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Gitlab has introduced a five-user limit for free groups

160 points by MattIPv4 3y ago

MattIPv4 3y ago
Just got an email from GitLab about a group I'm part of that has more than five users. The docs linked says "For existing namespaces, this limit is being rolled out gradually. Impacted users are notified in GitLab.com at least 60 days before the limit is applied.", however upon checking the group in GitLab, we are greeted by a big red box stating "Your top-level group [group] is over the 5 user limit and has been placed in a read-only state."
- mmcwilliams 3y ago
  Also got an email but interestingly the most populated group I'm a member of has 4 users in it including myself. It did mention that my "top-level" group has reached the 5-member limit but it references a numerical ID that doesn't match my user or any of the groups I'm member to. There may be a glitch with this rollout.
  - mike-cardwell 3y ago
    Yeah, I got the same email. I am in one group, and that group has one other person in it.
    - xx_ns 3y ago
      I'm in exactly 0 groups, never been in one, and I got the same email.
- john_cogs 3y ago
  GitLab team member here. The gradual roll out of this change started with a blog post[0] and included in-app notifications for the owners of impacted groups on GitLab.com. If the group owner did not log in during the in-app notification period, they were then emailed (the email you received today) notifying that the group was impacted. [0] - https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/03/24/efficient-free-tier/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/03/24/efficient-free-tier...
  - Nouser76 3y ago
    I don't know that it's a great plan to do a blogpost and in-app notification as the first round of reminders and email on the day of the change. Both the blogpost and in-app notification requires you to explicitly go on GitLab and see there's a problem. Maybe there's a reason to avoid it, but emailing from the get-go seems like it is the right move for transparency and not rug-pulling. EDIT: clarified antecedent
  - LegitShady 3y ago
    Wouldn’t it make more sense to email them before they were impacted instead of when they were impacted? What’s the point of gradual roll out that requires I read your blog etc. An email that says “You have 60 days to X” is a lot more effective than one that says “60 days ago we made a blog post letting you know, and now you’re f’d.”
    - Brian_K_White 3y ago
      Look they announced it publicly posted right in the back of the file cabinet in the basement behind the warning rabid tigers sign. Here's a question for Gitlab: "Why did you require me to give you an email address to sign up?" The answer to that question means there is no explaining why they didn't use it first, and followed up with at least a couple updates along the way. This is exactly what the address exists on thier db for.
  - alex3305 3y ago
    > If the group owner did not log in during the in-app notification period, they were then emailed (the email you received today) notifying that the group was impacted. I think there is a glitch in your mail or something else is going wrong. I'm currently not in any groups and still got an e-mail telling me that my top level group (starting with 5060) has reached the 5 members limit. Searching for the group also doesn't yield any results whatsoever.
    - john_cogs 3y ago
      Thanks, we are investigating this and the above reports about this behavior.
- crossroadsguy 3y ago
  I did receive an email too which just had a number mentioned that wasn’t even hyperlinked to anything. Turns out I am or was not part of any group ever.
- LaundroMat 3y ago
  My email mentions two group id's. I had to look at each group's page to see its id (no other way of finding out what group we're talking about). I have _no_ groups with the id's mentioned in the email. Also, I'm a solo hobbyist dev, there are no groups with more than one user in it.
sschueller 3y ago
If gitlab keeps up with this hostility even towards paying customer a fork will be incoming sooner than later.
- mal10c 3y ago
  There's always Gitea [1]. I've been using that for personal projects and it's perfect. [1]: https://docs.gitea.com/next/installation/comparison https://docs.gitea.com/next/installation/comparison
- mschuster91 3y ago
  You can always run a GitLab CE instance on your own, takes less than five minutes to set up at any Docker hosting provider you want.
  - andrewstuart2 3y ago
    I've been hosting my own GitLab for nearly 10 years, and it's been amazing and has grown with my environment really, really well.
  - LeSaucy 3y ago
    These are limited to 10 active users are they not?
    - mschuster91 3y ago
      No. They're fine for at least 300 users (which is the case in an instance I run) and you can connect it with Keycloak and LDAP for SSO. You don't get SSO user-group mappings in CE, but heh, if you use Terraform that is easy enough to manage manually even at that size.
    - TheRealPomax 3y ago
      There are no limits when self-hosting.
      - 3y ago
derN3rd 3y ago
Their pricing update end of last year was one of the reasons we switched over to Github. Other reasons were, that most external services had integration with Github but not with Gitlab, or that we didn't use many of the features Gitlab provided but charged for. If they would provide some lite plans with custom feature addons, we might have kept it, but all in all there was not much difference between Gitlab and Github except for the pricing then
- lazypenguin 3y ago
  I've said it before and I agree with this comment. Their pricing structure is just too aggressive for smaller teams and I think they missed out on capturing a market segment. Maybe they determined it would be unprofitable to support small teams or something but I would have happily kept my team on GitLab if there was an ala carte or "lite" option like you suggested. Instead we also ended up on Github (as paying customers).
  - jacquesm 3y ago
    You could of course host it yourself.
    - lazypenguin 3y ago
