4 ms·

When my company subscribed there was only a community and enterprise tier. Now this has become the starter edition and I feel we are losing a lot of value. We a

by tyldum 8y ago

When my company subscribed there was only a community and enterprise tier. Now this has become the starter edition and I feel we are losing a lot of value. We are 200 employees, but only 10 developers using the advanced features. We really want to make GitLab our hub (GitOps and all), however the the cost of going beyond starter edition is mind blowing (x5). So if we are to embrace GitLab further we must abandon the idea of letting the whole company use GitLab freely and limit it to devs only. Being small doesn't mean that we are not in need if advanced features, we just have a smaller scale. Also as our initial tier was the top tier, and now is the bottom one, I fear GitLab will fence off future functionality with even more tiers at random. Further, the tiers creates some artificial barriers where we several times feel the some of the new features we receive are just barely functioning and are just there to entice you to upgrade to the next tier. We are all in all very happy with GitLab, however we are no longer pushing it as a central hub for the company.

manigandham 8y ago
You pay 200 employees but don't want to spend $19/user/month on software for a company hub? That's not really a small company, and this seems like a budgeting problem if money is that tight. You can also try running multiple installations with a separate dev-only instance with more features. Also have you tried contacting Gitlab to negotiate? A few emails can go a long way.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- bigtunacan 8y ago
  I would say 200 employees is fairly small company; and depending on the line of business it is certainly small enough that profit margins and thus spending may need to be closely watched. If you consider that the OP has only 10 out of 200 users that need the advanced features, but has to purchase the advanced features for all 200 users for anyone to use those features that is $45,600 a year. Now if it were possible for example to have a mixed licensing model; buy 10 Premium licenses for the users who need it and 190 Starter licenses for everyone else then that is $11,400 a year. That is a difference of $34,200 a year so it may be the difference between being able to hire another employee or not.
  - manigandham 8y ago
    As stated, they can run separate instances, or spend 5 minutes contacting GitLab to negotiate. 200 employees is not small, that is considered a medium sized business. Millions of companies around the world never get past single-digits. With payroll extending into 10s of millions, $35k sounds rather trivial if it really is powering the company hub and the value that brings.
    - bigtunacan 8y ago
      "200 employees is not small, that is considered a medium sized business" I'm just curious what your basis for that is? To go with some kind of standardization on the term "small business" I would say the safest definition (within the US) would be to follow the SBA guidelines that define a small business. Depending on the industry a small business is defined by the SBA as a maximum of anywhere from 100 to 1500 employees. So it is not cut and dry that this is or is not a small business; industry and also potentially revenues in millions of dollars would need to be known to determine absolutely if it by definition a small business.
barrystaes 8y ago
I recognize this. Not every company with developers is a software develop company. Those 190 others that dont use the advanced features, what subset of functionality do they require?
- tyldum 8y ago
  Primarily logging in, filing issues and using the wikis. A few might be able to request changes by submitting a PR instead of issues. We do need to have authentication and cannot simply mark all repos public either. The 10 power users want to take advantage of the kubernetes and devops features - especially since we are a small team covering a lot if ground.
sytse 8y ago
"I fear GitLab will fence off future functionality with even more tiers at random" our goal when introducing the new tiers was to put new functionality in then, not to move existing functionality away. In the future we might move functionality between tiers to keep the grouping logical but we won't do that lightly let alone randomly. New functionaly is made iteratively starting with the minimal viable change. But they should always function and additions should land in the same tier. If we missed the mark somewhere please let us know.
- tyldum 8y ago
  I think the problem for us is that not all users are equal. To embrace devops/gitops I really want most of the company involved through our GitLab instance, but only a subset of the license seats would actually use the kubernetes features for instance. Most of our users would not venture beyond the features of the community edition (except for the LDAP auth we use). So while we enjoy GitLab and do some software development, we are not a software company. I think this is becoming all the more common.
elygre 8y ago
That one is exactly ours, too. We have 275 users in license, bought when GitLab Enterprise was the thing. We set up GitLab to help establish innersourcing (e.g. https://about.gitlab.com/2016/07/07/trends-version-control-innersourcing/ https://about.gitlab.com/2016/07/07/trends-version-control-i...), where all employees are users -- no exceptions. We run a GitLab introduction as part of onboarding of all employees, whether techies, marketing people or recruiters. Our 275 users are an eclectic mix. There are a few projects that really pound the product, there are lots of internal playground repositories, and even a few non-technical documentation repositories. The requirements are scattered. I think that that perhaps 25 of the 275 users have need for Ultimate Edition, but that is not possible, we'd have to pay $325.000 for the pleasure. And that is going nowhere. An interesting question then is what do we do next? Perhaps our innersourcing strategy has to go, and each team will get to choose their own platform. People will chose what they know, and soon most will be on GitHub.
- sytse 8y ago
  If you buy ultimate you get free guest users. Would that help?
  - matrixagent 8y ago
    We're facing the same problem at my company, I heavily pushed towards switching to GitLab and am currently overseeing the process. While we can probably make due with CE, there are a few features that only the 10 to 15 developers in our 300+ employee company would actually use. I don't think that in the foreseeable future the price point of Ultimate will make it viable for us to go that route. Having every employee being able to use GitLab is essential to my idea of how GitLab can be of use to the company, but unless free guest users will also come at least to Gold tier, I think we will have to live with the limitation of CE rather than becoming paying customers. (Please don't get me wrong, I definitely value the product a lot, but I'm not making these decisions alone and I'm merely stating what I know to be the facts for our company. As a fan and developer who would like to use some advanced features I'm hoping that free guest users will come to the other tiers as well.)
  - elygre 8y ago

