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Gitlab is great but they don't make money out of me and I'm not sure why. There is no reason for me to go to a paid account. There is no way that I could justi

by xupybd 4y ago

Gitlab is great but they don't make money out of me and I'm not sure why. There is no reason for me to go to a paid account. There is no way that I could justify the cost to my boss. We have 5 slots for the team and only need 3. There is nothing that we'd gain from paying. If they said tomorrow that we had to pay $60 a month to get what we're getting now, then I'd say to my manager we need to pay for this or we won't be able to keep developing our software without deploying infrastructure we have to maintain. At that point we'd start paying.

nonethewiser 4y ago
Why couldn't you switch to Github or an alternative? You seem to be implying GitLab has something unique that make those others non viable.
- xupybd 4y ago
  In our case it wouldn't be worth switching all the pipelines over. It would take a long time for that to pay back the $60 per month.
malikNF 4y ago
>If they said tomorrow that we had to pay $60 a month to get what we're getting now 0 to 60 overnight sounds like a very disastrous thing for a company to do, like a big ol bait and switch. I would immediately stop using that company and find alternatives, and I am guessing it will be the same for a lot of people too. At 60usd a month for 5 people, a developer should be able to buy a few servers(~4) for less than $30-$40, selfhost something like gitea with drone.
- xupybd 4y ago
  Yes you could but that is a shift in responsibility. At that point we are responsible for keeping that infrastructure running. Any failure ties up internal resources. At the scale of 1 developer and 2 freelancers it doesn't make so much sense. There are far more valuable things we can do for the business than remove that $60 USD cost.
- onion2k 4y ago
  selfhost something like gitea with drone And then set up the users Then set up the permissions And the hooks And move repos to it Then set up deployments, figuring out how to replace any missing Gitlab features Then update the docs that describe how the repo structure works for onboarding Etc etc Moving infrastructure is a couple of days work at least for a small team. If you factor than cost into it then it's rarely worthwhile. And that's before any time lost to investigating and fixing outages, updating the software, and so on.
  - fendy3002 4y ago
    People are severely underestimating how complicated it is to host a private server, even if they go to self hosted gitlab which essentially the same. The amount of downtime, sudden server crash, problem with SSL with NAT, setting up gitlab runner, upgrading, etc. You'll need someone experienced enough and maybe even a dedicated infra role to handle those things
    - Aeolun 4y ago
      > You'll need someone experienced enough and maybe even a dedicated infra role to handle those things Depends on where you are are doing it. AWS makes it ridiculously easy to hand off basically all aspects of hosting. Set up once, use forever.
      - nicce 4y ago
        AWS does not go to this category. You are literally paying for them to handle these matters.
    - simfree 4y ago
      We've been running Gitlab for over half a decade with over 100 repos, runners on Windows, Linux and Mac with minimal need for maintenance. Same story for the primary free software project we rely on (who we have a support contract with). Neither us nor them spend anywhere close to 10 hours a year on maintaining selfhosted Gitlab related infrastructure.
    - 4y ago
- inopinatus 4y ago
  Transferring all the administrative burden and operational risk whilst incurring the additional expense of SRE time makes the business case here look dead in the water.
- aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
  $60 is like 30-60min at a developer’s hourly rate.
  - KronisLV 4y ago
    > $60 is like 30-60min at a developer’s hourly rate. More like 4 hours of my salary (~2100 euros per month after taxes), given that I live in Eastern Europe and work for a local company. I think that there is definitely an interesting shift in opinions towards expenditure towards software, platforms and tools. The poorer a particular nation (and its developers) are on average, the more inclined everyone is towards a mindset of "doing instead of buying", given how their own time is comparatively less valuable than paying someone else to do it. Then again, the same applies to the software that they use, personally I pay for the Ultimate package of all the JetBrains products (their IDEs are really good), but a lot of my acquaintances only use free software, or other means of acquiring it. Kind of why a lot of Russia and other countries over there (if you look eastwards) is running on pirated Windows machines. Curiously, that's also why something like AWS is out of reach for me and instead I use local platforms like Time4VPS, or something like Hetzner/Scaleway/Contabo.
    - 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
      Makes sense. I am from an even poorer ex-soviet country. I think we have zero (or very close to zero) subscriptions, use no external services for anything critical, and host everything ourselves. It's not only much cheaper, but faster as well (when the closest datacenter is 150 ms away, the difference is obvious). It also protects us in case the dictator does something stupid and we get cut off because of sanctions or inability to pay. I've seen an even stronger drive towards self-hosting since February of this year, just in case.
- raverbashing 4y ago
  $60 is nothing compared to a developer's salary Sure, you could setup with 4 machines and think this is costing you only $40 per month, if you take out all the maintenance and setup time
- sokoloff 4y ago
  “Would you like to pay $60 a month to avoid a yak shave and on-going yak beard trimming?” Yes, I would. I’m often accused of being somewhat too frugal, but in this case frugality points me strongly towards paying the $60/mo.
blackoil 4y ago
Isn't that what they recently did, when the added a limit of 5 users per namespace or pay 228 USD/year/user if you want more. I know a company that moved to Github because why add a cost when more popular competitor is giving same for free.
jSherz 4y ago
The annualised billing winds me up - I wanted to build an integration with GitLab recently and needed group level webhooks. ~$20 / month but I'd have to pay for a full year upfront that I'd then not use.
L6489afSMNLNFDa 4y ago
Yep. We use it self-hosted but the only reason for us to pay would be to import groups (instead of just users) from LDAP. Hate to say that (and basic stuff like enforced approval flows) isn't worth $19/user/month... Unfortunately, they know this, and as a result they've actually been making more and more user-hostile changes (like bumping features up to higher plans, introducing virtually all of their new features as premium, and just generally ignoring their supposed pricing and monetization strategy in favor of $$$).