      We actually did self-host the community edition for several months using the omnibus version (some features you still need a license for that is same price as hoested). After initial setup it worked okay and was mostly hands-off except for that the performance started to degrade slowly over time. After spending a few weeks digging into the internals and failing to solve the problem we felt that we were better off just switching to a hosted provider. In this case we switched to GitHub because the pricing was better for the features we needed.
    - reaperman 3y ago
      For small teams which were happy using the "free" tier, that's really the correct solution. Just self-host it and retain free-tier functionality. That said, it looks like the premium features are $29/mo or $99/mo per user regardless if you self-host it or take advantage of their managed SaaS offering. It's somewhat bizarre - there's a lot of costs associated with managing this on-site but no discount for that. I presume they feel that extra overhead cost to the customer of self-hosting breaks even with the perceived or actual added security value of self-managed installations. I might be reading it wrong, but that's how I see the pricing presented here and associated pages: https://about.gitlab.com/install/ce-or-ee/ https://about.gitlab.com/install/ce-or-ee/
retrocryptid 3y ago
I'm currently hosting a git repo on my home machine and it's used by me when I'm on the road and a few people I trust enough to have logins on my DMZ machine. It seems there should be an easy way to use gitlab or github as a public read-only proxy to changes that are released on the private repo. And then going the other way, sucks up PRs from public sites and lovingly integrates them into the "real" repo on my home machine. Yes. There are security ramifications. There are availability ramifications. I seems slightly to be trying to skirt GitLab's policies they're probably putting into effect to avoid going bankrupt. But the flip-side is I really don't need a wiki or a bug tracker or whatever else GitLab is working on. I would pay a small amount of cash to just get a public repo mirror. And we all have different ideas about how to make this "easy". I don't mind running scripts on my local host, but would like to avoid polling the public repo to see if someone's posted a PR. I also don't want to have to run a script in a container on the public repo. So would love it if you could set the public repo to proxy PRs to a remote repo. Just curious if anyone else has similar requirements. Maybe you have a corporate repo and want to mirror it to a public site like GitLab, GitHub or SourceHut. Maybe, like me, *you* just want a remote repo to stash your code but a public location so your home server doesn't melt down that one time someone slashdots your project.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Gitlab does repo mirroring.
  - retrocryptid 3y ago
    Thx for the response. That might be a solution. I fear that GitLab might notice me doing that and decide they don't like it. But definitely something to play around with. I'll look again on the site and see if I can see where you activate it; didn't see it first time around.
    - lbotos 3y ago
      As someone who works at the Co -- If you are within the free usage limits, we are fine with you mirroring a repo on .com. If you are hosting game binaries or Shrek the 3rd we might have some problems, but if you have a genuine source code project that shouldn't be a problem unless you become a DDoS target.
mirzap 3y ago
I'm incredibly pleased about Microsoft's acquisition of Github, as I notice visible improvements every passing month. Considering Gitlab's pricing, I wonder why anyone would abandon GitHub Team or Enterprise plan in favor of Gitlab. Gitlab's costs are exorbitant, and they resemble Atlassian products, with an overwhelming number of features that are rarely used, cluttering the interface and diminishing the overall user experience.
- hamandcheese 3y ago
  I am not pleased with Microsoft. Yes, there have been some improvements. But GitHub Actions is very half baked, yet the bean counters at my company are asking "why do we pay for buildkite?". It feels like they are using the same playbook as MS Teams.
  - simooooo 3y ago
    What’s half baked about it?
    - hamandcheese 3y ago
      forgive me if my information is outdated, but: - You can't retry a failed action, be it manually in the UI or automatically under certain conditions. - workflows have a pretty low limit for number of jobs - 250 or so. We already split our rspec tests across 300 parallel jobs. - the UX is full of jank. If I click into an in-progress jobs I often can't see prior logs for the in-progress step until the step completes. There are also some annoyances that aren't really half-baked, but annoying for Monorepos: - workflows have to be defined under the .github folder. This means workflows can't be collocated with the code they relate to. - workflows can't be generated dynamically. At best, you can dynamically trigger predefined workflows, but I don't think they get associated with the PR that triggered them. This makes patterns like dynamically dispatching workflows based on, say, a bazel query for affected rdeps more challenging, if not entirely infeasible.
      - cpuguy83 3y ago
abeppu 3y ago
I find their use of the word "subgroup" here to be annoying, because a subgroup under their semantics "inherits" members from the group it's included in, i.e. the cardinality of a subgroup is _larger_ than the cardinality of its parent.
revskill 3y ago
There's no mention on "Why changes", it's a red flag to me.
- mrweasel 3y ago
  Probably because it's a publicly traded company that needs to please its shareholder. I honestly believe that what we are seeing is the realisation that money and growth isn't infinite and companies need to return to actually turn a profit, not just grow revenue. That's why we're seeing Reddit, Imgur, Gitlab, Meta, Twitter and others implement changes in rapid succession. It not even that I completely disagree with their choices, I just wonder why a dumb ass like myself who knows nothing of business was able to see broken business models years in advance, while Wall Street and Silicon Valley couldn't... Or did they just not care?
  - revskill 3y ago
    "Broken business" is vague though. There're always victims and winners. Shareholders in most cases is the winners here.
  - deciplex 3y ago
