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Gitlab removes its 'starter' tier Users must either pay 5x more or lose features
- batterylow 6y ago> Existing customers with up to 25 users can renew for one more year at the existing $4.00 rate, or get a free upgrade to Premium along with a staggered discount at the next renewal: $6.00 on year 1, $9.00 year 2 and $15.00 for year 3. This seems reasonable...
- znpy 6y agoBesides that, they can still run gitlab on-prem (it's not that hard after all). So it's not like gitlab is completely cutting people out of service.
- marcinzm 6y agoAs I understand it, on-prem requires a license if you want the non-community edition features and the license costs exactly as much as the SaaS version.
- marcinzm 6y agoThe people most annoyed in the last thread were the ones who evangelized GitLab within their companies but hadn't yet convinced the company to pull the plug or transition to a paid plan. They now have egg on their faces as GitLab is no longer a viable option due to pricing.
- zymhan 6y agoI worked at a company that only used Gitlab's free tier for production deployments. But instead of actually paying for their service to resolve various limitations we ran into, my manager decided he "had a bad experience with Gitlab" and so we switched providers. I honestly don't know what people are thinking using a free tier for some service provider to run their company.
- PaywallBuster 6y agoI'm also using Gitlab for free in production. We only use the CI/CD feature and host our own runners, free plan serves us well and gitlab.com just works.
- sofixa 6y ago> I honestly don't know what people are thinking using a free tier for some service provider to run their company Idk, at work we have a pretty big free hosted Gitlab ( across multiple machines and DCs) and there are very little limitations ( which are not worth the price jump from free to pretty expensive)
- meowster 6y agoReasonable for GitLab, but not the user. Reasonable for the user would be to just grandfather them in their current plan.
- weaksauce 6y agoYeah that's the bog standard method of moving forward every time something like this happens. never take something away from someone that they are used to... it will only breed resentment. you let them continue on at the old price and if they want xyz new shiny offering that you obviously think is worthwhile because you are charging 4x for it then they will move to the new tier and you are off the grandfather hook for that user. if they stop the service then you are off the hook and they can buy the new tier if they want to resume using the paid service. edit: it amazes me that companies don't do this time and time again and suffer the negative repercussions of it every time.
- gogopuppygogo 6y agoThey are nice enough to keep pricing for a reasonable amount of time for existing customers but it’s now much more attractive to use alternatives at lower costs.
- ignoramous 6y agoIt is reasonable until corp realizes GitHub might be cheaper. Since the core product is git (ignoring the lock-in with CI/CD and other related GitLab features), organizations with cost constraints could be forced to move and that might be a cause of annoyance.
- marcinzm 6y agoPrevious discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25918717 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25918717
- the-dude 6y agoI wonder if there will be the notable absence of the CEO in this thread too. That is remarkable.
- sytse 6y agoWe have an entire team of people responding on social and I wanted them to be the DRI https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/directly-responsible-individuals/ https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/directly-resp... I think the blog post with me as the author https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/01/26/new-gitlab-product-subscription-model/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2021/01/26/new-gitlab-product-... and the FAQ https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/faq-new-product-subscription-tiers/ https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/faq-new-product-subscriptio... answer most questions. But happy to answer any other questions.
- the-dude 6y agoThat was not the point. I was commenting on my perception of your different level of engagement. And a quick search with algolia justifies that : there are very little Gitlab threads where you have been absent.
- sytse 6y agoThat is true, and I was reading a lot yesterday. Because of the expected volume we had a different process for responding on social yesterday and I wasn't part of that group.
- korpheo 6y agoI do love the product you guys make. And that's why I am so damn disappointed with this decision. Can you please give me just a single good reason to convince my management why we are now going to spend MORE in this tool than for the full 365 package?
- cwhiz 6y agoWow. Almost feels like a bait and switch. GitLab is now completely uncompetitive with GitHub in terms of price structure. 4-5x on monthly cost.
- DylanDmitri 6y agoGithub is deeply subsidized by Azure's marketing budget and benefits from larger scale. Gitlab can't compete head-to-head; they'll have to pivot or partner soon.
