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Upcoming changes to user limits on Free tier of Gitlab SaaS

wiradikusuma 5y ago
JetBrains, the company behind Android Studio and many other IDEs, has "Spaces", basically MS Team clone with free unlimited Git and other developer-centric stuff (https://www.jetbrains.com/space/ https://www.jetbrains.com/space/).
- maxloh 5y ago
  Unfortunately, it is not open source :(
  - anaganisk 5y ago
    Why would that be relevant? Are we sure that Gilab runs the same code on servers as their open source code? Unless you are planning to self host it, I don’t see why its even an issue.
ttoinou 5y ago
Do they count only users registered on the whole namespace/group or all users registered in each sub git project inside the namespace / group ?
- lazypenguin 5y ago
  https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/faq-efficient-free-tier/ https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/faq-efficient-free-tier/ Q. What does namespace in the context of user limits refer to? A. In GitLab, a namespace is a unique name for a user, a group, or subgroup under which a project can be created. User limits are implemented at the top level group or personal namespace. For example: If a user has a group named top and two sub-groups under top named child1 and child2 with 4 users each, then the top namespace will have a total of 8 users, which is above the user limit of 5.
  - ttoinou 5y ago
    Thanks but still confused because it doesn't discuss git projects. If I have Group A which has A/privateGit1.git with 4 users and A/privateGit2.git with 4 others different users then Group A has 8 users ? Also it becomes more complex with guest users
    - PaywallBuster 5y ago
      exactly, 8 unique users in A/
    - john_cogs 5y ago
      GitLab team member here. Yes, you are correct. We count the unique sum of users within a namespace which includes the users in the parent namespace (group), subgroups, and projects. I created an MR to update the FAQ to make this more clear: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_requests/101294 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_request... Thanks for the feedback.
      - ttoinou 5y ago
        Thanks John !
lazypenguin 5y ago
Interesting announcement, didn't expect it. I respect the decision but it will force me to consider another git host provider. I've always been willing to pay for Gitlab but the prices have always been aggressive and discouraged me from doing it: - $20/per user for most basic tier when I don't really need any of the features offered (except maybe "approval before merge required") - $5/month for 10GB of storage ($0.50/GB) is steep. This stopped me from importing my large Git LFS project - No way to have "view only" members for a repo or issue board without it contributing to your user number count and having to pay full price for them. It's clear that I'm not that target market for them which is fine but its a bit of a shame as I do like gitlab.
- PaywallBuster 5y ago
  We're light users of Gitlab, just use it for Merge Requests and the CI interface (while we use our own runners) The cheapest plan is 19$ month and it doesn't give us any extra benefits and it's billed annually! Take it or leave it. For me it's 3 months timeline to leave Gitlab :) I still like it, but not worthwhile for my professional projects and Github is a better homepage with all my OSS contributions displayed. beside there's always a couple of people (non tech) who get added to the repo and barely login (but they want to keep the access), not worth paying 19$ for that
- karakanb 5y ago
  Considering that GitHub is priced at $4 per user/month, I really cannot justify paying 5x of that amount, especially without even using any of the features in the paid tier. I really like the product, but I am going to have to look for other options.
  - 11235813213455 5y ago
    Github can be free for teams: https://github.com/pricing.html https://github.com/pricing.html
- laughingpine 5y ago
  The changes they made (I guess a couple years now) to their pricing model really bit us in the ass. We had a 130 user licence on the old 5$ tier, and had to aggressively cut user counts to afford the new licence. There really needs to be something like a "view only" or a role based cost per user. Most of our clients are just there for commenting, and only a handful of developers actually use the product to its full extent. I know there was an issue open for discussion on their payment models, so I hope it is something they are continuing to look at. At 4x the cost of competitors that offer similar features, it is a very hard sell.
candiddevmike 5y ago
Reminder that Gitlab's stock is down more than 50% of their all time high post IPO. I'd expect more pricing/feature changes as they try to improve revenue/EPS. Can an open core company survive a recession AND maintain their community/developer mind share?
- PaywallBuster 5y ago
  for reference: https://ir.gitlab.com/news-releases/news-release-details/gitlab-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-fiscal-2022 https://ir.gitlab.com/news-releases/news-release-details/git... They're still rapidly growing but they're loosing their edge to Github who since being acquired by Microsoft can afford to play the long game and give away more at a better price point.
  - boringg 5y ago
    Exactly - MSFT can pay higher CAC and they are trying to keep them in their services as a whole not strictly GitHub related. Slightly different goals and pockets.
  - bdcravens 5y ago
    For years their advantage was CI and free private repos. They didn't have much of a moat.
- boringg 5y ago
  In this market I'm not sure how their stock being down 50% is particularly relevant to the performance of the company. Investors bought in on ridiculous multiples when it IPOed and tech as a whole has been crushed with the change in macro economic conditions. Less to do with their model more to do with the market. That said I am sure there is lots more internal pressure to drive revenue. Your second part of the statement seems more relevant.
  - prepend 5y ago
    The market isn’t down 50%. So it’s relevant because GitLab is performing worse than the market and worse than other companies.
naetd 5y ago
Interesting that Github has been getting slammed by people upset with the outages, but it doesn't seem like there's much movement towards Gitlab as an alternative. I use both near-daily for different clients and I have grown to prefer Gitlabs... the price is higher, but it might be worth it to some of the people in the daily HN github issue threads (eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30790593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30790593 )
- tssva 5y ago
  Possibly because Gitlab doesn't have any better record regarding outages.
berryton 5y ago
I was reviewing git hosting prices this week and Gitlab pricing really didn't make sense. The cheapest paid plan doesn't provide enough incentive to the majority of people who just want to host small/personal projects.
zozbot234 5y ago
These changes will make it harder to use GitLab for many open source projects. Five acknowledged "users" (i.e. committers, reviewers, moderators etc.) over the sum total of projects in a single group/organization is not that much. They have a pre-existing Community Program for Open Source but the application process is overly complex and admittance is explicitly said to be at GitLab's discretion, not guaranteed (it also looks like the 'Community' status has to be periodically renewed), so it doesn't seem to be suitable as-is for many users who might otherwise want to host FLOSS code there.
- john_cogs 5y ago