    They came right out and told you: nobody cared if nine out of ten investments were a total loss, provided the one had enough juice to make up for it. And, "juice" is an extremely vague term here: it could mean profitability, but given that there was so much money sloshing around, usually it just meant that the stock price jumped enough for investors to cash out - but that stock price was not necessarily tied to any tangible performance, much of the time. The real giveaway though, was the fact that stock dividends - you know, the thing that historically you buy stock for - are basically unheard of among all but the biggest companies in tech (and even unheard of among some of those). We have now an entire generation of leaders in tech for whom profitability has been this kind of abstract notion they didn't have to think about much, which explains why they all seem so ham-fisted now that they're being forced to.
    - mrweasel 3y ago
mardifoufs 3y ago
At least it does not seem to affect the self hosted community version... That could've been a lot scarier.
dataminded 3y ago
IT tried to get us to migrate to Gitlab in a past life, it went absolutely nowhere. Gitlab is stupidly expensive and complicated for value that never realized.
pierat 3y ago
This applies to the SaaS Gitlab ONLINE. This doesn't apply to Gitlab you install on your hardware. I mean, online resources on other peoples' servers cost money. A better law would be to forbid "free" offerings by companies. They all are fraudulent "free", since you pay a commercial entity with either money or data. And, corporate "free" rarely stays free. (This also doesn't have to be a new law, but application of false and deceptive advertising relating to the FTC, around the term of "free".) Edit: Found the rule, already in FTC's federal regs: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B/part-251 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B...
- reducesuffering 3y ago
  Free offerings are a marketing expense via extended trial run. It is more productive for society to give away limited product offerings at little marginal cost than to put the equivalent into more advertising, salespeople, and influencer campaigns. If I want to find out which git hosting to use, it would be great to try out Gitlab, GitHub, and Bitbucket first (and everyone else try them) so we could assess genuine product usefulness as a group rather than rely on Twitter ads or astroturfing here (no bearing on product)
  - pierat 3y ago
    You can excuse or justify it however you want. But it's still false and deceptive advertising to use "free" in situations like this. To say some service is "Free" (for now) means you're paying something that isn't disclosed. Even if you're paying in time as beta-tester, you're still paying. And you're still paying in data. Whereas, GitLab on-prem install is largely under MIT license, which is widely considered to be a very permissive license. I could see the FTC coming to similar agreement with that statement.
    - freedomben 3y ago
      instead of "free" what term/expression should the company use for their "free" tier?
bhauer 3y ago
The key mitigating factor here when comparing to GitHub: GitLab is self-hostable, and in the self-hosted version has no user limits. The limit discussed here only applied to the instance hosted by GitLab.
pyeri 3y ago
Why have technology companies become so greedy all over the world these days? Is it because recession is putting pressure on their revenues or have they collectively decided that time to cash in has come now?
- freedomben 3y ago
  It's because they are ultimately beholden to "shareholders" and "shareholders" nowadays expect continual growth. Not maintaining the "growth" will cause the share price to plummet and will eventually get the CEO fired. Furthermore, the high interest rates we have now are squeezing the hell out of margins, requiring these CEOs to look for turnips from which they can squeeze some blood. So tldr, the greed is a result of systemic forces, corporate structure, interest rates/inflation, and numbers on a spreadsheet.
  - deciplex 3y ago
    Continual growth has been there for decades, what's new is a focus on this thing called "profits." Until recently the incentive structure has favored growth almost to the exclusion of anything else, at least until you got very big. The reason so many companies are doing such a terrible job of it right now, is that frankly there aren't many c-levels in tech who are mentally equipped to think about their business that way, and even fewer who have ever been in a position where they had to. Reddit's the latest example of this: 18 years and never been profitable? And Huffman calls himself a libertarian? Good grief. I'm glad of it. Our industry is filled with basically con-men who have no idea how to run a business profitably (or interest in doing so) but have made up for it by having the right phone numbers etc. It's good that they're being squeezed, because it creates room for people who want to run an honest business.
  - pyeri 3y ago
    These systemic forces were always there since almost over a decade now but they always focused on growth, not revenue. Now, it's as if their cash flows are depleting and revenue is where they are focusing even at the cost of growth. Reddit is a classic example where they're not even caring about users leaving the platform and going elsewhere. They're perhaps realizing that those users are of no use to Reddit unless they can somehow turn them into revenue - which ironically those 3rd party apps seem to be doing better than Reddit itself!
joduplessis 3y ago
Surprisingly GitLab feels very dated. Their drive has been toward enterprise sales instead of product IMO. Nothing bad about that - but focus on product development at least as well.
- john_cogs 3y ago
  GitLab team member here. Not sure how frequently you're using GitLab but we recently updated our navigation. Feedback on the new nav is being collected here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/409005 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/409005 We've also invested heavily in AI features including Code Suggestions which is free for all users while in beta. You can read more about the AI features in GitLab here: https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/ai/ https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/ai/
- pxtail 3y ago