- mattashii 6y agoThey just last week announced a partnership with IBM: https://www.ibm.com/products/gitlab-ultimate https://www.ibm.com/products/gitlab-ultimate
- cwhiz 6y agoGitHub was acquired by Microsoft in 2018. Microsoft implemented a more generous free tier in 2020, but even before the acquisition the pricing structure was $7 - $21 per user, per month. GitLab is now $19 - $99. If I wanted to move my organization to GitLab it would now cost me an additional $78 per user, per month. A total nonstarter, even if I desperately hated GitHub. I don't understand the suddenness to this maneuver by GitLab. My guess is it is driven by the CI/CD minutes, but they have really thrown out the baby with the bathwater with their pricing structure.
- loceng 6y agoHasn't Gitlab just been a copying Github machine too from the start? I don't mean to start a fight but I've only ever seen praise from its launch as a wanted competitor, but no one seems to have mentioned the obvious? I know git wasn't invented by Github but from what I remember Github was a pretty clear roadmap for Gitlab.
- noja 6y agoI thought GitLab was ahead of GitHub features?
- pelagicAustral 6y agoMeanwhile Sourcehut is still twenty quid a year...
- SamWhited 6y agoIt's in alpha (or beta at this point? Either way, point still stands). At some point they will set actual prices but they haven't yet. We won't really be able to compare the two on price until they do.
- rsync 6y agoYes, I am rooting for sr.ht which looks like github would have looked if I had built it.
- RantyDave 6y agoI just had a quick poke around. Fast, innit? Very 'plaintext chic'. Love it.
- anderspitman 6y agoAnd 0 JavaScript.
- jennyyang 6y agoHaving never used Gitlab, is there any advantage over Github?
- batterylow 6y agoYou can self-host GitLab which may be an advantage for some. If you like the colour purple, there's that too!
- marcinzm 6y agoYou can self-host GitHub as well if I remember if you pay for the licenses. Gitlab does have an open source free version but without all the features.
- tyree731 6y agoYou can also self-host Github Enterprise I believe.
- brodock 6y agoSelf hosted GitHub Enterprise does not allow for public access. So you can't expose your opensource projects to the world using your own instance.
- glitchc 6y agoGitHub Enterprise is designed for self-hosting.
- laughingpine 6y agoBeen using it since 2016, and I would say the advantages are mostly related to their DevOps features - there are integrations with k8s, SentryIO, and Prometheus to help you with operations. Their CI/CD pipelines also seem a bit more refined than GitHub actions - maybe it is just a maturity thing though? That could also just be my inexperience with GitHub Actions. I think there are also some project management differences in how the items are setup. GitLab, at the premium tier, has epics where I believe GitHub doesn't any distinction. That being said I believe you kind of trade features with GitHub depending on how much you pay for each platform. Both are pretty good products as far as I am concerned.
- laughingpine 6y agoCurrently a starter tier user with more than 25 users, and I don't know how I feel. We had been mulling an upgrade to premium, but the price jump is a tough sell for us. This kind of leaves us in an predicament. Will have to see what GitLab can offer us as per their blog post.
- CapriciousCptl 6y agoCompare/contrast to my former email provider. They gave 1 month notice to some people before almost doubling prices, and others apparently didn’t get any notice at all. Left them for a more expensive service— large and sudden price increases send a message of instability and bait and switch dynamics whether or not it’s actually the case. Gitlab, on the other hand is using a phase in approach. It gives customers time to adjust and prepare. Whereas they could have just hiked prices and exploited customers who didn’t have time to react. Of course you get pricing wrong sometimes (I guess even by 2-5x). But really you have to be careful with how you raise prices. Personally I’d rather have happy customers, although captive ones pay the same.
- Grollicus 6y agoWe're currently using the starter edition for exactly one reason, ldap integration. Now we're supposed to pay $240 / employee for an ldap integration?! Not sure what we'll do but I suspect scripting some ldap integration into our gitlab will be one of the best spent times in terms of ROI for me this year.
- bearjaws 6y ago$240 a year (per engineer) to keep your engineers focusing on providing product value is beyond paying for itself. Building custom in house tooling always costs 5x more than engineers believe, and ultimately doesn't improve your end product. This kind of tooling would probably require at least 100 engineers to justify the innate cost of building and maintaining it.
- tschellenbach 6y agotrue in general and usually more than 5x. some teams manage to turn it into 10, 20 and 40x ldap integration sounds pretty simple though, so maybe not in this case
- whalesalad 6y ago$240/yr/employee for an LDAP connector is absolutely INSANE.