  The requirements to join the GitLab for Open Source program can be found here: https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/join/#requirements https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/join/#require... They are: - OSI-approved open source license: All of the code you host in this GitLab group must be published under OSI-approved open source licenses - Not seeking profit: Your organization must not seek to make a profit through services or by charging for higher tiers. Accepting donations to sustain your efforts is ok. Read more about this requirement here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relations/opensource-program/#who-qualifies-for-the-gitlab-for-open-source-program https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati... - Publicly visible: Your GitLab.com group or self-managed instance and your source code must be publicly visible and publicly available. GitLab's discretion means that we review applicants to ensure they meet these criteria and do not violate our CoC. The renewal helps us to ensure that our program members continue to meet these criteria.
  - djbusby 5y ago
    And keeps our open source company out :( We've got a FOSS project, use hosting and support services to pay staff to write MIT and GPL code. But because our model is nearly identical to GitLab model we cannot get the GitLab FOSS blessing. Is this irony?
    - arlcode 5y ago
      I guess they want to keep the free tier primarily for personal use or companies evaluating the product. In this case it makes sense for them to apply these changes and other users will have to see whether it makes sense to pay for the service.
adamc 5y ago
Just fuels my cynicism about "free" offerings. Sooner or later, companies decide they want to monetize as much as possible. I'm not saying it's unfair. But it makes me less interested in trying things just because they are "free".
- nicce 5y ago
  The current trend seems to be that sadly. You offer your services for free or for reduced price. Once you got enough users, you start taking all the money you can get.
- ensignavenger 5y ago
  Fortunately, GitLab is open core, and I have only used the features in it that are available as Open Source, so if I need to migrate, I can migrate to my own, self-host, system. And that is why I avoid free offerings that aren't open source. I also avoid paying for non-open source saas... because you never know when they will raise the price or make other changes that make it no longer work for you. Moral of the story is- use and buy open source! Not open core.
  - candiddevmike 5y ago
    Someone has to maintain that software. Doesn't matter if it's open source, open core, or paid, someone has to maintain it. Just because something may not be open source doesn't mean you should shy away from it, on the contrary it might be better supported in the long run than an open source project that doesn't have a monetization/support model. People want to get paid for their work, this notion of OSS maintainers being saints who work for free may fly for small hobby projects, but once shit gets real and folks are slamming you for bug/feature requests it gets old, fast.
    - ensignavenger 5y ago
      I specifically mentioned paying for Open Source.
  - adamc 5y ago
Dayshine 5y ago
This is really disappointing. I've always encouraged small non-commercial hobby projects to use GitLab. It just seemed like the right thing to do. If you're familiar with Paradox Interactive Studios games (Crusader Kings, Hearts of Iron, Stellaris): - Star Trek: New Horizons (127,000 current subscribers) - SW:Fallen Republic (97,000 current subscribers) - Kaiserreich (774,000 current subscribers) are (/were) all hosted on GitLab. A lot of the people who contribute to these projects only do so intermittently (so high member count to work done ratio) and are usually doing this in their formative years so would be likely to continue to use GitLab when they enter the working world. There is absolutely no money available as game publishers prohibit it. And even if they tried to sneak in some Patreon donations there's no way that's going to cover $19/m/user! Honestly, GitLab really seems to be falling far behind in their outreach. Their Open source programme is behind GitHub's and they don't have anything for Non-profits.
- rsstack 5y ago
  > This change does not apply to our other plans: ... GitLab for Open Source Doesn't that solve the issue for those projects?
  - Dayshine 5y ago
    Game mods often can't be open source as you don't have copyright on the original game files. Another problem is that game mods are often developed in private repos to prevent ideas and assets being "stolen" by other projects. There are no lawyers to protect your IP in the non-commercial world. It's taken decades for the commercial world to even vaguely become OK with source available, let alone open source, we can't really expect teenagers and young adults who weren't trained as software developers to be comfortable with it.
    - rsstack 5y ago
      Fair point. TIL :)
    - EMIRELADERO 5y ago
      > Game mods often can't be open source as you don't have copyright on the original game files. Don't most game mods simply patch the executable if there's no mod framework available? I would think that the patch engine and specific patches aren't violating the original game's copyright, simply because they wouldn't contain any of the game's assets or code (aside from maybe memory addresses and executable names for hooking)
eslaught 5y ago
First off, I'm really grateful for the service Gitlab has provided to date, both to the open source community and to Git users at large. Having said that, I think they're killing the golden goose. At one point, Gitlab's competitive advantage was relatively generous free access to private Git repos. This generated a lot of goodwill in the days when GitHub didn't provide private repos even for personal use. I'm guessing that Gitlab now views its competitive advantage as the CI / DevOps experience. Still, it feels to me like they could limit that feature specifically rather than limiting even public projects to 5 users. Right now, GitHub's offering is suddenly looking attractive again for anyone who doesn't want to fill out a separate application (annually!) for each of their open source namespaces. I'd think it's to Gitlab's advantage to keep these users. Right now, the current policy effectively chases them away. The only projects I imagine staying are those that really take advantage of the CI, but... is that really who Gitlab wants to limit their userbase to?
- mdoms 5y ago
  If your "competitive advantage" costs you money for every customer acquisition is it really an advantage?
  - eslaught 5y ago
    It depends on whether that cost is higher or lower than the value you get from paying customers (plus goodwill)---i.e., it's a customer acquisition cost. And whether this particular method of customer acquisition is more or less cost-effective than other methods. Since they're doing this, I assume they've done the analysis and determined this is no longer cost effective for them. But I'm surprised, because (a) they'll lose goodwill, and (b) what's their alternative plan for customer acquisition? I don't think Gitlab has grown to the point where they can afford to cut their growth, but I don't see how they're going to avoid that on the path they're going down.
    - mdoms 5y ago
      Just got off the phone with AWS, they say no they won't take payment in "customer good will"???
fartcannon 5y ago
How many more SaaS price increases before folks realize its better to self host?
- mindwok 5y ago
  Gitlab self hosted is awesome as well. It’s a single install that embeds everything Gitlab needs and also has a config management system bundled that simplified config enormously (Chef Omnibus for those interested). We just automatically update from the Debian package and it’s been pretty much fire and forget.
spoonjim 5y ago
Tale as old as time. Give a free tier to get people to store their data with you and then pull the rug when they’re too committed to leave. Should be illegal.
- Jxl180 5y ago
  Git is distributed. Just change the remote to GitHub or a different VCS and the full commit history will be pushed as well.
  - bdcravens 5y ago
    You lose the non-git history (discussions, PR context, issues, etc) as well as CI. If it was just commits, git is easily installed.
activitypea 5y ago
I abhor the "This only impacts 1% of our users" line. Putting the obvious "then why do it" aside, it's just coming out and saying "we are okay with screwing individual users over, as long as there's not so many of them that we get in trouble".
- squaresmile 5y ago
