23 ms·

Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model

• riffic 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    > $0, $19, $99
• marcus_holmes 6y ago
  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.
• ashton314 6y ago
  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!
  • aaomidi 6y ago
    Especially considering GitHub enterprise is $21/month/user
    • 0x008 6y ago
      Well but it seems gitlab offers a lot more value?
      • easton 6y ago
        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 6y ago
          Recommendation for Jira replacement? Preferably with an emphasis on speed?
          • teekert 6y ago
            Zenhub?
          • enra 6y ago
            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 https://linear.app
          • keithnz 6y ago
            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 6y ago
          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 6y ago
        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 6y ago
      I'm under the impression that GitHub Enterprise's on prem ci/cd pipelines isnt available yet
      • wdb 6y ago
        The v3 release candidate got it: https://github.blog/2021-01-15-github-enterprise-server-3-0-is-here/ 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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        Is this satire? Have you noticed that the richest companies in the world are tech companies?
  • ssully 6y ago
    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.
  • shagie 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
      • shagie 6y ago
        The permission model that GitLab has is one of the disappointing things about it and part of the reason we went with a different product for issue management (and I frequently grump about it). I'd really like to be able to define my own roles and assign different actions that that role can do. I feel that it wasn't made to host enterprise products but rather FOSS in competition with GitHub and then made a pivot to enterprise products but not quite moving away from the "this is for FOSS on the web". Things like "can modify own comments" not being something that can be modified (people updating their own comments and then not being able to go back over it for an audit or information request of some sort) or having a manager role that can administer the members of a project but not the code. And yea... having to pay $100/month for a product/project manager in a larger org is a rather firm "nope." Have a dozen of those and that's a lot to pay for not much functionality. A previous company that I worked at... there was a project manager. Just one. It was a small company - I sat across from the other Java developer. In there, were you've got a small organization where $100/month for a PM is a lot to swallow, but its only $100/month for one PM (and then you get all the other features that saves you from having to hire another operations person) - that's not as hard a price to swallow. There the thing would be "ok, we've got 10 people at $20/month and all this other stuff that we need to set up on our own, so $200/month vs 11 people at $100/month and a bunch that we don't need to set up on our own $1100" -- the "is it worth $900 for the rest of the infrastructure done for us - along with dumping trello for gitlab issues" and the answer would probably be "yes."
  • matthewmuscat 6y ago
    We've used GitLab CE internally for source code control + CI/CD since May 2014 (6+ years) and are currently evaluating their paid offerings as an overall replacement to Jira. Based on my observations so far, Ultimate is quite expensive when you have an "all in" approach. Every user, despite whether they would use the feature set must be licensed as Ultimate under the current model. I really wish there was some flexibility in how the licensing model works — right now, the all in approach is prohibitive to bringing on new users, as you need to justify the $1,200 upfront cost per user added — not all users / projects need to be licensed under the same tier — some user's needs are basic and cannot justify the cost of a license. -- Some thoughts on how this could be addressed... A) Assign a licence tier to a user (ie: Some users get Ultimate features, others are on premium with limited access to features) B) Assign licenses based on projects — if a project has "Ultimate" features enabled, all users in that project count towards an "Ultimate" seat
• jeswin 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
    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_access_tokens.html https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/settings/project_acc...
    • Aeolun 6y ago
      I thought you were going to make the layers easier to understand? :P Different features at different levels between self-hosted and gitlab.com seem counterproductive in that regard.
      • leipert 6y ago
        Certain features are disabled on GitLab.com in order to prevent abuse, are difficult to scale or just make no sense. In the case of the Project Access Tokens, the feature is quite new and it is to prevent abuse. See also the (nephew/niece?) comment I made in the thread (one to the side from yours, one down)
    • TavsiE9s 6y ago
      But not in the CE?
• CraftThatBlock 6y ago
  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.
• MrOxiMoron 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    > 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 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/15079
    • wdb 6y ago
      Yeah, there are a lot of these kind of tickets imho
  • jrochkind1 6y ago
    What are the things in bronze you did need/want, vs free?