  It's UI infuriates me quite frequently, options, menus, projects all the useful things are hidden behind UI elements which requires to click constantly to reveal items. All of that while plenty of unused blank space is available on the screen, fucking dumb.
dijit 3y ago
ok. so; it used to be: $0 - for as many users as you wanted $4 - per user, with some important additional features, including SSO and merge request approvals $19 - for nearly all the features except very enterprise/security ones €99 - for all festures. —- over the last 2 years they have dropped the $4 option and increased the $19 option. so now there is a cliff; free for 5: $29 for everything. Not sure why I would use gitlab over github if thats the up-front hill I will have to climb: for what its worth Perforce also has almost exactly this pricing model and has the games industry by the balls, but perforce has no real competitor. fwiw I am a gitlab user for 10 years and have advocated for its use, the only reason I haven't migrated off at this point is the switching cost
neilv 3y ago
> A five-user limit applies to newly created top-level namespaces with private visibility on GitLab SaaS Any idea whether they'll eventually chip away at public-visibility open source projects? "We're not Microsoft" might be GitLab's biggest remaining selling point. And the more savvy open source developers might care disproportionately about that. I'd think GitLab might be trying to lure open source, now that GitHub isn't the warm-fuzzy company that originally landed a lot of it, yet GitHub continues to be the de facto official provider for most major open source projects and ecosystems. Plus that has network effects for landing paying customers. Has GitLab given up on that? BTW, I'm fine with GitLab charging for non-open-source commercial projects. If your startup has more than 5 users, you probably already have salaries in your burn rate, and GitLab is a relatively small cost, for a critical service. (See: TLC's "No Scrubs".) I've happily paid for GitLab in earlier-stage startups.
timetraveller26 3y ago
We migrated to Github many months ago for this reason, we really didn't want to but the price was hard to justify for our small team.
ygouzerh 3y ago
Why downgrading the pricing when Github have a much better pricing and just rollout some crazy new GPT-powered features? We had in our backlog to explore a PoC to try out Github, since the announcement of Copilot X. Now, with this pricing announcement, this PoC will be transformed into a full migration from Gitlab to Github.
zachruss92 3y ago
This bait-and-switch along with real uptime issues is why I left GitLab years ago. I have a personal rule of; "if there is a reasonable OSS alternative to a proprietary software, use it." Unfortunately they are not reasonable. I was even a a paying customer but they changed their pricing structure so many times and moved features around for different tiers I couldn't justify it as a business. I've been happy moving back to GitHub post Microsoft acquisition. If I ever got fed up with GitHub I find Gitea to be refreshingly simple and does basically everything I need. I do wish the best for GitLab though and am rooting for them. Any company that makes an OSS model work is one worth having hope for.
slicktux 3y ago
When will people just host their own GIT?? It’s open source and web hosting services are cheap enough now a days that all you need is a domain and an internet facing server (raspberry pi)with SELinux…
- RussianCow 3y ago
  Are you seriously suggesting that companies host their mission critical Git repositories on a Raspberry Pi that they then have to manually manage?
  - slicktux 3y ago
    Way to take my comment out of context… Read the headline at least…it’s affecting users with free accounts. Obviously not a company and even if it was a company that small…I would never recommend “mission critical” code to be hosted in such way.
    - RussianCow 3y ago
      Okay fine, but replace "companies" with "people" and remove "mission critical" from my comment and the question still stands. Setting up and managing a Git repository on a Raspberry Pi in your own home is at least an order of magnitude more effort than creating a repository on GitHub or a similar service, and you miss out on all the non-Git-related benefits of using such a service.
- Strom 3y ago
  I wonder how many people even care that git is involved. I know my personal choice of GitHub has absolutely nothing to do with git. I would use it just as well if it had a different source control system. Indeed I used to use Mercurial and only switched because that's what GitHub demanded. I wasn't out looking for a git host.
Brian_K_White 3y ago
Question for Gitlab: Why did you collect an email address from the user in the first place? Why does it exist in your db? Now explain why it was not used for it's only legitimate reason for existing in your posession, first, let alone followed up with a few updates as the deadline got closer. You have a communication channel that not only is good for this, but exists for this exact sole purpose in the first place. If you aren't going to use it for that, then you have no legitimate reason to have it and I want you to delete it.
rhaway84773 3y ago
I don’t understand why anyone uses Gitlab anymore. In stark contrast to GitHub, it’s been an exercise in promising features which are then taken away from you, for years. Gitlab is almost certainly the most unethical company I’ve ever seen.
iFire 3y ago
Does this means introducing a gradual rolloff of Gitlab? Gitlab does have a monopoly on opensource hosting. Personally, I'd leave all my existing gitlab archived as readonly, open, and move on.
aussiedude 3y ago
Is anyone happy with Gitlab public runners? I've found them extremely unreliable both in my free account (every failure takes 1-2 mins away from my 50 minutes!) and in my employers paid subscription so we self run but run into issues with not being able to scale runners enough to meet developers demands. Its also super annoying that you can't use your own docker containers hosted on ECR on public runners (no way to provide auth)
- jamesfinlayson 3y ago
  > Its also super annoying that you can't use your own docker containers hosted on ECR on public runners (no way to provide auth) Yeah this is odd - it's slightly annoying having to docker login as part of jobs.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

