20 ms·

Introducing Exclusive Features to GitLab.com Bronze, Silver and Gold Plans

104 points by demurgos 9y ago

fny 9y ago
God bless you all. I was on the verge of setting up a Gitlab CI instance on a local box for our projects since we're about to outstrip the free tier. Upgrading will be way less expensive for my client and me.
- dimitrieh 9y ago
  Happy to hear so! GitLab.com should be able to offer all the features you need if you wish not to self-host! Happy GitLabbing!
  - sicklysweet 9y ago
    Super! That's really super, and awesome! Happy internetting!
kcorbitt 9y ago
It looks like unlimited private repositories, Gitlab Pages and even some CI minutes (2000/month) will continue to be available in the free plan. Gitlab continues to provide such phenomenal value to free users that I struggle to find a reason to upgrade for my own projects. :) That said, if I were running a business the extra workflow management tools in the bronze plan ($4/user/mo) and CI minutes in the silver plan ($19/user/mo) make total sense as useful upgrades.
- maxyme 9y ago
  Except for the fact that you cannot use gitlab.com for anything business related because it has abysmal performance and okay reliability. Basically they use gitlab.com to stress test gitlab.
  - jazoom 9y ago
    This is my main issue. Otherwise, the service has been great.
  - mydigitalself 9y ago
    We've been spending a lot of effort making GitLab.com more performant over the course of this year. We still have some ways to go, but every release includes performance enhancements based on performance data from GitLab.com. We no longer see GitLab.com as a mechanism to stress test GitLab and we're certainly pushing hard to improve performance and availability.
brianwawok 9y ago
Fun plot twist about at least self hosted Gitlab.. You are charged per user. When you install on your own server, it automatically makes an "admin" user. And then you get billed for this user. Despite never using him or doing anything with him, apparently a shell of a user costs a $4 licensing cost per month. They really need to clean up the setup workflow, I have literally never used a piece of software that charged for a default account no one uses. Fun plot twist: They let you go over your license count, and if I am reading billing correctly will bill you when you do a yearly renew for a full YEAR penalty for any user that went over, even if you added that user on the last possible day of the year. So day 364 of license.. add 1 user over license... your next license will have a penalty of 1 full year for that user. You need to go and add a user manually on the website which does some kind of weird proration to not pay this penalty. Send feedback but not too hopeful it was heard, so always the post to hacker news plan...
- mattl 9y ago
  I typically make the default user my account, but you can also delete that account if you like I believe.
  - brianwawok 9y ago
    But opps you went over your license count by 1 when creating your user, so your next renewal you will pay a penalty for that admin user.
    - Sir_Substance 9y ago
      I understand that this is a flaw, and indeed a billing-related flaw at that, and I agree it merits fixing and maybe even some refunds/discounts to make up the difference. But at the same time, you seem to be super-concerned about what is essentially a one-time overcharge of (apparently) between $4 and $48, and I feel like I would struggle to muster the emotion you seem to feel over that. If you're posting this at work you may have just wasted more than $4 worth of your salaried time making these posts and reading the responses. I get what you're saying, but I raise my eyebrow over the vitrol with which you say it, and wonder if perhaps there's something else you're not telling us?
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
mattl 9y ago
> Public projects will still have free access to all features and unlimited CI/CD, as part of our continued commitment to open-source software.
scrollaway 9y ago
Pricing feedback: Like kcorbitt said you're providing a lot of value to free users but here's some super weird stuff in the silver plan that I don't think should be there: - Block secret file push - Fast-forward merge with option to rebase - Squash and merge - Multiple assignees for issues - Issue Boards with Milestones Aside from the first one those are all features provided by free from Github which also don't make a lot of sense to paywall.
- amq 9y ago
  I also find it not nice, but to be fair, all of them will stay for open source projects, so the GitHub argument doesn't apply.
- mydigitalself 9y ago
  Hi there, those features are all available for free for public projects, it's only for private projects where we limit some functionality.
  - ValentineC 9y ago