    • thepill 6y ago
      Multiple Issue Assignees for me
    • rpadovani 6y ago
• jhasse 6y ago
  Is it 10000 CI minutes per user?
  • harrychin2 6y ago
    Just host your own runners https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/install/ https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/install/
    • easton 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        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 6y ago
        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-runners/ 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-deployments-in-5-minutes/ 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/directory/search?f0=Services+Offered&f0v0=Managed+%2F+Hosted+Services&Adv=none https://partners.gitlab.com/English/directory/search?f0=Serv...
  • john_cogs 6y ago
    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).
• TonyTrapp 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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.
  • curryst 6y ago
    Personally, I think it's a side effect of globalization. All else equal, large companies beat small companies by economy of scale. It follows that larger companies beat large companies. The inevitable outcome is an aggregation of tons of small companies into a small number of very large companies. That changes 2 things for a SaaS company: 1) Large companies pay more (in absolute amounts). They are also likely to be less of a support burden, since they're a single company so they should be relatively uniform. They're unlike to ask for both AWS and GCP support, but the 1,000 small businesses you need to replace that revenue are likely to ask for AWS, GCP and Azure cumulatively. 2) Small companies are more likely to fail. It's not enough to create a competitive product. They have to create a competitive product at a price that allows them to overcome the economy of scale. Creating an equivalent to Google is great. You're probably still going to pay more per-search than Google is, so they can cut prices until you can't keep up. > 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. I would argue that we're seeing the fruition of that. The answer is that you go ahead and pay for it. You hope that you can get enough growth to be a company that can afford to pay for it before you run out of money. Or you get acquired by a company whom you're more valuable to, and they can afford to pay for it. I don't see a viable path forward for small businesses under current circumstances. They can't compete on cost, big businesses are getting really good at emulating small business features (e.g. Spotify does a good job of recommending new music to me, so I don't need the record store to do that), and people are adapting to interfacing with machines instead of humans. I struggle to think of an advantage local stores have other than being able to get the thing you want in less than a day or two.
• Macha 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    I second this, the only thing from starter was "pull mirroring", and now I'm priced out of even thinking buying Gitlab premium.
  • jlgaddis 6y ago
    Just within the last 7-10 days or so, I added a task to my "to-do" list to upgrade my personal account to GitLab's lowest cost ($48/year) tier. I don't actually need any of the features from that tier but I absolutely do* get value from my (personal) use of GitLab (mostly centered around / related to my fairly extensive home lab) and wanted to support the company. I'm not aware of any way to make a donation so I decided I'd just pay the $48/year to upgrade my account as an alternative. I've been working on a (personal, "offline") project for about the last week and a half -- meaning so I've not been sitting at my workstation during that time -- or else I almost certainly would have just upgraded to the now defunct bronze/starter plan. Maybe I'll just buy some extra CI/CD minutes (which I don't use) or something similar as a way to show support for the company by giving them a few dollars.
• relaxatorium 6y ago
  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.
• wdb 6y ago
  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.
• jacquesm 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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
    • yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      Depending on your market, killing off cheaper plans might barely impact your revenue at all... right up until you stop getting bigger contacts because there's no on-ramp customers to try your services before going all-in.
  • jonas21 6y ago
    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.
• iFire 6y ago
  Does this mean repository mirroring (pulling) can be incorporated into Gitlab CE? * https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/23166#note_494457651 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/23166#note_494...
  • jrochkind1 6y ago
    why would it mean that?
• Dayshine 6y ago
  $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 6y ago
    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-comparison/ https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/gitlab-com/feature-comparis... - https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/self-managed/feature-comparison/ https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/self-managed/feature-compar... Let me know if there are specific features you have questions about.
    • Dayshine 6y ago
      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.
    • O5vYtytb 6y ago
      Do you have a list of features that were promoted from starter to premium or free? We invested a lot of time to evaluate features and decided on starter. Now it's confusing to understand what features we're gaining/losing if we go to premium or free.
    • sschueller 6y ago
      We don't need all those features, what we need is a competitive alternative to bitbucket. Your Bronze plan although more expensive was that. I was able to make the argument to switch to gitlab even thought bronze was a bit more but I can't make that for going to this tier.
