.
        
           | that_guy_iain wrote:
           | Ah, missed that comment.
           | 
           | Seems to me that not being able to add a rather in demand
           | feature because of OKR/KPI/etc highlights a flawed reality.
           | Where stats are more important that making more money.
        
             | ForHackernews wrote:
             | Who says they'll make more money? Based on this thread
             | alone, it sounds like monthly customers would spend very
             | little money while whining and demanding more support time.
             | 
             | In a good business, the metrics are set by somebody who
             | knows better what will actually make money.
        
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       (page generated 2022-06-05 23:01 UTC)