- rijoja 6y agoOkay, so I want to give gitlab the benefit of the doubt here. So look: "GitLab is second only to Microsoft-owned GitHub in this market. GitHub is tough to compete with in part because of Microsoft's financial clout and the fact that GitHub is more a strategic asset to win developers than a profit centre." Aren't ms kinda dumping the price here. As in selling at loss in order to kill competition. Wouldn't this be illegal in other industries. I get that the open source economy would be a bit confusing at times though.
- ivanhoe 6y agoWhat about Bitbucket?
- rijoja 6y agoI don't know. But I am desperate to find a good github alternative, so thanks for the suggestion. But at the same time isn't it quite easy to set up a github server?
- WrtCdEvrydy 6y agoGitlab CE is pretty easy to set up using Docker. I'm unsure of how big the divide on features is.
- e12e 6y agoMight want to have a look at: https://sourcehut.org/ https://sourcehut.org/ > But at the same time isn't it quite easy to set up a github server? I suspect a typo here - is on premise github a thing? [ed: judging by other comments github enterprise allows self-hosting - but unlike gitlab there's no Free software version]. Fwiw setting up a gitlab server is indeed quite straightforward.
- rijoja 6y agoThank you!
- donmcronald 6y ago
- forty 6y ago> One complication is that GitLab requires that all users in a group are on the same plan Honestly that really sucks. We are not impacted by the change (we pay for a higher tier), but we have non coders that would benefit from having gitlab access who don't because the price (which would be the same as for devs) makes it not worth it :/
- TheChaplain 6y agoIn the last thread I saw a reported issue about this, so at least they know there is a need. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/213185 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/213185
- donmcronald 6y agoThere have been a few different issues asking for that for years [1]. 1. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/2105 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/2105
- peter_d_sherman 6y agoI think it would be interesting if we had a P2P network that was only for Open Source source code, and it would be backed-up on a bunch of servers around the world run by volunteers (to prevent data loss) at regular intervals... (Note: This idea isn't fully fleshed-out yet. I'm sure that conceptually this idea has or would have a large amount of problems -- but all of those could in theory be solved in time with the correct engineering efforts...)
- Jkvngt 6y agoIs it really so difficult for a company to buy one (1) ten year old mid-spec server to do SCM? It's all you'd need even for dozens of users.
- thesz 6y ago>The company's pricing handbook states reassuringly that "when in doubt, we will default to moving features to a lower tier" but the effect of the change is that any features in Bronze that are not in the free tier have been moved up. This means they have no doubt in this particular case. I guess we also can doubtlessly deduce what to think then.
- pmlnr 6y agoEveryone who are finding the pricing too high: care to share why you're not hosting/running your own gitlab instances?
- Grollicus 6y agoWe're hosting our own instance but we need a feature that is not available in the free version
- rement 6y agoHosting it yourself does not give you any extra features. You still need to pay (the same price) for the premium features. The only benefit to self hosting is you have complete control of your data (which is important to some companies)
- cosmie 6y agoReading through the comments on a few of these recent Gitlab posts, the self-hosted option has pricing parity with the SaaS option. I.e. most of the features gated to the $19/month Premium tier for the SaaS are similarly gated in the self-hosted option, and require paying the same $19/month cost in order to activate that extended feature set in self-hosted instances. There do appear to be some features in the paid SaaS options that are available in the free/core self-hosted software, but I can't find a straightforward breakdown of what those all are.
- kdmytro 6y agoSelf-hosted costs are the same. Bronze is gitlab.com tier, Starter is self-hosted tier.
- marcinzm 6y agoI'm honestly surprised that GitLab didn't go for a-la-carte pricing where you can choose and pick add-on features as needed. It's what other enterprise SaaS platform with broad offerings seems to do with presumably great success (Okta, JIRA, etc.). I wonder if it's a purely by the numbers business decision or if there's technical/product issues which make that approach difficult for GitLab.
- bsmith4 6y agoThey hide like and dislike counters after many disliked the new announcement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG9d1y2jE14 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zG9d1y2jE14 "Transparency is one of our core values" - BULLSHIT !!
- stunt 6y agoI wonder if Microsoft is going to embed Github into one of their 365 packages. They can offer Office + Teams + Github as one package and it will be impossible for Gitlab to compete for enterprise customers on their managed plans.
- technick 6y agoI still haven't forgotten the downtime from 2017. Let them go out of business, cancel your account and tell them to go stroke themselves.
- pmarreck 6y agoI guess there's an advantage after all to getting bought out by Microsoft lol Isn't travis-ci doing something similar? Eliminating their free tier?