• neves 6y ago
  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.
  • thepill 6y ago
    This doesnt change what features you can use, does ist?
    • mikewhy 6y ago
      It does not, no.
  • daxelrod 6y ago
    You can host it yourself at any of the tiers. Paying for GitLab doesn't necessarily imply SaaS GitLab.
  • nemetroid 6y ago
    There are multiple paid self-hosted tiers, one of which is being phased out.
  • umvi 6y ago
    Which features do you get with self hosted?
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
      Exactly the same as with the hosted version. All you would gain is unlimited CI minutes but you can configure the hosted one to use your own CI runner anyway.
• devicenull 6y ago
  What happened to the pricing for self-managed instances? We rather like our onprem setup.
  • thepill 6y ago
    Its the same i guess!?
  • adamtulinius 6y ago
    Some time ago they made the pricing for hosted and on-prem the same.
  • boleary-gl 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      This is not clear from the pricing page, which talks about CI pipeline minutes and other SaaS only stuff.
      • john_cogs 6y ago
        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-comparison/ https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/self-managed/feature-compar...
    • scoodah 6y ago
      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 6y ago
• umvi 6y ago
  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...
  • sschueller 6y ago
    I'm trying to move away from bit bucket but now the price is again more and this is difficult to sell.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • harrisonjackson 6y ago
    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?
• iphorde 6y ago
  Time to get the VPN back up, and put subversion back online.
• adamtulinius 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    We are in the same boat. Probably going to downgrade to free.
  • boleary-gl 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • polskibus 6y ago
      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 6y ago
      The best possible service through the transition: no change.
• Freak_NL 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    > 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 6y ago
      I had my browser without uBlock Origin for all of five seconds after a fresh install last month.
    • dinkleberg 6y ago
      There certainly is a reason for them to do it, just not one that you or I like.
  • disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      It's especially annoying because their competition does not use cookies. https://github.blog/2020-12-17-no-cookie-for-you/ https://github.blog/2020-12-17-no-cookie-for-you/
      • 6y ago
• raro11 6y ago
  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?
  • TavsiE9s 6y ago
    Depends on your requirements to be honest. I’ve used gitea in the past and was very happy with it.
  • SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
    There is a feature that lets non users report issues via email which might be usable. It would prevent them participating in more advanced issue tracking and seeing other users issues though.
    • raro11 6y ago
      We tried it but it didn't work out for us. You don't know what your issue description was after you send an issue through service desk. You just get a generic reply that starts as the email-chain. The issue templating doesn't work obviously, the quality of created issues drop.
• dak1 6y ago
  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.
  • john_cogs 6y ago
    GitLab team member here. Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. Will share with our team.
    • Achshar 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        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-pricing-is-prioritized-over-monthly-pricing https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/pricing/#annual-pricin...
        • Redsquare 6y ago
          Do you pay google yearly upfront for hosting?
• GordonS 6y ago
  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?
  • theptip 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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.
      • theptip 6y ago
        Agreed, this is the problem with Gitlab's bloat; the more features they add, the harder it is to justify a cheap price-point like the old $5/month -- and everybody's idea of what should go into the $20/month tier is going to be different. You can't disaggregate the offerings to pay for just the pieces you are interested in. If they are focusing more on the Enterprise side of things, I could see it being a good idea for them to split out the licensing and billing for different offerings; see Datadog for an example of the opposite extreme, where every service is optional, and you pay (handsomely) for whatever you use. If Gitlab split their offerings into a few packages, say $10/mo for k8s integration, $10/mo for security, $10/mo for the Jira replacement that I've never touched, and so on, they could potentially get more stickiness - users would be using the top-tier functionality for the modules that they care about, instead of missing a few killer features that are stashed away in the gold tier. I'm not paying $100/mo for a Gitlab seat, but I would have considered $20-30/mo extra for the k8s/prometheus CD integration without having to pay for all the rest of the top-tier features I'm not interested in. This might help Gitlab to focus a bit more, too, as they would be able to see exactly what product lines are bringing in the most revenue, and focus on making those better.
• theptip 6y ago
  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.
