[HN Gopher] GitLab SaaS Free Tier FAQ
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GitLab SaaS Free Tier FAQ
Author : stefanoco
Score : 69 points
Date : 2022-09-13 07:55 UTC (15 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (about.gitlab.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (about.gitlab.com)
| geodel wrote:
| Sounds reasonable. In general I think price for any cloud based
| service will go up until _Cloud is obvious solution_ stop being
| applied in all contexts.
| tomxor wrote:
| For teams that only need git hosting the recent price hikes are
| complete nuts... changed from 0$ to 20$ per user / per month, i.e
| $240 per user / per year - this represents about a 120x
| difference in price compared to self hosting for my team. I get
| that their business model was based upon CI and ancillary
| integrations (which I have no need for), but I would have been
| happy to pay a reasonable base rate for git hosting... to me this
| price is just a "go away" signal for anyone not interested in CI
| and containers.
|
| I'm switching to self hosting, at the cost of 0.25 users in
| gitlab world - with a lot more resources (I noticed they throttle
| cloning). Thankfully gitea exists because it sounds like gitlab
| is a nightmare to self host anyway.
| arinlen wrote:
| > _For teams that only need git hosting the recent price hikes
| are complete nuts... changed from 0$ to 20$ per user / per
| month, i.e $240 per user / per year - this represents about a
| 120x difference in price compared to self hosting for my team._
|
| That's like complaining that AWS is expensive because you can
| self-host your apps. I mean, it's true but it still
| misrepresents the whole problem and misses the whole point of
| subscribing to a service.
|
| I'm not going to play the role of GitLab salesperson, specially
| as I'm seeing this change as an invitation to start hosting my
| projects elsewhere, but there is no professional devteam on
| earth that can hire anyone for 200EUR/month to reliably
| develop, manage and operate their self-hosting ticketing,
| services, CICD pipeline, team management software, etc.
| Claiming otherwise is just like claiming that you can maintain
| your used car as well as any professional mechanic provided
| that it never breaks down.
|
| And if all you need is to host git somewhere, a SSH connection
| will cover all your needs. But you use a bit more than that,
| don't you?
| tomxor wrote:
| > That's like complaining that AWS is expensive because you
| can self-host your apps
|
| I appreciate the one less job in maintaining self hosting...
| I have other things to maintain and would have happily paid
| with a reasonable markup. However the difference is not
| marginal, it's > 100x, and my team is small, the difference
| will be even larger for medium to large sized teams because
| the price is artificially proportional to number of users,
| it's not scalable and adds resistance to growth... If we
| derived more value than merely avoiding basic git self
| hosting that might be reasonable, but we don't.
|
| > but there is no professional devteam on earth that can hire
| anyone for 200EUR/month to reliably develop, manage and
| operate their self-hosting ticketing, services, CICD
| pipeline, team management software, etc. Claiming otherwise
| is just like claiming that you can maintain your used car as
| well as any professional mechanic provided that it never
| breaks down.
|
| This is disingenuous, It doesn't take the entirety of
| someone's role to maintain a basic git hosting server without
| the complexity of CI/CD. I already run a fleet of servers
| with far more requirements than gitea. Also I said basic git
| hosting... I have no need for any of CICD pipline, or issue
| tracking features, this significantly reduces the
| requirements.
|
| > if all you need is to host git somewhere, a SSH connection
| will cover all your needs. But you use a bit more than that,
| don't you?
|
| I don't think you read my post fully, I said basic git
| hosting without CI/CD... I was actually tempted by a basic
| SSH only git server but I don't want to manage SSH keys or
| force people to use the CLI to create repos, so I will be
| using Gitea to provide a simple web UI.
| arinlen wrote:
| > _I said basic git hosting... I have no need for any of
| CICD pipline, or issue tracking features._
|
| My point is that it makes no sense to adopt any third-party
| git hosting service is all you want to do is have a git
| repo somewhere, thus it makes no sense to complain about
| how a service is expensive when you do not have any reason
| to use the service to begin with. Services like GitHub or
| GitLab or BitBucket or AWS CodeCommit are pointless if all
| you need is a remote repo somewhere. Complaining that
| GitLab is expensive when you only need a git repo is like
| complaining that Netflix is expensive when you only need a
| screen saver.
| tomxor wrote:
| I'm not sure why you are so selectively reading my post.
|
| I'll paste the first sentence of my first paragraph here
| again, it provides a good reason:
|
| > I appreciate the one less job in maintaining self
| hosting... I have other things to maintain and would have
| happily paid with a reasonable markup.