160 points by MattIPv4 3y ago

Just got an email from GitLab about a group I'm part of that has more than five users. The docs linked says "For existing namespaces, this limit is being rolled out gradually. Impacted users are notified in GitLab.com at least 60 days before the limit is applied.", however upon checking the group in GitLab, we are greeted by a big red box stating "Your top-level group [group] is over the 5 user limit and has been placed in a read-only state."

mmcwilliams 3y ago
Also got an email but interestingly the most populated group I'm a member of has 4 users in it including myself. It did mention that my "top-level" group has reached the 5-member limit but it references a numerical ID that doesn't match my user or any of the groups I'm member to. There may be a glitch with this rollout.
- mike-cardwell 3y ago
  Yeah, I got the same email. I am in one group, and that group has one other person in it.
  - xx_ns 3y ago
    I'm in exactly 0 groups, never been in one, and I got the same email.
john_cogs 3y ago
GitLab team member here. The gradual roll out of this change started with a blog post[0] and included in-app notifications for the owners of impacted groups on GitLab.com. If the group owner did not log in during the in-app notification period, they were then emailed (the email you received today) notifying that the group was impacted. [0] - https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/03/24/efficient-free-tier/ https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/03/24/efficient-free-tier...
- Nouser76 3y ago
  I don't know that it's a great plan to do a blogpost and in-app notification as the first round of reminders and email on the day of the change. Both the blogpost and in-app notification requires you to explicitly go on GitLab and see there's a problem. Maybe there's a reason to avoid it, but emailing from the get-go seems like it is the right move for transparency and not rug-pulling. EDIT: clarified antecedent
- LegitShady 3y ago
  Wouldn’t it make more sense to email them before they were impacted instead of when they were impacted? What’s the point of gradual roll out that requires I read your blog etc. An email that says “You have 60 days to X” is a lot more effective than one that says “60 days ago we made a blog post letting you know, and now you’re f’d.”
  - Brian_K_White 3y ago
    Look they announced it publicly posted right in the back of the file cabinet in the basement behind the warning rabid tigers sign. Here's a question for Gitlab: "Why did you require me to give you an email address to sign up?" The answer to that question means there is no explaining why they didn't use it first, and followed up with at least a couple updates along the way. This is exactly what the address exists on thier db for.
- alex3305 3y ago
  > If the group owner did not log in during the in-app notification period, they were then emailed (the email you received today) notifying that the group was impacted. I think there is a glitch in your mail or something else is going wrong. I'm currently not in any groups and still got an e-mail telling me that my top level group (starting with 5060) has reached the 5 members limit. Searching for the group also doesn't yield any results whatsoever.
  - john_cogs 3y ago
    Thanks, we are investigating this and the above reports about this behavior.
crossroadsguy 3y ago
I did receive an email too which just had a number mentioned that wasn’t even hyperlinked to anything. Turns out I am or was not part of any group ever.
LaundroMat 3y ago
My email mentions two group id's. I had to look at each group's page to see its id (no other way of finding out what group we're talking about). I have _no_ groups with the id's mentioned in the email. Also, I'm a solo hobbyist dev, there are no groups with more than one user in it.