• godtoldmetodoit 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    Same for us - only a few users really need the subscription at all. The most only use basic features
  • umvi 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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 6y ago
        Email a diff to someone who has access?
        • liaukovv 6y ago
          Could skip source control entirely and just mail diffs around all day
        • synotna2 6y ago
• gnfargbl 6y ago
  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 6y ago
    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 6y ago
      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/migrating-from-gitlab-cicd-to-github-actions https://docs.github.com/en/actions/learn-github-actions/migr....
      • toyg 6y ago
        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.
      • gnfargbl 6y ago
        Replying to my own comment: I see that GitLab are actually offering a pretty generous transition deal for existing Bronze customers with less than 25 customers ($6/$9/$15 in yr 1/2/3). Honestly that is enough to retain me. I hope they open it up more widely as an intro offer.
• bsjd 6y ago
  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.
  • Aeolun 6y ago
    Quintuple I think?
• SomeHacker44 6y ago
  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.
• mchusma 6y ago
  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 6y ago
  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?
  • temac 6y ago
    Of course you can, it would not be open source / free software otherwise. (Yes, some people are attempting to redefine "open source" to other meanings, but gitlab does no such thing and Open Source GitLab is truly Open Source)
    • addicted 6y ago
      But to be clear, Open a source GitLab is not the same thing as Free GitLab.
• bsmith4 6y ago
  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.
• zmmmmm 6y ago
  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.
  • pjgalbraith 6y ago
    I'm in the same boat, our organisation has about 500 potential users. However only a small number need the paid features. If there was a way to assign licenses to groups or individual users in the self-hosted version we would be paying for it already. Same as you I really want Gitlab to do well, but the lack of options with licensing makes it difficult to adopt. A lot of other enterprise software allows for per-user license assignment like Office 365, Salesforce, Jira, etc...
• itsbenweeks 6y ago
  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.
• time0ut 6y ago
  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.
  • hermanradtke 6y ago
    This is it. My engineering team needs all the features. My product manager only needs basic ticket creation access. Why are these two types of users costing me the same amount?
  • factorialboy 6y ago
    If you have 1000 users, your sales rep should be giving you discounts based on your usage scenario. What did they say?
    • motoxpro 6y ago
      "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."
• O5vYtytb 6y ago
  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.
  • TheRealPomax 6y ago
    If you were on starter anyway, why would you this affect you? Just keeping using free?
    • O5vYtytb 6y ago
      Gitlab didn't make all starter features part of the free tier. Now we're forced to pay for premium without gaining any features relevant for our team. Edit: FYI starter was previously a paid tier.
    • addicted 6y ago
      Starter isn’t the free tier. It’s the self hosted equivalent of Bronze. And that’s also being removed.
• mikl 6y ago
  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.
• crb002 6y ago
  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.
• yc-kraln 6y ago
  I work in an organization which is part of a huge multinational. We've successfully managed to spearhead Gitlab into our giant company, and it's slowly making inroads. until this price change And now we're looking at alternatives. Sorry, the price hike for our case (~500 devs) is hefty, to the point where we're willing to eat crow and go with Gerrit+Jira+Confluence+Jenkins, and basically disentangle ourselves. So like, I guess it makes financial sense in the short term? But definitely will hurt in the mid-long term. You've lost us at least as a customer. And no--we aren't going to talk to our account leader about this, or discuss any discounts or anything.
• laingc 6y ago
  We are a Gitlab client, and very happy with their service. I hope that their business model succeeds, and am happy to be supporting them. The Bronze --> Premium transition seems to me to be a valid price restructuring, and this will prompt us to upgrade to Premium rather than downgrade to Free. However, - Ultimate seems like minimal value for substantial extra cost. There's no way we could ever justify it. - The collaboration model is terrible. We would love to introduce lots of our clients to gitlab as part of a collaboration - thereby increasing gitlab's mindshare, install base, and potential customer base - but the price tag attached to inviting a previously-free-tier collaborator doesn't make sense for us. - Premium needs to include Jira-killing features. Do that and we're yours probably for life.
• georgeburdell 6y ago
  In the past few years, my org has gone from Gerrit to Jira, and recently Jira to Gitlab. I'm guessing we're in for another move with these pricing changes.