|
| Also you can't simultaneously argue that I have no right
| to use a service with which I can compete with against
| cost price _and_ that I cannot possibly compete with
| their price. I get the sense that you have an axe to
| grind.
|
| My argument is merely that the price change is
| excessively unreasonable for those who only wanted git
| hosting... and at it's core, it's a git hosting service.
| sieabahlpark wrote:
| rwky wrote:
| I'm fine with this would have minded an extra month's notice but
| fine with it. It is free after all!
| OJFord wrote:
| Afaict there's nothing new today here - there was at least an
| extra month's notice on this. Emails too - tapering down
| towards the newly enforced storage limit for those that would
| breach it.
| rwky wrote:
| Yeah just noticed that myself!
| nakedgremlin wrote:
| We've been struggling with this GitLab storage change, even
| consulting with GitLab reps on strategy logic between namespace
| versus repositories. It's still very confusing, especially if you
| were using their other offerings like CI/CD build systems and
| associated build artifacts storage.
|
| The artifacts storage is that one that's just tough to figure out
| when dealing with large builds. We have already offloaded all our
| CI/CD to our own hosted GitLab runners, but apparently storing
| the artifacts afterwards (which by default GitLab always stores
| the most recent builds) MUST use their storage, we can't offload
| it to our own servers.
|
| The instructions for removing the most recent artifacts also just
| never works
| (https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/pipelines/job_artifacts.html#k...)
|
| So in our monorepo with multiple Windows and Mac applications, we
| are now stuck with lots of GB that are just there, currently
| unable to delete.
|
| This is causing us to dramatically revisit our strategy of using
| GitLab and might force us to other tools.
| dnsmichi wrote:
| > The instructions for removing the most recent artifacts also
| just never works (https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/pipelines/job_a
| rtifacts.html#k...)
|
| What's the error / job logs you are seeing with having the
| project settings disabled for keeping the latest artifacts? The
| async operation to delete artifacts can take a while. Suggest
| to continue on the GitLab community forum:
| https://forum.gitlab.com/ where more folks can help. If you
| continue seeing the problem, also suggest to create an issue as
| a bug report. Thanks! https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
| org/gitlab/-/issues/new?issuable_t...
|
| Another thought: You could clean the artifacts via the GitLab
| API, if that helps. An example script is available in
| https://gitlab.com/gitlab-de/gitlab-storage-analyzer also
| listed in the FAQ https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/faq-
| efficient-free-tier/#ma...
| kuschku wrote:
| And yet again it's crypto miners abusing public resources and
| leading to stricter rules for everyone :(
| Gigachad wrote:
| I don't think crypto miners are to blame. More that gitlab has
| been giving stuff away for free for a very long time and with
| the current world financial situation, they have to start
| charging money for this stuff now.
| Kelteseth wrote:
| > If you require 15GB storage, you will pay $120 for the year.
|
| This sounds like a lot, just so I can keep my native
| Windows/Linux/MacOS builds online. My current usage need is
| 14.9gb.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| I'm pretty sure the whole thing with the Gitlab product was
| that if you want to have that kind of control, you can host it
| yourself! And then you can use as much disk space as you want,
| for the price of disk space! (and management, power and backup)
| asdajksah2123 wrote:
| Until they start pulling features out of the self hosted free
| tier.
|
| The catch is that you need to host the Community Edition if
| you don't want to be at the mercy of their arbitrary decision
| making, which is much harder to find and install, and has far
| worse documentation/support and limited features.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| The core is open source so if that happens, you can fork it
| and do the hard work of supporting it yourself!
| [deleted]
| Donckele wrote:
| I got the email several weeks ago - and I still don't fully
| understand what it means! Unbelievable confusion.
|
| PLEASE can someone in plain english say what the limits are PER
| REPOSITORY? Is it 5GB per repository? can you have as many
| repositories as you want? I don't care or use namespaces.
| john_cogs wrote:
| Apologies for the confusion. I'd be happy to provide some more
| clarity. The answer depends on which tier of GitLab you are
| using.
|
| If you are using the free tier on GitLab SaaS, there will be a
| 5GB storage limit per top-level namespace.
|
| Paid tiers on GitLab SaaS will have limits of 50GB for Premium
| and 250GB for Ultimate.
|
| Community programs (GitLab for Open Source, GitLab for
| Education, and GitLab for Startups) will have the same 250GB
| limit as the Ultimate tier.
