8 ms·

so no pricing and its offered by inquiry only which i can only assume means we have serious reservations regarding the salability of this 'new' product versus,

so no pricing and its offered by inquiry only which i can only assume means we have serious reservations regarding the salability of this 'new' product versus, say, a $24 a month vultr instance or something... if you had 60 devs using the service thats 14k a year. you could have one of them thats on payroll maintain the gitlab container along with the rest of the CI/CD and im not sure it would really matter. Is there something im missing?

chrisseaton 4y ago
> offered by inquiry only which i can only assume means we have serious reservations regarding the salability of this 'new' product Much B2B is done on price by inquiry. The three columns and 'best value!' is a very modern thing. Even in those cases you'll usually see the enterprise option is 'call us'. I wouldn't make extreme assumptions based on the pricing model.
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > Much B2B is done on price by inquiry. The three columns and 'best value!' is a very modern thing. Yeah. That is the biggest cultural difference between "suit tech" and "t-shirt tech" - the old boomer-generation suits love personal connections and dealings of any kind, while the modern generation prefers efficiency and getting their work done without pseudo-social bullshit.
  - HatchedLake721 4y ago
    Nothing to do with t-shirts and suits. Enterprise deals can go anywhere between $50k and $10m+ per year. No one parts with that amount of money to “self serve” themselves by entering a credit card.
    - chrisseaton 4y ago
      Credit cards vs invoicing seems orthogonal - this is about seeing a price up front.
pelagicAustral 4y ago
Yeah, that's actually how much I pay for my instance on Vultr. Granted it's only a few users... It is a bit tricky at times to keep things up to date and secure enough, it would've been great to see a price tag for small teams or something. I mean, I do get that at that point (<= 5 devs) these guys (nor any other company of that size) actually cares about that particular case study since one could just stick to their free tier on the main site.
- lbotos 4y ago
  If you have any insights as to what makes it tricky to keep up to date I'm all ears. Would love to know: Single node? Omnibus or docker based? Making upgrades easier for all users is a core part of my plan for the next year (I work at GL)
  - pelagicAustral 4y ago
    I guess my comment was a bit misleading, what I meant was the entire sysop of having a single node (which is what I have) running smoothly. I mainly work development so at times having to tinker with the OS, keeping things up to date (including GL), secure, manage logs, etc can be quite time consuming. I do remember the first time I have a bit of a meltdown with the stage upgrade procedure. Granted the same thing can be said of any upgrade, you follow steps toward latest and greatest. But it was a bit of a job to get that up to date from the image provided by Vultr.
nixgeek 4y ago
Exact pricing is not listed, however if you dig around on GitLab’s site [1] it says Dedicated is for purchasers of >= 2000 seats of Ultimate, plus a management fee to cover defraying the infrastructure cost, and the time to look after it for you. From this even with generous discounting on those seats, I’d infer this is for customers willing to spend >$50k/mo or >$500k/yr. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/direction/saas-platforms/dedicated/#pricing https://about.gitlab.com/direction/saas-platforms/dedicated/...
Thaxll 4y ago
Comparing a SaaS solution to a cheap vps like vultr is completely missing the point.
senko 4y ago
> Is there something im missing? Yes. This is for big corporations who absolutely must not use shared/co-hosted/non-dedicated hardware, but don't want to maintain the thing themselves. We had several such customers at my previous startup; one of them was a bank, another was a popular household name, neither of which so much as blinked when we quoted a price much higher than what they could get otherwise if they only shopped for the cheapest option.
- toomuchtodo 4y ago
  Cheaper than blame when there is a vendor snafu, compliance/regulatory risk and all that. It’s mostly a risk insurance premium.
- tallship 4y ago
  > neither of which so much as blinked when we quoted a price much higher than what they could get otherwise And therein lies the business model of throwing good money after bad, and that's not even taking into consideration the enormous cost benefits of self-hosting with one's own physically colocated hardware infra and a meager full time staff. Not batting an eye, or rather, "...so much as blinked", as you said, are bourne of business models with factored in wreckless budget kruft that may at first be acceptable until one merely scratches the surface of cost savings. Even with a full time staff, and carrier hotel fees, the reliability and overall cost savings of self-hosting would likely not even exceed 15% of what the fully managed SaaS hosting package would cost - and two more points as well... * Response time of support staff would be under 5 minutes. * Dedicated support staff would actually need to "dedicate" very little actual man-hours to support functions, freeing them up to have their budgeted labor resources allocated elsewhere in the company most of the time. This is a wonderfully stark and typical example of how to sell vendor lock-in for a FOSS solution... brilliant!
  - mschuster91 4y ago
    > Even with a full time staff, and carrier hotel fees, the reliability and overall cost savings of self-hosting would likely not even exceed 15% of what the fully managed SaaS hosting package would cost - and two more points as well... There's a bigger issue: security updates. With self-host, you have to subscribe to a ton of better-or-less-well-organized mailing lists, and once a 0-day is published you are in the race between your IT team and exploiters (who can and will find your instance on Shodan). In contrast, SaaS vendors (usually...) get informed about vulnerabilities prior to everyone else, so you don't have to worry about timely updates.
bmitc 4y ago
I have never understood why companies don't just publish pricing. It too often means pricing is just a game they want to play, for both personal and enterprise use, and it's a game I all too often don't want to play. If pricing is not available, I almost universally move on.
- a_c 4y ago
  Enterprise software is more willing to milk money from corporate than to leave money on the table. The amount of money a company is will to pay can be order of magnitudes higher than an enterprise software imagined. Hence SaaS company hire bunch of sales people/sales engineer to "understand your need", which is an euphemistic way of asking how deep your pocket is. And when everyone is doing this, you can't simply move on, there are only so much options. Of course, you could see it completely differently, private pricing means longer sales process, higher labour cost and fewer customer. Having tiered offering is common. This is actually what gitlab did, free plan, individual plans, business plan[1]. If you don't need worrying about data residency, you don't need contacting their sales at all. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/ https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/
  - a_c 4y ago
    One more angle, when you are starting up, every bucks feel like coming out of your own pocket. When purchasing "enterprise plan", your company already attain certain size and you are spending your company's money, money that otherwise would not fall under your pocket anyway.
    - zeeZ 4y ago
      Or your startup is forced to look into "enterprise plans" due to necessary features for compliance being locked behind them, without having attained a certain size and "enterprise" money.
- cbzoiav 4y ago
  Because when you are dealing with corporates the amount of time needed can vary massively by customer. A bank or healthcare firm will come at you with endless feature requests, support requests etc. over things they claim is a regulatory requirement / they must have ASAP. You also might offer the first bank a discount because once you have one onboard its much easier to sell your product to others. They know a competitor has already done all the due diligence and decided you're safe, so the risk they spend months evaluating you to not be able to move forward is minimal.
water-your-self 4y ago
>maintain the gitlab container along with the rest of the CI/CD Errr.. I would hope you have at least 1, preferably more, replications outside of your own stack.