by xupybd 4y ago

nonethewiser 4y ago

Why couldn't you switch to Github or an alternative? You seem to be implying GitLab has something unique that make those others non viable.

xupybd 4y ago
In our case it wouldn't be worth switching all the pipelines over. It would take a long time for that to pay back the $60 per month.

malikNF 4y ago

>If they said tomorrow that we had to pay $60 a month to get what we're getting now 0 to 60 overnight sounds like a very disastrous thing for a company to do, like a big ol bait and switch. I would immediately stop using that company and find alternatives, and I am guessing it will be the same for a lot of people too. At 60usd a month for 5 people, a developer should be able to buy a few servers(~4) for less than $30-$40, selfhost something like gitea with drone.

xupybd 4y ago
Yes you could but that is a shift in responsibility. At that point we are responsible for keeping that infrastructure running. Any failure ties up internal resources. At the scale of 1 developer and 2 freelancers it doesn't make so much sense. There are far more valuable things we can do for the business than remove that $60 USD cost.
onion2k 4y ago
selfhost something like gitea with drone And then set up the users Then set up the permissions And the hooks And move repos to it Then set up deployments, figuring out how to replace any missing Gitlab features Then update the docs that describe how the repo structure works for onboarding Etc etc Moving infrastructure is a couple of days work at least for a small team. If you factor than cost into it then it's rarely worthwhile. And that's before any time lost to investigating and fixing outages, updating the software, and so on.
- fendy3002 4y ago
  People are severely underestimating how complicated it is to host a private server, even if they go to self hosted gitlab which essentially the same. The amount of downtime, sudden server crash, problem with SSL with NAT, setting up gitlab runner, upgrading, etc. You'll need someone experienced enough and maybe even a dedicated infra role to handle those things
  - Aeolun 4y ago
    > You'll need someone experienced enough and maybe even a dedicated infra role to handle those things Depends on where you are are doing it. AWS makes it ridiculously easy to hand off basically all aspects of hosting. Set up once, use forever.
    - nicce 4y ago
      AWS does not go to this category. You are literally paying for them to handle these matters.
  - simfree 4y ago
    We've been running Gitlab for over half a decade with over 100 repos, runners on Windows, Linux and Mac with minimal need for maintenance. Same story for the primary free software project we rely on (who we have a support contract with). Neither us nor them spend anywhere close to 10 hours a year on maintaining selfhosted Gitlab related infrastructure.
  - 4y ago
inopinatus 4y ago
Transferring all the administrative burden and operational risk whilst incurring the additional expense of SRE time makes the business case here look dead in the water.
aaaaaaaaaaab 4y ago
$60 is like 30-60min at a developer’s hourly rate.
- KronisLV 4y ago
  > $60 is like 30-60min at a developer’s hourly rate. More like 4 hours of my salary (~2100 euros per month after taxes), given that I live in Eastern Europe and work for a local company. I think that there is definitely an interesting shift in opinions towards expenditure towards software, platforms and tools. The poorer a particular nation (and its developers) are on average, the more inclined everyone is towards a mindset of "doing instead of buying", given how their own time is comparatively less valuable than paying someone else to do it. Then again, the same applies to the software that they use, personally I pay for the Ultimate package of all the JetBrains products (their IDEs are really good), but a lot of my acquaintances only use free software, or other means of acquiring it. Kind of why a lot of Russia and other countries over there (if you look eastwards) is running on pirated Windows machines. Curiously, that's also why something like AWS is out of reach for me and instead I use local platforms like Time4VPS, or something like Hetzner/Scaleway/Contabo.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 4y ago
    Makes sense. I am from an even poorer ex-soviet country. I think we have zero (or very close to zero) subscriptions, use no external services for anything critical, and host everything ourselves. It's not only much cheaper, but faster as well (when the closest datacenter is 150 ms away, the difference is obvious). It also protects us in case the dictator does something stupid and we get cut off because of sanctions or inability to pay. I've seen an even stronger drive towards self-hosting since February of this year, just in case.
raverbashing 4y ago
$60 is nothing compared to a developer's salary Sure, you could setup with 4 machines and think this is costing you only $40 per month, if you take out all the maintenance and setup time
sokoloff 4y ago
“Would you like to pay $60 a month to avoid a yak shave and on-going yak beard trimming?” Yes, I would. I’m often accused of being somewhat too frugal, but in this case frugality points me strongly towards paying the $60/mo.

blackoil 4y ago

Isn't that what they recently did, when the added a limit of 5 users per namespace or pay 228 USD/year/user if you want more. I know a company that moved to Github because why add a cost when more popular competitor is giving same for free.

jSherz 4y ago

The annualised billing winds me up - I wanted to build an integration with GitLab recently and needed group level webhooks. ~$20 / month but I'd have to pay for a full year upfront that I'd then not use.

L6489afSMNLNFDa 4y ago

Yep. We use it self-hosted but the only reason for us to pay would be to import groups (instead of just users) from LDAP. Hate to say that (and basic stuff like enforced approval flows) isn't worth $19/user/month... Unfortunately, they know this, and as a result they've actually been making more and more user-hostile changes (like bumping features up to higher plans, introducing virtually all of their new features as premium, and just generally ignoring their supposed pricing and monetization strategy in favor of $$$).