|
| Self-managed users have no limit.
| Donckele wrote:
| Thanks. 2 more questions:
|
| - Do I have to do anything now with all my "top-level"
| repositories (total >5GB)?
|
| - When I create a new repository do I have to do something
| else as well (create new namespace)?
| john_cogs wrote:
| The FAQ contains information on how to manage your storage
| which will be helpful for top-level namespace exceeding 5GB
| in storage: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/faq-efficient-
| free-tier/#ma...
| arinlen wrote:
| > _If you are using the free tier on GitLab SaaS, there will
| be a 5GB storage limit per top-level namespace._
|
| What does this cover? Does it cover the size of a git repo?
| Build artifacts, both temporary and exported to packages? And
| what about Docker images?
|
| Docker images concern me the most. It's terribly easy to
| build and use Docker images that are >100MB, and 50 of those
| easily go beyond 5GB. Two projects with nightly builds easily
| go beyond that in a month even when doing nothing at all.
| dnsmichi wrote:
| > What does this cover?
|
| https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/faq-efficient-free-
| tier/#ma... provides a list of what counts towards the
| storage limits, and also ways to manage, reduce and cleanup
| storage.
|
| > Does it cover the size of a git repo? Build artifacts,
| both temporary and exported to packages? And what about
| Docker images?
|
| Yes, they all are storage types that add to the overall
| storage consumption.
|
| > Docker images concern me the most. It's terribly easy to
| build and use Docker images that are >100MB, and 50 of
| those easily go beyond 5GB. Two projects with nightly
| builds easily go beyond that in a month even when doing
| nothing at all.
|
| You can define container cleanup policies within the
| registry, matching on age, tags, etc. https://docs.gitlab.c
| om/ee/user/packages/container_registry/...
| arinlen wrote:
| > _You can define container cleanup policies within the
| registry, matching on age, tags, etc.https://docs.gitlab.
| com/ee/user/packages/container_registry/..._
|
| As a long time GitLab user, and a user who championed the
| adoption of GitLab by a previous employer, this is highly
| disappointing. This basically eliminates GitLab as a
| viable option to some SMEs and specially for personal
| projects that relied on GitLab to build Docker images and
| deploy them as part of the CICD pipeline.
|
| I just checked a personal project I have hosted in GitLab
| that does nothing more than pulling a Docker image, do a
| minor tweak and deliver the image to the container
| registry, and the Docker image build step alone adds
| ~100MB to the usage quotas each time the pipeline is
| triggered.
|
| I'm sorry to say, but if this plan stays as is, GitLab
| ceases to be an option.
| Macha wrote:
| If you're a paying user it's 5GB per repository.
|
| If you are not on a paid tier, all your repositories share a
| pool of 5GB per namespace. A namespace is basically a user or
| project. So if you don't use namespaces, everything is under
| your personal user namespace and your limit is 5GB total
| storage across all your repositories.
| Donckele wrote:
| So can I create multiple "namespaces" and each one can
| contain a repository of 5GB?
| Macha wrote:
| They need to be top level groups.
|
| But yes, if you have public repos repoa/repoa and
| repob/repob instead of user/repoa and user/repob, then my
| understanding is both repoa and repob will hae 5GB each.
| mlegendre wrote:
| > If you're a paying user it's 5GB per repository.
|
| TFA says 10 GB (and so does my experience).
|
| > A namespace is basically a user or project
|
| I believe you meant to write "a user or a group".
| ttoinou wrote:
| How painful is it to self host Gitlab on your own server ? Number
| of hours of maintenance per month
| stefanoco wrote:
| Seems like free tier limitations _does not apply_ to a public
| group as top namespace, that contains private subgroups and
| repositories. This would kind of help a lot!
| stefanoco wrote:
| Anyone able to comment on this? Difficult to check before the
| new limits' deadline though...
| john_cogs wrote:
| For the free tier of GitLab SaaS, user limits will apply only
| to top-level namespaces that are private. Public namespaces
| will not have user limits at this time.
|
| Storage limits will apply to both private and public
| namespaces.
| sarki_247 wrote:
| GitLab team member here! User Limits will not apply to a public
| group as a top namespace and as at this time, no limit on
| private groups within a public top namespace group. See the 6th
| Q&A entry in the FAQ page
| (https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/faq-efficient-free-
| tier/#us...), excerpt here:
|
| > Q. Do these changes apply to private projects within a top-
| level namespace with public visibility? A. User limits are
| currently applied based on the visibility of the top-level
| namespace. We will monitor how top-level namespaces with public
| visibility are using private projects to identify whether any
| limits on such projects are needed.