by tyldum 8y ago

manigandham 8y ago

You pay 200 employees but don't want to spend $19/user/month on software for a company hub? That's not really a small company, and this seems like a budgeting problem if money is that tight. You can also try running multiple installations with a separate dev-only instance with more features. Also have you tried contacting Gitlab to negotiate? A few emails can go a long way.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
bigtunacan 8y ago
I would say 200 employees is fairly small company; and depending on the line of business it is certainly small enough that profit margins and thus spending may need to be closely watched. If you consider that the OP has only 10 out of 200 users that need the advanced features, but has to purchase the advanced features for all 200 users for anyone to use those features that is $45,600 a year. Now if it were possible for example to have a mixed licensing model; buy 10 Premium licenses for the users who need it and 190 Starter licenses for everyone else then that is $11,400 a year. That is a difference of $34,200 a year so it may be the difference between being able to hire another employee or not.
- manigandham 8y ago
  As stated, they can run separate instances, or spend 5 minutes contacting GitLab to negotiate. 200 employees is not small, that is considered a medium sized business. Millions of companies around the world never get past single-digits. With payroll extending into 10s of millions, $35k sounds rather trivial if it really is powering the company hub and the value that brings.
  - bigtunacan 8y ago
    "200 employees is not small, that is considered a medium sized business" I'm just curious what your basis for that is? To go with some kind of standardization on the term "small business" I would say the safest definition (within the US) would be to follow the SBA guidelines that define a small business. Depending on the industry a small business is defined by the SBA as a maximum of anywhere from 100 to 1500 employees. So it is not cut and dry that this is or is not a small business; industry and also potentially revenues in millions of dollars would need to be known to determine absolutely if it by definition a small business.

barrystaes 8y ago

I recognize this. Not every company with developers is a software develop company. Those 190 others that dont use the advanced features, what subset of functionality do they require?

tyldum 8y ago
Primarily logging in, filing issues and using the wikis. A few might be able to request changes by submitting a PR instead of issues. We do need to have authentication and cannot simply mark all repos public either. The 10 power users want to take advantage of the kubernetes and devops features - especially since we are a small team covering a lot if ground.

sytse 8y ago

"I fear GitLab will fence off future functionality with even more tiers at random" our goal when introducing the new tiers was to put new functionality in then, not to move existing functionality away. In the future we might move functionality between tiers to keep the grouping logical but we won't do that lightly let alone randomly. New functionaly is made iteratively starting with the minimal viable change. But they should always function and additions should land in the same tier. If we missed the mark somewhere please let us know.

tyldum 8y ago
I think the problem for us is that not all users are equal. To embrace devops/gitops I really want most of the company involved through our GitLab instance, but only a subset of the license seats would actually use the kubernetes features for instance. Most of our users would not venture beyond the features of the community edition (except for the LDAP auth we use). So while we enjoy GitLab and do some software development, we are not a software company. I think this is becoming all the more common.

elygre 8y ago

That one is exactly ours, too. We have 275 users in license, bought when GitLab Enterprise was the thing. We set up GitLab to help establish innersourcing (e.g. https://about.gitlab.com/2016/07/07/trends-version-control-innersourcing/ https://about.gitlab.com/2016/07/07/trends-version-control-i...), where all employees are users -- no exceptions. We run a GitLab introduction as part of onboarding of all employees, whether techies, marketing people or recruiters. Our 275 users are an eclectic mix. There are a few projects that really pound the product, there are lots of internal playground repositories, and even a few non-technical documentation repositories. The requirements are scattered. I think that that perhaps 25 of the 275 users have need for Ultimate Edition, but that is not possible, we'd have to pay $325.000 for the pleasure. And that is going nowhere. An interesting question then is what do we do next? Perhaps our innersourcing strategy has to go, and each team will get to choose their own platform. People will chose what they know, and soon most will be on GitHub.

sytse 8y ago
If you buy ultimate you get free guest users. Would that help?
- matrixagent 8y ago
  We're facing the same problem at my company, I heavily pushed towards switching to GitLab and am currently overseeing the process. While we can probably make due with CE, there are a few features that only the 10 to 15 developers in our 300+ employee company would actually use. I don't think that in the foreseeable future the price point of Ultimate will make it viable for us to go that route. Having every employee being able to use GitLab is essential to my idea of how GitLab can be of use to the company, but unless free guest users will also come at least to Gold tier, I think we will have to live with the limitation of CE rather than becoming paying customers. (Please don't get me wrong, I definitely value the product a lot, but I'm not making these decisions alone and I'm merely stating what I know to be the facts for our company. As a fan and developer who would like to use some advanced features I'm hoping that free guest users will come to the other tiers as well.)
- elygre 8y ago