    From the pricing page: > Public projects get all paid features and unlimited CI/CD for free. I think this needs to be more obvious. ;) Perhaps the price tiers should be separated out into a Private Repo-only section?
1123581321 9y ago
We're evaluating source control right now (have repos all over the place) and I'm wondering if anyone can comment on the Github $25/mo plan vs. Gitlab's and Bitbucket's comparable offerings. It seems like the built-in CI is an advantage for Bitbucket and Gitlab, but I wonder what gotchas we're not seeing right now.
- problems 9y ago
  If you're looking for the hosted version, there's lots of complaints about GitLab.com's performance. Bitbucket is quite excellent and integrates well with hosted JIRA too - I'd say it's arguably a better option than GitHub in many cases. I've had good luck with self-hosted GitLab's performance in my small group, but I've heard tales of others who haven't, so try before you buy if you're doing that. The CI integration is really nice though and GitLab has put good work into that flow. It can also be the cheapest option and keeps you self-reliant if that's something that appeals to you.
  - dimitrieh 9y ago
    Hi, GitLab UX Designer here. I would like to add that GitLab has put tremendous efforts in optimizing for performance lately. These performance optimisations optimise GitLab instances big and small. These improvements were triggered by having literally millions of users and projects on GitLab.com which is our hosted solution. For self-hosted GitLab instances run on a smaller scale, there should not even be a chance of performance hits :). Just to give a good overview of what GitLab is offering for both self-hosted as well as our hosted solution of GitLab.com please look at https://about.gitlab.com/features/ https://about.gitlab.com/features/ I am happy to hear that the CI/CD integration, which is our native solution for CI/CD and beyond is being well received! We want to persuade not force users to use our native solutions.
    - clemmakesapps 9y ago
      GitLab frontend engineer here. Also wanted to add that performance improvement is a big part of our OKRs for our Q3 and are viewable at https://about.gitlab.com/okrs/ https://about.gitlab.com/okrs/
ComputerGuru 9y ago
Mandatory heads-up for those that haven't come across them: gogs [0] and its fork gitea [1] are zero config, download-and-run, self-hosted alternatives to GitHub/BitBucket/GitLab that won't suck the life out of your server, are efficiently written, and very fast even on underpowered (read: RPi) hardware or shared VPS nodes. 0: https://gogs.io/ https://gogs.io/ 1: https://gitea.io/en-US/ https://gitea.io/en-US/
- awill 9y ago
  I'd agree with this. gitea outperforms gitlab by a mile.
- aphextron 9y ago
  Seconded for gogs. Gitlab is a bloated mess.
- mi100hael 9y ago
  cgit is even faster https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/about/ https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/about/
  - koolba 9y ago
    I've never used it but as it appears to be made by the same guy that made password store[1] (i.e. "pass") then I've got a default high opinion of it. Will definitely be checking it out. [1]: https://www.passwordstore.org/ https://www.passwordstore.org/
    - jonathonf 9y ago
      And don't forget wireguard [1]. I'd argue that's even _more_ awesome. :) [1] https://www.wireguard.com/ https://www.wireguard.com/
      - koolba 9y ago
        Had I known I'd have listed that. Seriously this guy is amazing.
jasonrhaas 9y ago
I have been using the free hosted plan for about a month now, which includes the "Silver" tier features. I'm really happy about their Early Adopter program! They are keeping my current Silver capability for free for another 12 months. I have to say, I really like gitlab.com. The UI is slick, and you get a ton of features right out of the box (for free). Bravo gitlab.com, keep up the good work!
- mydigitalself 9y ago
  Thank you for the kind words, we've been working hard on improving the UI (have you tried the latest update in https://gitlab.com/profile/preferences#new-navigation https://gitlab.com/profile/preferences#new-navigation) and have tried to make our free offering as valuable as possible as well as treating our existing free customers respectfully.
  - jasonrhaas 9y ago
    I am using the new navigation, love it.
  - awill 9y ago
    I didn't know you there was a new UI. I just switched over. Definitely seems like an improvement. Good job everyone!
  - jazoom 9y ago
    Question: why does it take about 5 seconds to load the list of projects when clicking on the dropdown arrow on the top left of the screen? It's even slower than loading the whole GitLab.com website, which includes a list of those projects. I find this a frequent annoyance and often choose to go back and load the full projects page just to change project.