sschueller 3y ago

If gitlab keeps up with this hostility even towards paying customer a fork will be incoming sooner than later.

mal10c 3y ago
There's always Gitea [1]. I've been using that for personal projects and it's perfect. [1]: https://docs.gitea.com/next/installation/comparison https://docs.gitea.com/next/installation/comparison
mschuster91 3y ago
You can always run a GitLab CE instance on your own, takes less than five minutes to set up at any Docker hosting provider you want.
- andrewstuart2 3y ago
  I've been hosting my own GitLab for nearly 10 years, and it's been amazing and has grown with my environment really, really well.
- LeSaucy 3y ago
  These are limited to 10 active users are they not?
  - mschuster91 3y ago
    No. They're fine for at least 300 users (which is the case in an instance I run) and you can connect it with Keycloak and LDAP for SSO. You don't get SSO user-group mappings in CE, but heh, if you use Terraform that is easy enough to manage manually even at that size.
  - TheRealPomax 3y ago
    There are no limits when self-hosting.
    - 3y ago

derN3rd 3y ago

Their pricing update end of last year was one of the reasons we switched over to Github. Other reasons were, that most external services had integration with Github but not with Gitlab, or that we didn't use many of the features Gitlab provided but charged for. If they would provide some lite plans with custom feature addons, we might have kept it, but all in all there was not much difference between Gitlab and Github except for the pricing then

lazypenguin 3y ago
I've said it before and I agree with this comment. Their pricing structure is just too aggressive for smaller teams and I think they missed out on capturing a market segment. Maybe they determined it would be unprofitable to support small teams or something but I would have happily kept my team on GitLab if there was an ala carte or "lite" option like you suggested. Instead we also ended up on Github (as paying customers).
- jacquesm 3y ago
  You could of course host it yourself.
  - lazypenguin 3y ago
    We actually did self-host the community edition for several months using the omnibus version (some features you still need a license for that is same price as hoested). After initial setup it worked okay and was mostly hands-off except for that the performance started to degrade slowly over time. After spending a few weeks digging into the internals and failing to solve the problem we felt that we were better off just switching to a hosted provider. In this case we switched to GitHub because the pricing was better for the features we needed.
  - reaperman 3y ago
    For small teams which were happy using the "free" tier, that's really the correct solution. Just self-host it and retain free-tier functionality. That said, it looks like the premium features are $29/mo or $99/mo per user regardless if you self-host it or take advantage of their managed SaaS offering. It's somewhat bizarre - there's a lot of costs associated with managing this on-site but no discount for that. I presume they feel that extra overhead cost to the customer of self-hosting breaks even with the perceived or actual added security value of self-managed installations. I might be reading it wrong, but that's how I see the pricing presented here and associated pages: https://about.gitlab.com/install/ce-or-ee/ https://about.gitlab.com/install/ce-or-ee/

retrocryptid 3y ago

I'm currently hosting a git repo on my home machine and it's used by me when I'm on the road and a few people I trust enough to have logins on my DMZ machine. It seems there should be an easy way to use gitlab or github as a public read-only proxy to changes that are released on the private repo. And then going the other way, sucks up PRs from public sites and lovingly integrates them into the "real" repo on my home machine. Yes. There are security ramifications. There are availability ramifications. I seems slightly to be trying to skirt GitLab's policies they're probably putting into effect to avoid going bankrupt. But the flip-side is I really don't need a wiki or a bug tracker or whatever else GitLab is working on. I would pay a small amount of cash to just get a public repo mirror. And we all have different ideas about how to make this "easy". I don't mind running scripts on my local host, but would like to avoid polling the public repo to see if someone's posted a PR. I also don't want to have to run a script in a container on the public repo. So would love it if you could set the public repo to proxy PRs to a remote repo. Just curious if anyone else has similar requirements. Maybe you have a corporate repo and want to mirror it to a public site like GitLab, GitHub or SourceHut. Maybe, like me, *you* just want a remote repo to stash your code but a public location so your home server doesn't melt down that one time someone slashdots your project.

robertlagrant 3y ago
Gitlab does repo mirroring.
- retrocryptid 3y ago
  Thx for the response. That might be a solution. I fear that GitLab might notice me doing that and decide they don't like it. But definitely something to play around with. I'll look again on the site and see if I can see where you activate it; didn't see it first time around.
  - lbotos 3y ago
    As someone who works at the Co -- If you are within the free usage limits, we are fine with you mirroring a repo on .com. If you are hosting game binaries or Shrek the 3rd we might have some problems, but if you have a genuine source code project that shouldn't be a problem unless you become a DDoS target.