chrisseaton 4y ago

> offered by inquiry only which i can only assume means we have serious reservations regarding the salability of this 'new' product Much B2B is done on price by inquiry. The three columns and 'best value!' is a very modern thing. Even in those cases you'll usually see the enterprise option is 'call us'. I wouldn't make extreme assumptions based on the pricing model.

mschuster91 4y ago
> Much B2B is done on price by inquiry. The three columns and 'best value!' is a very modern thing. Yeah. That is the biggest cultural difference between "suit tech" and "t-shirt tech" - the old boomer-generation suits love personal connections and dealings of any kind, while the modern generation prefers efficiency and getting their work done without pseudo-social bullshit.
- HatchedLake721 4y ago
  Nothing to do with t-shirts and suits. Enterprise deals can go anywhere between $50k and $10m+ per year. No one parts with that amount of money to “self serve” themselves by entering a credit card.
  - chrisseaton 4y ago
    Credit cards vs invoicing seems orthogonal - this is about seeing a price up front.

pelagicAustral 4y ago

Yeah, that's actually how much I pay for my instance on Vultr. Granted it's only a few users... It is a bit tricky at times to keep things up to date and secure enough, it would've been great to see a price tag for small teams or something. I mean, I do get that at that point (<= 5 devs) these guys (nor any other company of that size) actually cares about that particular case study since one could just stick to their free tier on the main site.

lbotos 4y ago
If you have any insights as to what makes it tricky to keep up to date I'm all ears. Would love to know: Single node? Omnibus or docker based? Making upgrades easier for all users is a core part of my plan for the next year (I work at GL)
- pelagicAustral 4y ago
  I guess my comment was a bit misleading, what I meant was the entire sysop of having a single node (which is what I have) running smoothly. I mainly work development so at times having to tinker with the OS, keeping things up to date (including GL), secure, manage logs, etc can be quite time consuming. I do remember the first time I have a bit of a meltdown with the stage upgrade procedure. Granted the same thing can be said of any upgrade, you follow steps toward latest and greatest. But it was a bit of a job to get that up to date from the image provided by Vultr.

nixgeek 4y ago

Exact pricing is not listed, however if you dig around on GitLab’s site [1] it says Dedicated is for purchasers of >= 2000 seats of Ultimate, plus a management fee to cover defraying the infrastructure cost, and the time to look after it for you. From this even with generous discounting on those seats, I’d infer this is for customers willing to spend >$50k/mo or >$500k/yr. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/direction/saas-platforms/dedicated/#pricing https://about.gitlab.com/direction/saas-platforms/dedicated/...