  Yeah, I have been finding these internal justifications kinda odd in a public announcement. As a user, ether I'm affected or I'm not. 99% or 1% doesn't concern me. I don't think I would react differently if the number is 5% or 25%. I agree the implication feels a bit like don't bother complaining since you guys are an insignificant portion of the userbase. Cool, good to know I guess.
- treis 5y ago
  One of these days anti-trust regulators need to look at these "free until we get market share" plans. This isn't a particular egregious example, but it is pretty classic dumping.
  - adtac 5y ago
    >anti-trust This has absolutely nothing to do with antitrust. The word antitrust has lost all meaning.
  - jjeaff 5y ago
    The FTC would be the one looking into this type of thing. Bait and switch is something they go after. But it seems that as long as you bait and switch over a long time horizon, it's ok. I'm fine with deciding to take away free stuff. The part that irks me is the lock in. When you create a lot of custom code to work on the free system they offer you, you are left to either pay or scramble to rebuild what you have somewhere else.
    - treis 5y ago
      It's an anti-trust concern too. Current SCOTUS precedent is essentially dumping/predatory pricing doesn't work so there's no harm to the consumer so it's not illegal. If you could show it worked, i.e. a company drove competitors out of business and then maintained artificially high prices then it would be a slam dunk case.
rootusrootus 5y ago
I wanted to pay GitLab for my personal project space (I prefer to be a customer!) but their prices are too steep for such flippant use. I otherwise like their product, it’s just that the pricing model doesn’t well fit my use case.
josephcsible 5y ago
Since GitLab for Open Source isn't affected, who will actually be affected by this in practice?
- LeSaucy 5y ago
  People who were relying on Gitlab the company to provide free tier access to hosted gitlab instances (as opposed to those who host gitlab themselves)
  - josephcsible 5y ago
    But doesn't GitLab for Open Source exist on the hosted one?
- mynameisvlad 5y ago
  "GitLab for Open Source" is a program that requires an application as well as occasional renewal. So, all the open source projects who choose not to do that for various reasons, small teams and businesses, hobbyist projects like hackathons which generally have more than 5 people to a team. You know, just off the top of my head.
lerela 5y ago
As others have pointed out, $19/user/month is just not an option for many small teams, especially with non-western costs. I guess we'll start planning the migration but it's really disappointing not to be able to pay a reasonable fee and then be kicked out on a 3-months notice. I've seen complaints about this business model for a while on HN but never got the chance to understand Gitlab's reasoning for sticking to this pricing.
qeternity 5y ago
Don't worry, just switch to a paid. With Gitlab's atrocious uptime and reliability, you'll be getting your entire monthly payment back in SLA credit.
whoisjuan 5y ago
I can't believe the number of entitled posts here. Do people here think that Gitlab SaaS doesn't have an operation cost (in servers, development, support, etc)? Perhaps people need to start re-evaluating what "free" means in the context of a cloud offering. "Free" is a marketing strategy, not a charitable act. In the case of Gitlab there's nothing preventing you from using the self-managed free tier which will effectively remove this limit, but guess what? Running it on your own will also have a cost for you. The same way it does for Gitlab when they give it for free through Gitlab.com
- PaywallBuster 5y ago
  Not entitlement Gitlab used to have a basic free tier and a 5$ tier which was accessible Since they will heavily restrict the free tier, and the 5$ plan was moved to 20$, many organizations have a serious financial decision to make and all the fans of Gitlab, myself included, will have to consider options and the other problem is pricing/per seat billing, is difficult for everyone, of course. But surely there's plenty of organizations which are probably a lot cheaper for Gitlab to keep as users than others depending on feature usage.
- benatkin 5y ago
  I read every single top-level comment, and not a single one seems "entitled" to me.
- Dayshine 5y ago
  I used to run Jira Server myself for a hobby project, I paid $10 for the 10 user version. I guess I might have been able to stretch to $50 out of my personal funds. Guess what? They dropped support and the suggested replacement product costs thousands per year. Am I entitled in that case too? Small non-commercial projects get stepped on all the time despite contributing most of the important software in the world. GitLab recently upped their pricing from $5/m to $20/m as well, so even paying members got a huge price increase.
bovermyer 5y ago
I don't really have a big problem with this, but in a weird coincidence, I just decided this morning to spin up a self-hosted instance of GitLab and migrate all of my GitHub and GitLab repositories to it. This just adds a little impetus to that decision.
- ProAm 5y ago
  How difficult was that spin up? Ive been wanting to play with it. Are you hosting on a VPS somewhere?
  - bovermyer 5y ago
    More difficult than expected to configure, but the initial installation was pretty easy. I put it on a 4 cpu 8 GB RAM VPS in Digital Ocean, with another 1 cpu 2 GB RAM VPS acting as a runner. You'll need a mail service that GitLab can route transactional email through. All the difficulty is in configuring things post-installation, but it's well documented.
philpem 5y ago
I'm grateful for the service Gitlab has provided to date, but this seems ludicrous. My use-case for Gitlab is to support the internal tools and some bespoke development for a fan-run non-profit event. In a typical year we might have about $8,000 to run the whole event (ticket sales, less venue hire and other costs). Non-profit pricing is only available to registered charities in my country, so we're forced into paying full price for most of the SaaS services. That puts most of them out of our budget -- and it seems like Gitlab is joining that list. So Gitlab are asking us to pony up $19 per user *per month* -- which is a cool $2300 a year. That's five times our current total IT spend (which benefits everyone), for a service which serves ten users. It's nearly a quarter of what we have to run the event. Fair enough it unlocks extra features, but the only one I can see us using is Epics. To compare prices -- Github is currently charging $48 per user, per year. That's $480 for the whole 10-person team. It's still going to be a tough sell for our Finance guy, but not as bad as $2300 (he'd ask if I hit my head if I asked for that). The team picked Gitlab over Github because of the really good feature set on the free tier, and the availability of the bronze/starter tier for when we needed more. With Bronze going away last year, and now a 5-user cap, the message I'm getting from Gitlab is "we're a premium provider and we don't want your custom". As @eslaught said -- it really feels like they're killing the golden goose. If they added the option of buying more user seats for the Free tier and threw in a premium feature or two (Epics would win me over), I'd absolutely pitch that to my finance guy -- especially if the price was the same as Github. Heck, I wouldn't even care if they cut the number of CI minutes... I can spin up a VPS if I need that.
- snapetom 5y ago
  I was in the same boat with another organization. We needed some light computing resources, but didn't have the money for it. We eventually just went ahead and created a foundation to officially be a non-profit and qualify for stuff. It's a hassle, but it was worth it. Honestly a $8000 budget is plenty to justify doing this.
- 11235813213455 5y ago
  Github is free for teams, $48 is the team plan, but you can use the free plan with an organisation of any number of users
literallyWTF 5y ago
Surprised they’re not also shipping a major version that deprecates a bunch of shit. Gitlab is so nice to use, but then they decide to release a bunch of new crap, change everything, and then jack up the price.