• anemosg 6y ago
  Wanted to see the pricing page, but the burger menu button isn’t working at all. Anyone else? I am on Safari, iOS 13.
  • john_cogs 6y ago
    Here's a link to the pricing page: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/ https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/ If you're still having issues with the menu, please create an issue using this template: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/issues/new?issuable_template=-website-bug-report https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/issues/new?is...
• TavsiE9s 6y ago
  Have they finally axed True Ups?
• Aeolun 6y ago
  > For customers that require more control across their DevOps processes and support, the GitLab Premium tier is a better suited offering than Bronze/Starter. How about you leave that for the customers to decide?
  • SulfurHexaFluri 6y ago
    They essentially said they are not at the top of the post because its not profitable enough to keep the bronze tier. I appreciate the honesty tbh
    • Aeolun 6y ago
      That seems unlikely to me. The marginal cost of Gitlab must be pretty near zero. I agree with them that most people probably want the $240/year plan, but their existing customers clearly chose the bronze plan for a reason.
• malikolivier 6y ago
  We are a small company and have been paying for GitLab's Bronze plan for about two years now. We have about 5 devs, but the bulk of our GitLab users are non-technical (sales, customer support, etc.) who probably do not even know what git is. Those users are lurkers, but their input can be valuable and if possible I'd like them to be able to login onto GitLab. Getting billed $228/users/year upfront is a harsh blow. I don't think I will ever be able to justify such cost to our CEO. The way I see it now, we will renew our Bronze plan during the one-year grace period, while we are preparing the transition to another tool. Hopefully, we never really integrated our processes too much with GitLab, so we can transition whenever we need to. If the "per user" subscription is to be that expensive, then I would suggest GitLab to provide a monthly subscription and/or a "per committer" subscription instead of a "per user" subscription.
  • storrgie 6y ago
    Per comitter would be ideal, viewing source and interacting via tickets is something that is usually a secondary stakeholder community that is larger than the score development group (in every org I see adoptjng forge style tools)
  • rleigh 6y ago
    I'm currently just using a single-user Bronze subscription for consulting work. I was previously thinking of adding customers and other end users to the plan, but it already gets far too expensive. None of these users would be developers; it would primarily be so they could download sources, read and comment on issues, and generally observe what was going on. The one-size-fits-all fixed-tier subscription makes no sense from the point of view of an end user. I would love to have users/projects with differing access levels. Likewise, GitLab is too bloated; I might want one or two features from the higher tiers but I can't justify paying for them. Why not let people pay for the features they actually need selectively? I've also not been too impressed by the inflexibility of GitLab's billing practices. Not only is it fixed annual subscription, if you don't pay by auto-renewal you have to renew the subscription on a specific week. You can't even pay them in advance! I was effectively forced into the auto-renewal due to not being around on that specific week, and in the following year when I was winding up the company and finalising the accounts, I got a surprise bill due to that coerced auto-renewal. I was not happy with that. They really need to get their billing system sorted out.
• maxdo 6y ago
  The big problem of gitlab you got free version and expensive one. I’d rather switch to GitHub , they offer subset but it’s much better connected with the rest of the world
• ta988 6y ago
  Looked into gitlab (official instance) for an academic project, it is horribly painful to setup an educational account and requires lots of writing. Took a few minutes on github. I guess that will not help pushing their product to the next generation.
• bsmith4 6y ago
  Gitlab was good but not evil. We're 1000+ in your Starter and that was a mistake we moved 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.
• rendaw 6y ago
  I'm an individual (hobby?) user. I switched to Gitlab and purchased a subscription not for features but as a hedge against them selling out to another major company with a conflict of interest, but at 4x the cost I can't justify that. So much for putting my money where my mouth is. I looked around and nobody except Github has a non-free hobbyist tier AFAICT. Is "paid personal git service" just not a thing? It's either free or you're an enterprise customer?
  • brnt 6y ago
    Sourcehut (https://sr.ht https://sr.ht)?