Thaxll 4y ago

Comparing a SaaS solution to a cheap vps like vultr is completely missing the point.

senko 4y ago

> Is there something im missing? Yes. This is for big corporations who absolutely must not use shared/co-hosted/non-dedicated hardware, but don't want to maintain the thing themselves. We had several such customers at my previous startup; one of them was a bank, another was a popular household name, neither of which so much as blinked when we quoted a price much higher than what they could get otherwise if they only shopped for the cheapest option.

toomuchtodo 4y ago
Cheaper than blame when there is a vendor snafu, compliance/regulatory risk and all that. It’s mostly a risk insurance premium.
tallship 4y ago
> neither of which so much as blinked when we quoted a price much higher than what they could get otherwise And therein lies the business model of throwing good money after bad, and that's not even taking into consideration the enormous cost benefits of self-hosting with one's own physically colocated hardware infra and a meager full time staff. Not batting an eye, or rather, "...so much as blinked", as you said, are bourne of business models with factored in wreckless budget kruft that may at first be acceptable until one merely scratches the surface of cost savings. Even with a full time staff, and carrier hotel fees, the reliability and overall cost savings of self-hosting would likely not even exceed 15% of what the fully managed SaaS hosting package would cost - and two more points as well... * Response time of support staff would be under 5 minutes. * Dedicated support staff would actually need to "dedicate" very little actual man-hours to support functions, freeing them up to have their budgeted labor resources allocated elsewhere in the company most of the time. This is a wonderfully stark and typical example of how to sell vendor lock-in for a FOSS solution... brilliant!
- mschuster91 4y ago
  > Even with a full time staff, and carrier hotel fees, the reliability and overall cost savings of self-hosting would likely not even exceed 15% of what the fully managed SaaS hosting package would cost - and two more points as well... There's a bigger issue: security updates. With self-host, you have to subscribe to a ton of better-or-less-well-organized mailing lists, and once a 0-day is published you are in the race between your IT team and exploiters (who can and will find your instance on Shodan). In contrast, SaaS vendors (usually...) get informed about vulnerabilities prior to everyone else, so you don't have to worry about timely updates.

bmitc 4y ago

I have never understood why companies don't just publish pricing. It too often means pricing is just a game they want to play, for both personal and enterprise use, and it's a game I all too often don't want to play. If pricing is not available, I almost universally move on.

a_c 4y ago
Enterprise software is more willing to milk money from corporate than to leave money on the table. The amount of money a company is will to pay can be order of magnitudes higher than an enterprise software imagined. Hence SaaS company hire bunch of sales people/sales engineer to "understand your need", which is an euphemistic way of asking how deep your pocket is. And when everyone is doing this, you can't simply move on, there are only so much options. Of course, you could see it completely differently, private pricing means longer sales process, higher labour cost and fewer customer. Having tiered offering is common. This is actually what gitlab did, free plan, individual plans, business plan[1]. If you don't need worrying about data residency, you don't need contacting their sales at all. [1] https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/ https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/
- a_c 4y ago
  One more angle, when you are starting up, every bucks feel like coming out of your own pocket. When purchasing "enterprise plan", your company already attain certain size and you are spending your company's money, money that otherwise would not fall under your pocket anyway.
  - zeeZ 4y ago
    Or your startup is forced to look into "enterprise plans" due to necessary features for compliance being locked behind them, without having attained a certain size and "enterprise" money.
cbzoiav 4y ago
Because when you are dealing with corporates the amount of time needed can vary massively by customer. A bank or healthcare firm will come at you with endless feature requests, support requests etc. over things they claim is a regulatory requirement / they must have ASAP. You also might offer the first bank a discount because once you have one onboard its much easier to sell your product to others. They know a competitor has already done all the due diligence and decided you're safe, so the risk they spend months evaluating you to not be able to move forward is minimal.

water-your-self 4y ago

>maintain the gitlab container along with the rest of the CI/CD Errr.. I would hope you have at least 1, preferably more, replications outside of your own stack.