throwaway81523 5y ago
They keep changing this, can they make up their minds? I'd rather self-host anyway. I use Gitea but it is kind of limited. Gitlab (self hosted) otoh is a horrendous resource pig Is there something suitable for self hosting that's not such bloat? What does Gitlab bring that's difficult to self-host?
- packetlost 5y ago
  Sourcehut?
  - throwaway81523 5y ago
    Interesting, I had thought of that as just another hosting service. Thanks, I will look into it further. I see that it is written in Go. Not my preference, but Gitea also is, so it is ok. I wonder whether bug tracking can or should simply be folded into Git, so the tracker would be distributed just as the source control is.
mrtweetyhack 5y ago
PaywallBuster 5y ago
Just sharing, there's also a few providers selling "Hosted Gitlab" solutions so you may find a better deal than "pay-per-seat gitlab.com" without the inconvenience of self hosting Example https://gitlabhost.com/pricing/single-tenant-gitlab-hosting/ https://gitlabhost.com/pricing/single-tenant-gitlab-hosting/
- tommoor 5y ago
  I suppose it's easy to be cheaper when you don't pay for any of the R&D
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    What goes around comes around. Building a business off of git. Then someone builds a product off of your product.
  - skinnymuch 5y ago
    One could argue Gitlab outsourced a decent amount of R&D to Github by copying it as much as they did, especially earlier on.
    - tommoor 5y ago
      very true!
franga2000 5y ago
It seems like every SaaS out there is targeting only the very occasional users and large enterprise users, but nothing in between. If this announcement read "we're limiting Free Tier, but creating a new 10$/month plan that gives you what you had before" I'd be signing up immediately. But per-user pricing, especially with the lowest plan being 20$/u/m, is absolutely insane for anyone but big corporations and startups drowning in VC money. Some practical examples: - if I participate in a 48h game jam with my usual team, it would cost us 120$ to host our code on GitLab. For 2 days!! - the non-profit I develop for would need to pay 1680$ a year, despite all but 2 of our repos being FOSS. That is literally 3/4 of the budget we had last year! Server load, bandwidth and disk space are the things that cost money and they are barely correlated with the number of users in all but a handful of textbook scenarios. Why does everyone insist on putting customers into price brackets based on such a useless metric?
- existencebox 5y ago
  My somewhat cynical hypothesis regarding "Why does everyone insist on putting customers into price brackets based on such a useless metric" (And I do not mean this as a dig at Gitlab, to be clear, just an examination of the strategy.) If there is a curve "amount of money a company of a given size will pay", in certain applications, server load, bandwidth, and disk space utilization likely scales far below that trendline, whereas per-user tracks far closer. It also ensures there is effectively no upper bound on CLTV as a given customer scales out, even if net-usage only increases logarithmically/asymptotically. To try and be even-handed and take a more generous interpretation as well, the former is also less likely to be cogently communicable to a customer, and may have painful UX when limits are hit.
  - justsomehnguy 5y ago
    You took the words out of my mouth. Except I would say what instead of a certain applications this is true for the most of applications. If something doesn't uses tons of traffic/storage and is user facing then the resources spent per user are minuscule, you would spend more time and (even literal) energy to actually track and bill the user for the spent resources and somehow explain why some resources are billed for the insane rates (because you need to bill some thing for insane rates to make up $10 ARPU/month). I had the same problem recently - I was musing about re-selling my monitoring solution (I'm using it myself, at like ~2% of the VPS I'm renting) and the first thing of course was the idea to base the price on the load each client would generate... and I pretty quickly come to a conclusion what I can't reasonably price things at $0.10 per unit, because the time I would need to spend on the setup is way, way more costly for me than that and that doesn't include billing hassles in any way. So yes, billing per user is not only beneficial for the provider on the "user is paid wherever it uses the resource or not" but also allows the provider to not to spend time and money on actually implementing the way to bill the user for the resources.
asp_hornet 5y ago
I remember when Microsoft purchased Github and there was a mass exodus to Gitlab because they were so sure “M$” would commercialise and ruin GitHub. MS ended up moving offerings from their paid tier to the free tier and Gitlab decided to offer this.
0x0 5y ago
It's a shame to see them price themselves out of several markets. In the "agency" model of work, there will be many users that very rarely connect, while there is a much smaller core group of active developers. Impossible to justify paying the full price per month when all these barely-active users count as full users. For years the free tier was good enough, but while wanting to pay them, the lowest priced paid tier was too pricey to make sense. Feels like they are leaving money on the table, and now they are also pushing away people who previously would be championing and advocating for their product and service.
poink 5y ago
This will bite our startup. Regardless of the percentage affected, this seems to run counter to their previously-stated strategy of charging based on who wants a feature, and looks more like an attempt to purge large/unusually active projects similar to Vimeo's recent actions. Message received, I guess?
mindwok 5y ago
Gitlab is probably the single enterprise software product I actually enjoy and advocate paying for. Decisions like this worry me about where they are headed.
jenny91 5y ago
For those saying the GitLab for Open Source program will allow open source projects to have more than 5 members: I was involved in a project that was a part of that program. However, it requires yearly renewals and they somehow botched it at their end last time even though we signed all the documents. So bottom line is that we don't have it anymore.
- john_cogs 5y ago
  Sorry to hear about this experience. I’d love to find out what happened and renew the license for your project. Feel free to email me jcoghlan at gitlab and I’ll be happy to help.
client4 5y ago
While its sad to see gitlab go this path (I've converted two orgs to paid accounts on them) I always look at the silver linings. I've been meaning to move my personal stuff to sourcehut and this is the little shove I needed.
wenbin 5y ago
Two pricing tactics that I wish more SaaS businesses could adopt - 1. Daily subscription and auto-cancel. For example, you can subscribe for 3 days, then it'll automatically cancel your subscription after 3 days. In Gitlab's case, they would enable hackathon teams to use paid plans for 3 days without overpaying for an entire month. 2. Customers can toggle specific features for very fine-grained pricing. Essentially, it's to make SaaS pricing more on-demand.
MisterBiggs 5y ago
> impact fewer than 2% of Free tier users within 0.3% of namespaces Sure most of my projects uploaded are small toy projects, but this change completely turns me off to uploading any larger project that I plan to work on long term and hope for additional contributors.
thawaya3113 5y ago
Gitlab continues to validate my decision to move away from them. After being one of their most enthusiastic early adopters, Gitlab has by far been the most bait and switch SAAS product I have ever used.
p8123 5y ago
We are currently exactly at the threshold of 5 devs. As soon as we hire another dev we'll have to move to github. I like gitlab but there is no way to justify paying 5x per user.
RamblingCTO 5y ago
They had a price-hike last year and we actually migrated to GitHub because of that. Really shows me that this was the right decision. The system is better and the prices are lower.