- connorshea 9y ago
  Thanks, we'll keep making the product better. :) Glad to hear you're happy with the transition!
- jasonrhaas 9y ago
zschuessler 9y ago
This makes me slightly worried. I'm fine with paying for a service like Gitlab's hosted instance (and will start paying for it), it's a pretty good service. The UI isn't amazing but the tools are better IMO than GitHub's.. last time I checked, anyway. What worries me is that as a heavy user of self-hosted CE, I see frequently that many features that I would like are enterprise (EE) only. Something like doing an IP whitelist/banlist on your server in the nginx config is surprisingly difficult unless you are an EE customer. It's a common use case that shouldn't be EE-only. This change on their values (the very generous free private hosting) makes me wonder what the future holds.
- brainfire 9y ago
  There's a configuration option in the omnibus CE config file to add additional lines to the built-in nginx configuration, it seems pretty straightforward to me - although we use a different web server so that we can integrate with our SSO, so I haven't tried it.
  - zschuessler 9y ago
    You are correct! The implementation is strange, however. I'm not able to directly override any of the nginx settings already set. As there is no route overriding in nginx, this makes things real tough in trying to allow/deny access by route. The hacky workaround is to create a more specific regex to override any existing routes. So "Location /" becomes "Location /(.*)" Other alternatives like running your own nginx configuration or apache2 is possible, but no current documentation exists (some is available, but it is outdated and following steps results in a landslide of errors). Plus I don't like the idea of using a different configuration as far as new updates breaking my instance goes. This is just one example as well - and one I chose because simple IP allow/deny IMO is not an enterprise feature, but a very common use case for anyone running CE.
MikeKusold 9y ago
I use GitLab for private personal projects, and in general I'm supportive of most of these changes. Some paid features that I think are still useful to teams under 3 people: * Block secret file push * Various merge options (squash, rebase, etc...) * Export issues as CSV
- smarx007 9y ago
  I think squash and merge is absolutely essential!
psankar 9y ago
I've been using gitlab for a one person company for the last six months or so. The free plan is good for me. There are private repos, CI/CD Integration (pipelines). I am not using Issues or wikis etc. I use pull requests though. I just need git hosting and a decent CI/CD pipeline system. I don't mind paying gitlab though to avoid the hassle of hosting things myself. But the Bronze plan does not add any value for me, as there is no increase in the CI/CD minutes compared to the free plan. The silver plan is not affordable to me. Are there any other FOSS tools that HN readers know that provides out of the box support for git hosting as well as CI/CD ? This is just a backup planning in case gitlab decide to reduce or stop the CI/CD minutes.
- 0x0 9y ago
  You can install gitlab-ci-multi-runner on a machine you control, and you will have unlimited CI minutes. I actually prefer this method because this lets me also write pipelines that depend on internal infrastructure and weird software (or not so weird - need a mac to build iOS projects with xcode, for example), and my code never touches random cloud VMs where the host is shared with other people (think guest-to-hypervisor escape exploit) It's also super duper easy to set up, with the runner client being a self-contained binary available for most operating systems thanks to being written in Go.
christilut 9y ago
I've been using Gitlab free for all my personal projects and mostly I'm totally okay with this change. I was afraid of being forced to pay for some basic functionality in a year but honestly most bronze/silver features are for slightly bigger projects than personal. Just one small thing: pretty much the only 2 features I use from the Bronze plan are Issue Weight (I can live without them) and Milestones. I would like to see Milestones in the Free plan because for me it is just a convenience to create more structure in my issues. I wouldn't pay for just that feature and the alternative is more labels which would have the same result but more messy.
- sytse 9y ago
  Just to clarify, milestones for issues are available in the free please, issue boards filtered on a milestone are a paid feature https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/issue_board.html#board-with-a-milestone https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/issue_board.html#boa...