mirzap 3y ago

I'm incredibly pleased about Microsoft's acquisition of Github, as I notice visible improvements every passing month. Considering Gitlab's pricing, I wonder why anyone would abandon GitHub Team or Enterprise plan in favor of Gitlab. Gitlab's costs are exorbitant, and they resemble Atlassian products, with an overwhelming number of features that are rarely used, cluttering the interface and diminishing the overall user experience.

hamandcheese 3y ago
I am not pleased with Microsoft. Yes, there have been some improvements. But GitHub Actions is very half baked, yet the bean counters at my company are asking "why do we pay for buildkite?". It feels like they are using the same playbook as MS Teams.
- simooooo 3y ago
  What’s half baked about it?
  - hamandcheese 3y ago
    forgive me if my information is outdated, but: - You can't retry a failed action, be it manually in the UI or automatically under certain conditions. - workflows have a pretty low limit for number of jobs - 250 or so. We already split our rspec tests across 300 parallel jobs. - the UX is full of jank. If I click into an in-progress jobs I often can't see prior logs for the in-progress step until the step completes. There are also some annoyances that aren't really half-baked, but annoying for Monorepos: - workflows have to be defined under the .github folder. This means workflows can't be collocated with the code they relate to. - workflows can't be generated dynamically. At best, you can dynamically trigger predefined workflows, but I don't think they get associated with the PR that triggered them. This makes patterns like dynamically dispatching workflows based on, say, a bazel query for affected rdeps more challenging, if not entirely infeasible.
    - cpuguy83 3y ago

abeppu 3y ago

I find their use of the word "subgroup" here to be annoying, because a subgroup under their semantics "inherits" members from the group it's included in, i.e. the cardinality of a subgroup is _larger_ than the cardinality of its parent.

revskill 3y ago

There's no mention on "Why changes", it's a red flag to me.

mrweasel 3y ago
Probably because it's a publicly traded company that needs to please its shareholder. I honestly believe that what we are seeing is the realisation that money and growth isn't infinite and companies need to return to actually turn a profit, not just grow revenue. That's why we're seeing Reddit, Imgur, Gitlab, Meta, Twitter and others implement changes in rapid succession. It not even that I completely disagree with their choices, I just wonder why a dumb ass like myself who knows nothing of business was able to see broken business models years in advance, while Wall Street and Silicon Valley couldn't... Or did they just not care?
- revskill 3y ago
  "Broken business" is vague though. There're always victims and winners. Shareholders in most cases is the winners here.
- deciplex 3y ago
  They came right out and told you: nobody cared if nine out of ten investments were a total loss, provided the one had enough juice to make up for it. And, "juice" is an extremely vague term here: it could mean profitability, but given that there was so much money sloshing around, usually it just meant that the stock price jumped enough for investors to cash out - but that stock price was not necessarily tied to any tangible performance, much of the time. The real giveaway though, was the fact that stock dividends - you know, the thing that historically you buy stock for - are basically unheard of among all but the biggest companies in tech (and even unheard of among some of those). We have now an entire generation of leaders in tech for whom profitability has been this kind of abstract notion they didn't have to think about much, which explains why they all seem so ham-fisted now that they're being forced to.
  - mrweasel 3y ago

mardifoufs 3y ago

At least it does not seem to affect the self hosted community version... That could've been a lot scarier.

dataminded 3y ago

IT tried to get us to migrate to Gitlab in a past life, it went absolutely nowhere. Gitlab is stupidly expensive and complicated for value that never realized.

pierat 3y ago

This applies to the SaaS Gitlab ONLINE. This doesn't apply to Gitlab you install on your hardware. I mean, online resources on other peoples' servers cost money. A better law would be to forbid "free" offerings by companies. They all are fraudulent "free", since you pay a commercial entity with either money or data. And, corporate "free" rarely stays free. (This also doesn't have to be a new law, but application of false and deceptive advertising relating to the FTC, around the term of "free".) Edit: Found the rule, already in FTC's federal regs: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B/part-251 https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B...

reducesuffering 3y ago
Free offerings are a marketing expense via extended trial run. It is more productive for society to give away limited product offerings at little marginal cost than to put the equivalent into more advertising, salespeople, and influencer campaigns. If I want to find out which git hosting to use, it would be great to try out Gitlab, GitHub, and Bitbucket first (and everyone else try them) so we could assess genuine product usefulness as a group rather than rely on Twitter ads or astroturfing here (no bearing on product)
- pierat 3y ago
  You can excuse or justify it however you want. But it's still false and deceptive advertising to use "free" in situations like this. To say some service is "Free" (for now) means you're paying something that isn't disclosed. Even if you're paying in time as beta-tester, you're still paying. And you're still paying in data. Whereas, GitLab on-prem install is largely under MIT license, which is widely considered to be a very permissive license. I could see the FTC coming to similar agreement with that statement.
  - freedomben 3y ago
    instead of "free" what term/expression should the company use for their "free" tier?