JetBrains, the company behind Android Studio and many other IDEs, has "Spaces", basically MS Team clone with free unlimited Git and other developer-centric stuff (https://www.jetbrains.com/space/ https://www.jetbrains.com/space/).

maxloh 5y ago
Unfortunately, it is not open source :(
- anaganisk 5y ago
  Why would that be relevant? Are we sure that Gilab runs the same code on servers as their open source code? Unless you are planning to self host it, I don’t see why its even an issue.

ttoinou 5y ago

Do they count only users registered on the whole namespace/group or all users registered in each sub git project inside the namespace / group ?

lazypenguin 5y ago
https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/faq-efficient-free-tier/ https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/faq-efficient-free-tier/ Q. What does namespace in the context of user limits refer to? A. In GitLab, a namespace is a unique name for a user, a group, or subgroup under which a project can be created. User limits are implemented at the top level group or personal namespace. For example: If a user has a group named top and two sub-groups under top named child1 and child2 with 4 users each, then the top namespace will have a total of 8 users, which is above the user limit of 5.
- ttoinou 5y ago
  Thanks but still confused because it doesn't discuss git projects. If I have Group A which has A/privateGit1.git with 4 users and A/privateGit2.git with 4 others different users then Group A has 8 users ? Also it becomes more complex with guest users
  - PaywallBuster 5y ago
    exactly, 8 unique users in A/
  - john_cogs 5y ago
    GitLab team member here. Yes, you are correct. We count the unique sum of users within a namespace which includes the users in the parent namespace (group), subgroups, and projects. I created an MR to update the FAQ to make this more clear: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_requests/101294 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_request... Thanks for the feedback.
    - ttoinou 5y ago
      Thanks John !

lazypenguin 5y ago

Interesting announcement, didn't expect it. I respect the decision but it will force me to consider another git host provider. I've always been willing to pay for Gitlab but the prices have always been aggressive and discouraged me from doing it: - $20/per user for most basic tier when I don't really need any of the features offered (except maybe "approval before merge required") - $5/month for 10GB of storage ($0.50/GB) is steep. This stopped me from importing my large Git LFS project - No way to have "view only" members for a repo or issue board without it contributing to your user number count and having to pay full price for them. It's clear that I'm not that target market for them which is fine but its a bit of a shame as I do like gitlab.

PaywallBuster 5y ago
We're light users of Gitlab, just use it for Merge Requests and the CI interface (while we use our own runners) The cheapest plan is 19$ month and it doesn't give us any extra benefits and it's billed annually! Take it or leave it. For me it's 3 months timeline to leave Gitlab :) I still like it, but not worthwhile for my professional projects and Github is a better homepage with all my OSS contributions displayed. beside there's always a couple of people (non tech) who get added to the repo and barely login (but they want to keep the access), not worth paying 19$ for that
karakanb 5y ago
Considering that GitHub is priced at $4 per user/month, I really cannot justify paying 5x of that amount, especially without even using any of the features in the paid tier. I really like the product, but I am going to have to look for other options.
- 11235813213455 5y ago
  Github can be free for teams: https://github.com/pricing.html https://github.com/pricing.html
laughingpine 5y ago
The changes they made (I guess a couple years now) to their pricing model really bit us in the ass. We had a 130 user licence on the old 5$ tier, and had to aggressively cut user counts to afford the new licence. There really needs to be something like a "view only" or a role based cost per user. Most of our clients are just there for commenting, and only a handful of developers actually use the product to its full extent. I know there was an issue open for discussion on their payment models, so I hope it is something they are continuing to look at. At 4x the cost of competitors that offer similar features, it is a very hard sell.

candiddevmike 5y ago

Reminder that Gitlab's stock is down more than 50% of their all time high post IPO. I'd expect more pricing/feature changes as they try to improve revenue/EPS. Can an open core company survive a recession AND maintain their community/developer mind share?

PaywallBuster 5y ago
for reference: https://ir.gitlab.com/news-releases/news-release-details/gitlab-reports-fourth-quarter-and-full-year-fiscal-2022 https://ir.gitlab.com/news-releases/news-release-details/git... They're still rapidly growing but they're loosing their edge to Github who since being acquired by Microsoft can afford to play the long game and give away more at a better price point.
- boringg 5y ago
  Exactly - MSFT can pay higher CAC and they are trying to keep them in their services as a whole not strictly GitHub related. Slightly different goals and pockets.
- bdcravens 5y ago
  For years their advantage was CI and free private repos. They didn't have much of a moat.
boringg 5y ago
In this market I'm not sure how their stock being down 50% is particularly relevant to the performance of the company. Investors bought in on ridiculous multiples when it IPOed and tech as a whole has been crushed with the change in macro economic conditions. Less to do with their model more to do with the market. That said I am sure there is lots more internal pressure to drive revenue. Your second part of the statement seems more relevant.
- prepend 5y ago
  The market isn’t down 50%. So it’s relevant because GitLab is performing worse than the market and worse than other companies.

naetd 5y ago

Interesting that Github has been getting slammed by people upset with the outages, but it doesn't seem like there's much movement towards Gitlab as an alternative. I use both near-daily for different clients and I have grown to prefer Gitlabs... the price is higher, but it might be worth it to some of the people in the daily HN github issue threads (eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30790593 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30790593 )

tssva 5y ago
Possibly because Gitlab doesn't have any better record regarding outages.

berryton 5y ago

I was reviewing git hosting prices this week and Gitlab pricing really didn't make sense. The cheapest paid plan doesn't provide enough incentive to the majority of people who just want to host small/personal projects.

zozbot234 5y ago

These changes will make it harder to use GitLab for many open source projects. Five acknowledged "users" (i.e. committers, reviewers, moderators etc.) over the sum total of projects in a single group/organization is not that much. They have a pre-existing Community Program for Open Source but the application process is overly complex and admittance is explicitly said to be at GitLab's discretion, not guaranteed (it also looks like the 'Community' status has to be periodically renewed), so it doesn't seem to be suitable as-is for many users who might otherwise want to host FLOSS code there.