• polskibus 6y ago
  There is a real need in the market for a nicely done Git frontend, with support for more advanced processes (approvals, etc.). Not everyone needs the devops stuff. Please reconsider your tiering @Gitlab.
• ilmiont 6y ago
  Almost all the comments in this thread can be summarised as: GitLab: your product is great; your pricing is madness. This removal of Starter doesn’t seem to have helped anyone except GitLab. You really need to look at how you’re pricing your service and seriously consider much stronger user role management. GitLab pricing is unworkable for many smaller teams, so we stay on Free and give you nothing at all. The pricing actively discourages whole-org adoption - no way are we paying $19/mo for a non-dev user who would rarely use the system. So we pay nothing at all and keep everyone on free, because that user does still need some access, so you get nothing at all. To be clear - I love GitLab and I want to pay for more features. I don’t want Premium for nothing but the way it’s billed is completely impractical and hard to get value from for small dev teams, as we have to think very carefully about who gets an account. I would love it if you’d think about allowing different users on an instance to have a different plan - like with Microsoft 365, where some users have the full works and others just have an email inbox. I need 5 Premium users, 3 Starter users and 2 Free users, for example. You’d now be getting payment for 8 users instead of 0 in my scenario! Not all my users need Premium; some do. Consequently, we all stay on Free, because I can only justify/afford the pricing for the handful of Premium licenses I actually need. I really hope this makes sense - there is money waiting for you, and I know many other small dev shop owners feel the same way, but you’re not doing anything to claim it! You need to look within yourself and work out how you can sell your product to smaller teams in a way that makes sense for everyone. It kinda feels like you just don’t care about your roots anymore and that you only want Ultimate users on your service; I hope you don’t make the mistake of turning your back on the users who started you off and who vocally endorse and support your product.
  • carlosf 6y ago
    I have exactly the same issue. BTW that seems to be a recurrent issue with Salas products, I often like something but can't transition to giving paid plans due terrible pricing models.
    • garaboncias2 6y ago
      +1
  • 6y ago
• gogopuppygogo 6y ago
  Crazy price bumps. I love open source and want to support GutLab but it is now significantly cheaper to use something like Azure DevOps instead: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/devops/azure-devops-services/ https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/devops/azu...
• comprev 6y ago
  Just last week I was starting the process of migrating a client (6 users total) from Bitbucket/Trello over to Gitlab Bronze. Not any more. That price hike is nuts and well out of the grasp of many small startups watching their cashflow!
• RamblingCTO 6y ago
  You're pricing was off already anyway, considering we don't use most of the stuff you push upon us. Peculiar timing, Space was just released, you worsen your plans and get way too expensive. I kinda get the feeling you want to narrow down your target audience. We'll probably switch to Space or something else, considering that we only use merge requests, CI and the repo itself anyway.
• rronalddas 6y ago
  Okay this is bad. I had just convinced management to get us on Bronze Plan, now it's gone. Intially the whole team ~10 Dev's were in Bitbucket, was considering between GitHub and GitLab since Gitlab allowed importing pull request issues, whereas GitHub support just asked me to write my own plugin for the same.
• xsenna 6y ago
  So, who is considering what alternatives? We are using GitLab only for git ui, as I put a stop to using it any deeper due to a questionable open-core model.
• smcleod 6y ago
  I've been a big proponent of GitLab but this doesn't look at all good. I work at a consultancy and the word over the past day from many of our clients after hearing this is that they're now looking to move off GitLab. Going from $5.20AUD/user/month to $24.50AUD/user/month would be a huge price increase, especially when most of them only needed a paid license just to enable the MR approvals feature. One of them has around 300 users, this will change their bill from around $18,000/yr to a $88,000/yr. I understand they were losing money on Bronze subscriptions, but I'm hoping they did consider other options such as potentially scaling back some of the (many) features that are baked into the platform. For example out of the many GitLab installs I've seen - I've not once seen anyone use or care about the Kubernetes/Infa orchestration and monitoring features. From what I can tell people mostly care about MRs and the workflow around them, CI/CD, Security Scanning, code Issues and Kanban and Wiki functionality. I feel like as a product - it's trying to do too much and really what most people want is an alternative to Github, Jira and Confluence.