104 points by demurgos 9y ago

fny 9y ago

God bless you all. I was on the verge of setting up a Gitlab CI instance on a local box for our projects since we're about to outstrip the free tier. Upgrading will be way less expensive for my client and me.

dimitrieh 9y ago
Happy to hear so! GitLab.com should be able to offer all the features you need if you wish not to self-host! Happy GitLabbing!
- sicklysweet 9y ago
  Super! That's really super, and awesome! Happy internetting!

kcorbitt 9y ago

It looks like unlimited private repositories, Gitlab Pages and even some CI minutes (2000/month) will continue to be available in the free plan. Gitlab continues to provide such phenomenal value to free users that I struggle to find a reason to upgrade for my own projects. :) That said, if I were running a business the extra workflow management tools in the bronze plan ($4/user/mo) and CI minutes in the silver plan ($19/user/mo) make total sense as useful upgrades.

maxyme 9y ago
Except for the fact that you cannot use gitlab.com for anything business related because it has abysmal performance and okay reliability. Basically they use gitlab.com to stress test gitlab.
- jazoom 9y ago
  This is my main issue. Otherwise, the service has been great.
- mydigitalself 9y ago
  We've been spending a lot of effort making GitLab.com more performant over the course of this year. We still have some ways to go, but every release includes performance enhancements based on performance data from GitLab.com. We no longer see GitLab.com as a mechanism to stress test GitLab and we're certainly pushing hard to improve performance and availability.

brianwawok 9y ago

Fun plot twist about at least self hosted Gitlab.. You are charged per user. When you install on your own server, it automatically makes an "admin" user. And then you get billed for this user. Despite never using him or doing anything with him, apparently a shell of a user costs a $4 licensing cost per month. They really need to clean up the setup workflow, I have literally never used a piece of software that charged for a default account no one uses. Fun plot twist: They let you go over your license count, and if I am reading billing correctly will bill you when you do a yearly renew for a full YEAR penalty for any user that went over, even if you added that user on the last possible day of the year. So day 364 of license.. add 1 user over license... your next license will have a penalty of 1 full year for that user. You need to go and add a user manually on the website which does some kind of weird proration to not pay this penalty. Send feedback but not too hopeful it was heard, so always the post to hacker news plan...

mattl 9y ago
I typically make the default user my account, but you can also delete that account if you like I believe.
- brianwawok 9y ago
  But opps you went over your license count by 1 when creating your user, so your next renewal you will pay a penalty for that admin user.
  - Sir_Substance 9y ago
    I understand that this is a flaw, and indeed a billing-related flaw at that, and I agree it merits fixing and maybe even some refunds/discounts to make up the difference. But at the same time, you seem to be super-concerned about what is essentially a one-time overcharge of (apparently) between $4 and $48, and I feel like I would struggle to muster the emotion you seem to feel over that. If you're posting this at work you may have just wasted more than $4 worth of your salaried time making these posts and reading the responses. I get what you're saying, but I raise my eyebrow over the vitrol with which you say it, and wonder if perhaps there's something else you're not telling us?

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

mattl 9y ago

> Public projects will still have free access to all features and unlimited CI/CD, as part of our continued commitment to open-source software.

scrollaway 9y ago

Pricing feedback: Like kcorbitt said you're providing a lot of value to free users but here's some super weird stuff in the silver plan that I don't think should be there: - Block secret file push - Fast-forward merge with option to rebase - Squash and merge - Multiple assignees for issues - Issue Boards with Milestones Aside from the first one those are all features provided by free from Github which also don't make a lot of sense to paywall.

amq 9y ago
I also find it not nice, but to be fair, all of them will stay for open source projects, so the GitHub argument doesn't apply.
mydigitalself 9y ago
Hi there, those features are all available for free for public projects, it's only for private projects where we limit some functionality.
- ValentineC 9y ago
  From the pricing page: > Public projects get all paid features and unlimited CI/CD for free. I think this needs to be more obvious. ;) Perhaps the price tiers should be separated out into a Private Repo-only section?