john_cogs 5y ago
The requirements to join the GitLab for Open Source program can be found here: https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/join/#requirements https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/join/#require... They are: - OSI-approved open source license: All of the code you host in this GitLab group must be published under OSI-approved open source licenses - Not seeking profit: Your organization must not seek to make a profit through services or by charging for higher tiers. Accepting donations to sustain your efforts is ok. Read more about this requirement here: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relations/opensource-program/#who-qualifies-for-the-gitlab-for-open-source-program https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/marketing/community-relati... - Publicly visible: Your GitLab.com group or self-managed instance and your source code must be publicly visible and publicly available. GitLab's discretion means that we review applicants to ensure they meet these criteria and do not violate our CoC. The renewal helps us to ensure that our program members continue to meet these criteria.
- djbusby 5y ago
  And keeps our open source company out :( We've got a FOSS project, use hosting and support services to pay staff to write MIT and GPL code. But because our model is nearly identical to GitLab model we cannot get the GitLab FOSS blessing. Is this irony?
  - arlcode 5y ago
    I guess they want to keep the free tier primarily for personal use or companies evaluating the product. In this case it makes sense for them to apply these changes and other users will have to see whether it makes sense to pay for the service.

adamc 5y ago

Just fuels my cynicism about "free" offerings. Sooner or later, companies decide they want to monetize as much as possible. I'm not saying it's unfair. But it makes me less interested in trying things just because they are "free".

nicce 5y ago
The current trend seems to be that sadly. You offer your services for free or for reduced price. Once you got enough users, you start taking all the money you can get.
ensignavenger 5y ago
Fortunately, GitLab is open core, and I have only used the features in it that are available as Open Source, so if I need to migrate, I can migrate to my own, self-host, system. And that is why I avoid free offerings that aren't open source. I also avoid paying for non-open source saas... because you never know when they will raise the price or make other changes that make it no longer work for you. Moral of the story is- use and buy open source! Not open core.
- candiddevmike 5y ago
  Someone has to maintain that software. Doesn't matter if it's open source, open core, or paid, someone has to maintain it. Just because something may not be open source doesn't mean you should shy away from it, on the contrary it might be better supported in the long run than an open source project that doesn't have a monetization/support model. People want to get paid for their work, this notion of OSS maintainers being saints who work for free may fly for small hobby projects, but once shit gets real and folks are slamming you for bug/feature requests it gets old, fast.
  - ensignavenger 5y ago
    I specifically mentioned paying for Open Source.
- adamc 5y ago

Dayshine 5y ago

This is really disappointing. I've always encouraged small non-commercial hobby projects to use GitLab. It just seemed like the right thing to do. If you're familiar with Paradox Interactive Studios games (Crusader Kings, Hearts of Iron, Stellaris): - Star Trek: New Horizons (127,000 current subscribers) - SW:Fallen Republic (97,000 current subscribers) - Kaiserreich (774,000 current subscribers) are (/were) all hosted on GitLab. A lot of the people who contribute to these projects only do so intermittently (so high member count to work done ratio) and are usually doing this in their formative years so would be likely to continue to use GitLab when they enter the working world. There is absolutely no money available as game publishers prohibit it. And even if they tried to sneak in some Patreon donations there's no way that's going to cover $19/m/user! Honestly, GitLab really seems to be falling far behind in their outreach. Their Open source programme is behind GitHub's and they don't have anything for Non-profits.

rsstack 5y ago
> This change does not apply to our other plans: ... GitLab for Open Source Doesn't that solve the issue for those projects?
- Dayshine 5y ago
  Game mods often can't be open source as you don't have copyright on the original game files. Another problem is that game mods are often developed in private repos to prevent ideas and assets being "stolen" by other projects. There are no lawyers to protect your IP in the non-commercial world. It's taken decades for the commercial world to even vaguely become OK with source available, let alone open source, we can't really expect teenagers and young adults who weren't trained as software developers to be comfortable with it.
  - rsstack 5y ago
    Fair point. TIL :)
  - EMIRELADERO 5y ago
    > Game mods often can't be open source as you don't have copyright on the original game files. Don't most game mods simply patch the executable if there's no mod framework available? I would think that the patch engine and specific patches aren't violating the original game's copyright, simply because they wouldn't contain any of the game's assets or code (aside from maybe memory addresses and executable names for hooking)

eslaught 5y ago

First off, I'm really grateful for the service Gitlab has provided to date, both to the open source community and to Git users at large. Having said that, I think they're killing the golden goose. At one point, Gitlab's competitive advantage was relatively generous free access to private Git repos. This generated a lot of goodwill in the days when GitHub didn't provide private repos even for personal use. I'm guessing that Gitlab now views its competitive advantage as the CI / DevOps experience. Still, it feels to me like they could limit that feature specifically rather than limiting even public projects to 5 users. Right now, GitHub's offering is suddenly looking attractive again for anyone who doesn't want to fill out a separate application (annually!) for each of their open source namespaces. I'd think it's to Gitlab's advantage to keep these users. Right now, the current policy effectively chases them away. The only projects I imagine staying are those that really take advantage of the CI, but... is that really who Gitlab wants to limit their userbase to?

mdoms 5y ago
If your "competitive advantage" costs you money for every customer acquisition is it really an advantage?
- eslaught 5y ago
  It depends on whether that cost is higher or lower than the value you get from paying customers (plus goodwill)---i.e., it's a customer acquisition cost. And whether this particular method of customer acquisition is more or less cost-effective than other methods. Since they're doing this, I assume they've done the analysis and determined this is no longer cost effective for them. But I'm surprised, because (a) they'll lose goodwill, and (b) what's their alternative plan for customer acquisition? I don't think Gitlab has grown to the point where they can afford to cut their growth, but I don't see how they're going to avoid that on the path they're going down.
  - mdoms 5y ago
    Just got off the phone with AWS, they say no they won't take payment in "customer good will"???

fartcannon 5y ago

How many more SaaS price increases before folks realize its better to self host?

mindwok 5y ago
Gitlab self hosted is awesome as well. It’s a single install that embeds everything Gitlab needs and also has a config management system bundled that simplified config enormously (Chef Omnibus for those interested). We just automatically update from the Debian package and it’s been pretty much fire and forget.

spoonjim 5y ago

Tale as old as time. Give a free tier to get people to store their data with you and then pull the rug when they’re too committed to leave. Should be illegal.