| stefanoco wrote:
| Great news!!!
| siscia wrote:
| Anytime I read about price increases with gitlab I am wondering
| if we should just have a well designed python library for all our
| CI needs.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > Additional units can be purchased from the GitLab Customer
| Portal at $60/year for 10GB
|
| $6/year per GB. My Backblaze costs me $0.06/year per GB, so it's
| only a factor of 100 more expensive.
|
| Am I the only one that thinks that's pretty insane?
|
| What I think is even stranger, is that the number of users you
| pay for apparently has no effect on your storage allowance.
| Whether there's 1 or a 100 accounts, the limit is the same.
| nine_k wrote:
| Aren't you comparing block storage (mountable as an efficient
| file system) and object storage?
| arinlen wrote:
| > _Am I the only one that thinks that's pretty insane?_
|
| Their pricing model might not be designed to cover only
| storage. Pretty much all features from GitLab are loss leaders,
| including computing costs and developing/maintaining a CICD
| system that arguably is by far the best in the world. At the
| end of the day the money needs to come from somewhere, and you
| don't get that cash flow by offering everything for free.
| Ayesh wrote:
| > by far the best in the world
|
| Bold opinion. I extensively use GitHub actions and GitLab CI
| on a daily basis, and I am slowly liking GitHub Actions more.
| GitLab CI is much more straight forward if you have your own
| Docker image, but the mix and match approach in GitHub
| actions, despite the configuration complexity, is more robust
| in my opinion.
|
| That said, my rudimentary knack is that GitLab CI tend to be
| quite fast in their free hosted runners. I have CI jobs
| completing in under a minute on some setups that otherwise
| take 2-3 minutes on GitHub hosted runners. This could be
| because I use a custom container image on GitLab, that
| basically requires no additional tooling setup.
| arinlen wrote:
| > _GitLab CI is much more straight forward if you have your
| own Docker image_
|
| In my experience GitLab is straight-forward in all of its
| happy path, which happens to be exactly what all developers
| need to do: build software, push build artifacts, run
| tests, and in the case of services deploy stuff somewhere
| else.
|
| With GitLab anyone can set their fully working CICD
| pipeline from scratch after a quick googling, which is
| absolutely not possible with GitHub actions.
|
| The only downside of GitLab is their pricing model. If it
| wasn't for GitLab's not-so generous free tier, there
| wouldn't be any reason to bother looking at alternatives
| like GitHub and the like.
| teruakohatu wrote:
| The pricing does seem unusual. Dropbox is also $0.06/year GB. A
| dev/b2b servicing charging 100x as much as a consumer service
| seems very strange.
|
| At least they could charge in increments if 1 or 2GB.
| sluongng wrote:
| I think its simply a reselling of GCP storage services with
| overhead cost of their backup redundancy and SRE on-call.
|
| But even with all that, 6GB per year definitely make you
| question the value of using Gitlab Container Registry vs Your
| Cloud of choice similar offering.
| arinlen wrote:
| > _Dropbox is also $0.06 /year GB._
|
| Dropbox is 10EUR/month, which comes with a max cap of 2TB for
| what amounts to cold storage for docs that are rarely
| touched.
|
| GitLab comes at 20EUR/month, and comes with a max cap of 50GB
| for files that are actively edited.
|
| Comparing GB is disingenuous as the usecases involving
| storage are hardly comparable.
| xani_ wrote:
| They simply know the storage limit is the one users will most
| likely exceed first so having all of it bundled instead of
| separate price for storage and for "compute" would net them
| less money.
|
| From their perspective it's basically "as long as it is
| cheaper than customer paying someone to set up gitlab
| instance"
| [deleted]
| kcmastrpc wrote:
| This is what happens when you start losing business to
| competition: put a price tag on services that were once free to
| generate new revenue streams.
| thunky wrote:
| And then you lose even more business to competition.
| fariszr wrote:
| GitLab really needs to work on their marketing and their pricing
| page.
|
| On GitHub, they show their generous open source limits
| first,(Unlimited actions, Unlimited members, GitHub pages, etc)
|
| While on GitLab, the first thing you see, 5 users limits and 400
| minutes limit, which are nothing compared to GtiHub.