1123581321 9y ago

We're evaluating source control right now (have repos all over the place) and I'm wondering if anyone can comment on the Github $25/mo plan vs. Gitlab's and Bitbucket's comparable offerings. It seems like the built-in CI is an advantage for Bitbucket and Gitlab, but I wonder what gotchas we're not seeing right now.

problems 9y ago
If you're looking for the hosted version, there's lots of complaints about GitLab.com's performance. Bitbucket is quite excellent and integrates well with hosted JIRA too - I'd say it's arguably a better option than GitHub in many cases. I've had good luck with self-hosted GitLab's performance in my small group, but I've heard tales of others who haven't, so try before you buy if you're doing that. The CI integration is really nice though and GitLab has put good work into that flow. It can also be the cheapest option and keeps you self-reliant if that's something that appeals to you.
- dimitrieh 9y ago
  Hi, GitLab UX Designer here. I would like to add that GitLab has put tremendous efforts in optimizing for performance lately. These performance optimisations optimise GitLab instances big and small. These improvements were triggered by having literally millions of users and projects on GitLab.com which is our hosted solution. For self-hosted GitLab instances run on a smaller scale, there should not even be a chance of performance hits :). Just to give a good overview of what GitLab is offering for both self-hosted as well as our hosted solution of GitLab.com please look at https://about.gitlab.com/features/ https://about.gitlab.com/features/ I am happy to hear that the CI/CD integration, which is our native solution for CI/CD and beyond is being well received! We want to persuade not force users to use our native solutions.
  - clemmakesapps 9y ago
    GitLab frontend engineer here. Also wanted to add that performance improvement is a big part of our OKRs for our Q3 and are viewable at https://about.gitlab.com/okrs/ https://about.gitlab.com/okrs/

ComputerGuru 9y ago

Mandatory heads-up for those that haven't come across them: gogs [0] and its fork gitea [1] are zero config, download-and-run, self-hosted alternatives to GitHub/BitBucket/GitLab that won't suck the life out of your server, are efficiently written, and very fast even on underpowered (read: RPi) hardware or shared VPS nodes. 0: https://gogs.io/ https://gogs.io/ 1: https://gitea.io/en-US/ https://gitea.io/en-US/

awill 9y ago
I'd agree with this. gitea outperforms gitlab by a mile.
aphextron 9y ago
Seconded for gogs. Gitlab is a bloated mess.
mi100hael 9y ago
cgit is even faster https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/about/ https://git.zx2c4.com/cgit/about/
- koolba 9y ago
  I've never used it but as it appears to be made by the same guy that made password store[1] (i.e. "pass") then I've got a default high opinion of it. Will definitely be checking it out. [1]: https://www.passwordstore.org/ https://www.passwordstore.org/
  - jonathonf 9y ago
    And don't forget wireguard [1]. I'd argue that's even _more_ awesome. :) [1] https://www.wireguard.com/ https://www.wireguard.com/
    - koolba 9y ago
      Had I known I'd have listed that. Seriously this guy is amazing.

jasonrhaas 9y ago

I have been using the free hosted plan for about a month now, which includes the "Silver" tier features. I'm really happy about their Early Adopter program! They are keeping my current Silver capability for free for another 12 months. I have to say, I really like gitlab.com. The UI is slick, and you get a ton of features right out of the box (for free). Bravo gitlab.com, keep up the good work!