Jxl180 5y ago
Git is distributed. Just change the remote to GitHub or a different VCS and the full commit history will be pushed as well.
- bdcravens 5y ago
  You lose the non-git history (discussions, PR context, issues, etc) as well as CI. If it was just commits, git is easily installed.

activitypea 5y ago

I abhor the "This only impacts 1% of our users" line. Putting the obvious "then why do it" aside, it's just coming out and saying "we are okay with screwing individual users over, as long as there's not so many of them that we get in trouble".

squaresmile 5y ago
Yeah, I have been finding these internal justifications kinda odd in a public announcement. As a user, ether I'm affected or I'm not. 99% or 1% doesn't concern me. I don't think I would react differently if the number is 5% or 25%. I agree the implication feels a bit like don't bother complaining since you guys are an insignificant portion of the userbase. Cool, good to know I guess.
treis 5y ago
One of these days anti-trust regulators need to look at these "free until we get market share" plans. This isn't a particular egregious example, but it is pretty classic dumping.
- adtac 5y ago
  >anti-trust This has absolutely nothing to do with antitrust. The word antitrust has lost all meaning.
- jjeaff 5y ago
  The FTC would be the one looking into this type of thing. Bait and switch is something they go after. But it seems that as long as you bait and switch over a long time horizon, it's ok. I'm fine with deciding to take away free stuff. The part that irks me is the lock in. When you create a lot of custom code to work on the free system they offer you, you are left to either pay or scramble to rebuild what you have somewhere else.
  - treis 5y ago
    It's an anti-trust concern too. Current SCOTUS precedent is essentially dumping/predatory pricing doesn't work so there's no harm to the consumer so it's not illegal. If you could show it worked, i.e. a company drove competitors out of business and then maintained artificially high prices then it would be a slam dunk case.

rootusrootus 5y ago

I wanted to pay GitLab for my personal project space (I prefer to be a customer!) but their prices are too steep for such flippant use. I otherwise like their product, it’s just that the pricing model doesn’t well fit my use case.

josephcsible 5y ago

Since GitLab for Open Source isn't affected, who will actually be affected by this in practice?

LeSaucy 5y ago
People who were relying on Gitlab the company to provide free tier access to hosted gitlab instances (as opposed to those who host gitlab themselves)
- josephcsible 5y ago
  But doesn't GitLab for Open Source exist on the hosted one?
mynameisvlad 5y ago
"GitLab for Open Source" is a program that requires an application as well as occasional renewal. So, all the open source projects who choose not to do that for various reasons, small teams and businesses, hobbyist projects like hackathons which generally have more than 5 people to a team. You know, just off the top of my head.

lerela 5y ago

As others have pointed out, $19/user/month is just not an option for many small teams, especially with non-western costs. I guess we'll start planning the migration but it's really disappointing not to be able to pay a reasonable fee and then be kicked out on a 3-months notice. I've seen complaints about this business model for a while on HN but never got the chance to understand Gitlab's reasoning for sticking to this pricing.

qeternity 5y ago

Don't worry, just switch to a paid. With Gitlab's atrocious uptime and reliability, you'll be getting your entire monthly payment back in SLA credit.

whoisjuan 5y ago

I can't believe the number of entitled posts here. Do people here think that Gitlab SaaS doesn't have an operation cost (in servers, development, support, etc)? Perhaps people need to start re-evaluating what "free" means in the context of a cloud offering. "Free" is a marketing strategy, not a charitable act. In the case of Gitlab there's nothing preventing you from using the self-managed free tier which will effectively remove this limit, but guess what? Running it on your own will also have a cost for you. The same way it does for Gitlab when they give it for free through Gitlab.com

PaywallBuster 5y ago
Not entitlement Gitlab used to have a basic free tier and a 5$ tier which was accessible Since they will heavily restrict the free tier, and the 5$ plan was moved to 20$, many organizations have a serious financial decision to make and all the fans of Gitlab, myself included, will have to consider options and the other problem is pricing/per seat billing, is difficult for everyone, of course. But surely there's plenty of organizations which are probably a lot cheaper for Gitlab to keep as users than others depending on feature usage.
benatkin 5y ago
I read every single top-level comment, and not a single one seems "entitled" to me.
Dayshine 5y ago
I used to run Jira Server myself for a hobby project, I paid $10 for the 10 user version. I guess I might have been able to stretch to $50 out of my personal funds. Guess what? They dropped support and the suggested replacement product costs thousands per year. Am I entitled in that case too? Small non-commercial projects get stepped on all the time despite contributing most of the important software in the world. GitLab recently upped their pricing from $5/m to $20/m as well, so even paying members got a huge price increase.

bovermyer 5y ago

I don't really have a big problem with this, but in a weird coincidence, I just decided this morning to spin up a self-hosted instance of GitLab and migrate all of my GitHub and GitLab repositories to it. This just adds a little impetus to that decision.

ProAm 5y ago
How difficult was that spin up? Ive been wanting to play with it. Are you hosting on a VPS somewhere?
- bovermyer 5y ago
  More difficult than expected to configure, but the initial installation was pretty easy. I put it on a 4 cpu 8 GB RAM VPS in Digital Ocean, with another 1 cpu 2 GB RAM VPS acting as a runner. You'll need a mail service that GitLab can route transactional email through. All the difficulty is in configuring things post-installation, but it's well documented.

philpem 5y ago

I'm grateful for the service Gitlab has provided to date, but this seems ludicrous. My use-case for Gitlab is to support the internal tools and some bespoke development for a fan-run non-profit event. In a typical year we might have about $8,000 to run the whole event (ticket sales, less venue hire and other costs). Non-profit pricing is only available to registered charities in my country, so we're forced into paying full price for most of the SaaS services. That puts most of them out of our budget -- and it seems like Gitlab is joining that list. So Gitlab are asking us to pony up $19 per user *per month* -- which is a cool $2300 a year. That's five times our current total IT spend (which benefits everyone), for a service which serves ten users. It's nearly a quarter of what we have to run the event. Fair enough it unlocks extra features, but the only one I can see us using is Epics. To compare prices -- Github is currently charging $48 per user, per year. That's $480 for the whole 10-person team. It's still going to be a tough sell for our Finance guy, but not as bad as $2300 (he'd ask if I hit my head if I asked for that). The team picked Gitlab over Github because of the really good feature set on the free tier, and the availability of the bronze/starter tier for when we needed more. With Bronze going away last year, and now a 5-user cap, the message I'm getting from Gitlab is "we're a premium provider and we don't want your custom". As @eslaught said -- it really feels like they're killing the golden goose. If they added the option of buying more user seats for the Free tier and threw in a premium feature or two (Epics would win me over), I'd absolutely pitch that to my finance guy -- especially if the price was the same as Github. Heck, I wouldn't even care if they cut the number of CI minutes... I can spin up a VPS if I need that.

snapetom 5y ago
I was in the same boat with another organization. We needed some light computing resources, but didn't have the money for it. We eventually just went ahead and created a foundation to officially be a non-profit and qualify for stuff. It's a hassle, but it was worth it. Honestly a $8000 budget is plenty to justify doing this.
11235813213455 5y ago
Github is free for teams, $48 is the team plan, but you can use the free plan with an organisation of any number of users

literallyWTF 5y ago

Surprised they’re not also shipping a major version that deprecates a bunch of shit. Gitlab is so nice to use, but then they decide to release a bunch of new crap, change everything, and then jack up the price.