|
| Then under a small FAQ link you can find the actually generous
| limits for FOSS:
|
| > What is changing with user limits? A. There will be a 5-user
| limit for top-level namespaces with private visibility. At this
| time, top-level namespaces with public visibility will not have a
| user limit
|
| OP's link.
|
| > Yes. Public projects created after 2021-07-17 will have an
| allocation of CI/CD pipeline minutes as follows: Free tier -
| 50,000 minutes, Premium tier - 1,250,000 minutes, Ultimate tier -
| 6,250,000.
|
| https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/#why-do-i-need-to-enter-cre...
|
| I didn't know that the 5 member limits applies only to private
| projects. And a big part of the reason I signed up, because they
| give you a lot of CI/CD minutes for FOSS, although the Visa
| requirement is very annoying.
| arinlen wrote:
| > _While on GitLab, the first thing you see, 5 users limits and
| 400 minutes limit, which are nothing compared to GtiHub._
|
| I feel the minutes thing is far from a blocker, as GitLab's
| GitLab Runner is trivial to setup and a must-have if you care
| about having control over how your software is built. I have a
| tiny Hetzner CX11 node with a GitLab Runner handling the
| workload of about a dozen projects, and things work flawlessly.
|
| GitLab Premium, at EUR20/(user*month) is not that pricy though,
| given you get the whole saas stack with it.
|
| To me GitLab is unmatched in terms of DX and features and
| simplicity, but I understand if some people care about paying
| EUR20/month to use it.
| rascul wrote:
| > GitLab Premium, at EUR20/(user*month) is not that pricy
| though, given you get the whole saas stack with it.
|
| It is insanely expensive for me as a small time hobby coder.
| I'm not sure what I'll do if I ever hit the free plan limits
| but $228/year is not the answer for me.
| arinlen wrote:
| > _It is insanely expensive for me as a small time hobby
| coder._
|
| No small time hobby coder needs GitLab Premium. You are
| free to create as many projects and groups as you need,
| without having to pay a dime.
| rascul wrote:
| > No small time hobby coder needs GitLab Premium. You are
| free to create as many projects and groups as you need,
| without having to pay a dime.
|
| For now, I'm nowhere near any limits of the free plan.
| I'm not sure I'll ever be but I'm not ruling out the
| possibility, especially if/when the plans change in the
| future.
|
| Edit: My local Linux kernel git repo is over 4GB. If I
| wanted to hack on that and keep it on Gitlab, with my
| current usage, I would be pretty close to the 5GB limit.
| Of course I don't need Premium in such a case as there is
| a (relatively expensive) storage addition option, but if
| I need to expand again then Premium would actually be $1
| less and I'll get more storage.
| dijit wrote:
| OR: You can run your own node and pay the native cost for
| storage.
|
| I run a gitlab for my IRC network (https://git.drk.sc)
| because I like to do sysadmin things and some people
| don't want to do that.
|
| But storage isn't free, it's not really fair to expect
| everything hosted for free, they give you the software
| which you can run yourself.
|
| I know Github does this; but it's obviously a loss leader
| for them and I do think that the day will come that
| they'll start restricting (heavily) the free tiers once
| they have total dominance on the Git ecosystem or the
| financials start becoming a huge issue.
| rascul wrote:
| > OR: You can run your own node and pay the native cost
| for storage.
|
| At that point I'll just run Gitea on a sub-$5 VPS. It
| does more than what I need and is simple to run, and has
| more storage for less.
|
| > But storage isn't free, it's not really fair to expect
| everything hosted for free, they give you the software
| which you can run yourself.
|
| I'm more interested in paying a reasonable amount if I
| hit their free plan limits. My point is that their
| pricing scheme seems ridiculously high for small time
| hobby coders like myself and will drive me away from
| Gitlab if I hit their limits, instead of giving them
| money.
| mynameisvlad wrote:
| You can, per another comment it's $60/yr for 10GB extra
| storage. Not exactly cheap, though.
| dijit wrote:
| $0.50/m per Gig.
|
| Pretty high; maybe 20x what Google would charge for raw
| storage for regionally available disks.
|
| Not counting access (0.05c/10,000 ops) or backups.
| andrewaylett wrote:
| I'm pretty sure of my reading: if your GitLab repo is a
| fork of an existing repo, you only pay for the
| difference.
|
| It may well be that your repo currently isn't a fork of
| something like https://gitlab.com/linux-kernel/linux then
| you can fork it, add the fork as your origin, and push
| the result.
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2022-09-13 23:02 UTC)