mydigitalself 9y ago
Thank you for the kind words, we've been working hard on improving the UI (have you tried the latest update in https://gitlab.com/profile/preferences#new-navigation https://gitlab.com/profile/preferences#new-navigation) and have tried to make our free offering as valuable as possible as well as treating our existing free customers respectfully.
- jasonrhaas 9y ago
  I am using the new navigation, love it.
- awill 9y ago
  I didn't know you there was a new UI. I just switched over. Definitely seems like an improvement. Good job everyone!
- jazoom 9y ago
  Question: why does it take about 5 seconds to load the list of projects when clicking on the dropdown arrow on the top left of the screen? It's even slower than loading the whole GitLab.com website, which includes a list of those projects. I find this a frequent annoyance and often choose to go back and load the full projects page just to change project.
connorshea 9y ago
Thanks, we'll keep making the product better. :) Glad to hear you're happy with the transition!
jasonrhaas 9y ago

zschuessler 9y ago

This makes me slightly worried. I'm fine with paying for a service like Gitlab's hosted instance (and will start paying for it), it's a pretty good service. The UI isn't amazing but the tools are better IMO than GitHub's.. last time I checked, anyway. What worries me is that as a heavy user of self-hosted CE, I see frequently that many features that I would like are enterprise (EE) only. Something like doing an IP whitelist/banlist on your server in the nginx config is surprisingly difficult unless you are an EE customer. It's a common use case that shouldn't be EE-only. This change on their values (the very generous free private hosting) makes me wonder what the future holds.

brainfire 9y ago
There's a configuration option in the omnibus CE config file to add additional lines to the built-in nginx configuration, it seems pretty straightforward to me - although we use a different web server so that we can integrate with our SSO, so I haven't tried it.
- zschuessler 9y ago
  You are correct! The implementation is strange, however. I'm not able to directly override any of the nginx settings already set. As there is no route overriding in nginx, this makes things real tough in trying to allow/deny access by route. The hacky workaround is to create a more specific regex to override any existing routes. So "Location /" becomes "Location /(.*)" Other alternatives like running your own nginx configuration or apache2 is possible, but no current documentation exists (some is available, but it is outdated and following steps results in a landslide of errors). Plus I don't like the idea of using a different configuration as far as new updates breaking my instance goes. This is just one example as well - and one I chose because simple IP allow/deny IMO is not an enterprise feature, but a very common use case for anyone running CE.

MikeKusold 9y ago

I use GitLab for private personal projects, and in general I'm supportive of most of these changes. Some paid features that I think are still useful to teams under 3 people: * Block secret file push * Various merge options (squash, rebase, etc...) * Export issues as CSV

smarx007 9y ago
I think squash and merge is absolutely essential!

psankar 9y ago

I've been using gitlab for a one person company for the last six months or so. The free plan is good for me. There are private repos, CI/CD Integration (pipelines). I am not using Issues or wikis etc. I use pull requests though. I just need git hosting and a decent CI/CD pipeline system. I don't mind paying gitlab though to avoid the hassle of hosting things myself. But the Bronze plan does not add any value for me, as there is no increase in the CI/CD minutes compared to the free plan. The silver plan is not affordable to me. Are there any other FOSS tools that HN readers know that provides out of the box support for git hosting as well as CI/CD ? This is just a backup planning in case gitlab decide to reduce or stop the CI/CD minutes.

0x0 9y ago
You can install gitlab-ci-multi-runner on a machine you control, and you will have unlimited CI minutes. I actually prefer this method because this lets me also write pipelines that depend on internal infrastructure and weird software (or not so weird - need a mac to build iOS projects with xcode, for example), and my code never touches random cloud VMs where the host is shared with other people (think guest-to-hypervisor escape exploit) It's also super duper easy to set up, with the runner client being a self-contained binary available for most operating systems thanks to being written in Go.

christilut 9y ago

I've been using Gitlab free for all my personal projects and mostly I'm totally okay with this change. I was afraid of being forced to pay for some basic functionality in a year but honestly most bronze/silver features are for slightly bigger projects than personal. Just one small thing: pretty much the only 2 features I use from the Bronze plan are Issue Weight (I can live without them) and Milestones. I would like to see Milestones in the Free plan because for me it is just a convenience to create more structure in my issues. I wouldn't pay for just that feature and the alternative is more labels which would have the same result but more messy.

sytse 9y ago
Just to clarify, milestones for issues are available in the free please, issue boards filtered on a milestone are a paid feature https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/issue_board.html#board-with-a-milestone https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/issue_board.html#boa...