throwaway81523 5y ago

They keep changing this, can they make up their minds? I'd rather self-host anyway. I use Gitea but it is kind of limited. Gitlab (self hosted) otoh is a horrendous resource pig Is there something suitable for self hosting that's not such bloat? What does Gitlab bring that's difficult to self-host?

packetlost 5y ago
Sourcehut?
- throwaway81523 5y ago
  Interesting, I had thought of that as just another hosting service. Thanks, I will look into it further. I see that it is written in Go. Not my preference, but Gitea also is, so it is ok. I wonder whether bug tracking can or should simply be folded into Git, so the tracker would be distributed just as the source control is.

mrtweetyhack 5y ago

PaywallBuster 5y ago

Just sharing, there's also a few providers selling "Hosted Gitlab" solutions so you may find a better deal than "pay-per-seat gitlab.com" without the inconvenience of self hosting Example https://gitlabhost.com/pricing/single-tenant-gitlab-hosting/ https://gitlabhost.com/pricing/single-tenant-gitlab-hosting/

tommoor 5y ago
I suppose it's easy to be cheaper when you don't pay for any of the R&D
- ipaddr 5y ago
  What goes around comes around. Building a business off of git. Then someone builds a product off of your product.
- skinnymuch 5y ago
  One could argue Gitlab outsourced a decent amount of R&D to Github by copying it as much as they did, especially earlier on.
  - tommoor 5y ago
    very true!

franga2000 5y ago

It seems like every SaaS out there is targeting only the very occasional users and large enterprise users, but nothing in between. If this announcement read "we're limiting Free Tier, but creating a new 10$/month plan that gives you what you had before" I'd be signing up immediately. But per-user pricing, especially with the lowest plan being 20$/u/m, is absolutely insane for anyone but big corporations and startups drowning in VC money. Some practical examples: - if I participate in a 48h game jam with my usual team, it would cost us 120$ to host our code on GitLab. For 2 days!! - the non-profit I develop for would need to pay 1680$ a year, despite all but 2 of our repos being FOSS. That is literally 3/4 of the budget we had last year! Server load, bandwidth and disk space are the things that cost money and they are barely correlated with the number of users in all but a handful of textbook scenarios. Why does everyone insist on putting customers into price brackets based on such a useless metric?

existencebox 5y ago
My somewhat cynical hypothesis regarding "Why does everyone insist on putting customers into price brackets based on such a useless metric" (And I do not mean this as a dig at Gitlab, to be clear, just an examination of the strategy.) If there is a curve "amount of money a company of a given size will pay", in certain applications, server load, bandwidth, and disk space utilization likely scales far below that trendline, whereas per-user tracks far closer. It also ensures there is effectively no upper bound on CLTV as a given customer scales out, even if net-usage only increases logarithmically/asymptotically. To try and be even-handed and take a more generous interpretation as well, the former is also less likely to be cogently communicable to a customer, and may have painful UX when limits are hit.
- justsomehnguy 5y ago
  You took the words out of my mouth. Except I would say what instead of a certain applications this is true for the most of applications. If something doesn't uses tons of traffic/storage and is user facing then the resources spent per user are minuscule, you would spend more time and (even literal) energy to actually track and bill the user for the spent resources and somehow explain why some resources are billed for the insane rates (because you need to bill some thing for insane rates to make up $10 ARPU/month). I had the same problem recently - I was musing about re-selling my monitoring solution (I'm using it myself, at like ~2% of the VPS I'm renting) and the first thing of course was the idea to base the price on the load each client would generate... and I pretty quickly come to a conclusion what I can't reasonably price things at $0.10 per unit, because the time I would need to spend on the setup is way, way more costly for me than that and that doesn't include billing hassles in any way. So yes, billing per user is not only beneficial for the provider on the "user is paid wherever it uses the resource or not" but also allows the provider to not to spend time and money on actually implementing the way to bill the user for the resources.

asp_hornet 5y ago

I remember when Microsoft purchased Github and there was a mass exodus to Gitlab because they were so sure “M$” would commercialise and ruin GitHub. MS ended up moving offerings from their paid tier to the free tier and Gitlab decided to offer this.

0x0 5y ago

It's a shame to see them price themselves out of several markets. In the "agency" model of work, there will be many users that very rarely connect, while there is a much smaller core group of active developers. Impossible to justify paying the full price per month when all these barely-active users count as full users. For years the free tier was good enough, but while wanting to pay them, the lowest priced paid tier was too pricey to make sense. Feels like they are leaving money on the table, and now they are also pushing away people who previously would be championing and advocating for their product and service.

poink 5y ago

This will bite our startup. Regardless of the percentage affected, this seems to run counter to their previously-stated strategy of charging based on who wants a feature, and looks more like an attempt to purge large/unusually active projects similar to Vimeo's recent actions. Message received, I guess?

mindwok 5y ago

Gitlab is probably the single enterprise software product I actually enjoy and advocate paying for. Decisions like this worry me about where they are headed.

jenny91 5y ago

For those saying the GitLab for Open Source program will allow open source projects to have more than 5 members: I was involved in a project that was a part of that program. However, it requires yearly renewals and they somehow botched it at their end last time even though we signed all the documents. So bottom line is that we don't have it anymore.

john_cogs 5y ago
Sorry to hear about this experience. I’d love to find out what happened and renew the license for your project. Feel free to email me jcoghlan at gitlab and I’ll be happy to help.

client4 5y ago

While its sad to see gitlab go this path (I've converted two orgs to paid accounts on them) I always look at the silver linings. I've been meaning to move my personal stuff to sourcehut and this is the little shove I needed.

wenbin 5y ago

Two pricing tactics that I wish more SaaS businesses could adopt - 1. Daily subscription and auto-cancel. For example, you can subscribe for 3 days, then it'll automatically cancel your subscription after 3 days. In Gitlab's case, they would enable hackathon teams to use paid plans for 3 days without overpaying for an entire month. 2. Customers can toggle specific features for very fine-grained pricing. Essentially, it's to make SaaS pricing more on-demand.

MisterBiggs 5y ago

> impact fewer than 2% of Free tier users within 0.3% of namespaces Sure most of my projects uploaded are small toy projects, but this change completely turns me off to uploading any larger project that I plan to work on long term and hope for additional contributors.

thawaya3113 5y ago

Gitlab continues to validate my decision to move away from them. After being one of their most enthusiastic early adopters, Gitlab has by far been the most bait and switch SAAS product I have ever used.

p8123 5y ago

We are currently exactly at the threshold of 5 devs. As soon as we hire another dev we'll have to move to github. I like gitlab but there is no way to justify paying 5x per user.

RamblingCTO 5y ago

They had a price-hike last year and we actually migrated to GitHub because of that. Really shows me that this was the right decision. The system is better and the prices are lower.