bhauer 3y ago

The key mitigating factor here when comparing to GitHub: GitLab is self-hostable, and in the self-hosted version has no user limits. The limit discussed here only applied to the instance hosted by GitLab.

pyeri 3y ago

Why have technology companies become so greedy all over the world these days? Is it because recession is putting pressure on their revenues or have they collectively decided that time to cash in has come now?

freedomben 3y ago
It's because they are ultimately beholden to "shareholders" and "shareholders" nowadays expect continual growth. Not maintaining the "growth" will cause the share price to plummet and will eventually get the CEO fired. Furthermore, the high interest rates we have now are squeezing the hell out of margins, requiring these CEOs to look for turnips from which they can squeeze some blood. So tldr, the greed is a result of systemic forces, corporate structure, interest rates/inflation, and numbers on a spreadsheet.
- deciplex 3y ago
  Continual growth has been there for decades, what's new is a focus on this thing called "profits." Until recently the incentive structure has favored growth almost to the exclusion of anything else, at least until you got very big. The reason so many companies are doing such a terrible job of it right now, is that frankly there aren't many c-levels in tech who are mentally equipped to think about their business that way, and even fewer who have ever been in a position where they had to. Reddit's the latest example of this: 18 years and never been profitable? And Huffman calls himself a libertarian? Good grief. I'm glad of it. Our industry is filled with basically con-men who have no idea how to run a business profitably (or interest in doing so) but have made up for it by having the right phone numbers etc. It's good that they're being squeezed, because it creates room for people who want to run an honest business.
- pyeri 3y ago
  These systemic forces were always there since almost over a decade now but they always focused on growth, not revenue. Now, it's as if their cash flows are depleting and revenue is where they are focusing even at the cost of growth. Reddit is a classic example where they're not even caring about users leaving the platform and going elsewhere. They're perhaps realizing that those users are of no use to Reddit unless they can somehow turn them into revenue - which ironically those 3rd party apps seem to be doing better than Reddit itself!

joduplessis 3y ago

Surprisingly GitLab feels very dated. Their drive has been toward enterprise sales instead of product IMO. Nothing bad about that - but focus on product development at least as well.

john_cogs 3y ago
GitLab team member here. Not sure how frequently you're using GitLab but we recently updated our navigation. Feedback on the new nav is being collected here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/409005 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/409005 We've also invested heavily in AI features including Code Suggestions which is free for all users while in beta. You can read more about the AI features in GitLab here: https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/ai/ https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/ai/
pxtail 3y ago
It's UI infuriates me quite frequently, options, menus, projects all the useful things are hidden behind UI elements which requires to click constantly to reveal items. All of that while plenty of unused blank space is available on the screen, fucking dumb.

dijit 3y ago

ok. so; it used to be: $0 - for as many users as you wanted $4 - per user, with some important additional features, including SSO and merge request approvals $19 - for nearly all the features except very enterprise/security ones €99 - for all festures. —- over the last 2 years they have dropped the $4 option and increased the $19 option. so now there is a cliff; free for 5: $29 for everything. Not sure why I would use gitlab over github if thats the up-front hill I will have to climb: for what its worth Perforce also has almost exactly this pricing model and has the games industry by the balls, but perforce has no real competitor. fwiw I am a gitlab user for 10 years and have advocated for its use, the only reason I haven't migrated off at this point is the switching cost

neilv 3y ago

> A five-user limit applies to newly created top-level namespaces with private visibility on GitLab SaaS Any idea whether they'll eventually chip away at public-visibility open source projects? "We're not Microsoft" might be GitLab's biggest remaining selling point. And the more savvy open source developers might care disproportionately about that. I'd think GitLab might be trying to lure open source, now that GitHub isn't the warm-fuzzy company that originally landed a lot of it, yet GitHub continues to be the de facto official provider for most major open source projects and ecosystems. Plus that has network effects for landing paying customers. Has GitLab given up on that? BTW, I'm fine with GitLab charging for non-open-source commercial projects. If your startup has more than 5 users, you probably already have salaries in your burn rate, and GitLab is a relatively small cost, for a critical service. (See: TLC's "No Scrubs".) I've happily paid for GitLab in earlier-stage startups.

timetraveller26 3y ago

We migrated to Github many months ago for this reason, we really didn't want to but the price was hard to justify for our small team.

ygouzerh 3y ago

Why downgrading the pricing when Github have a much better pricing and just rollout some crazy new GPT-powered features? We had in our backlog to explore a PoC to try out Github, since the announcement of Copilot X. Now, with this pricing announcement, this PoC will be transformed into a full migration from Gitlab to Github.

zachruss92 3y ago

This bait-and-switch along with real uptime issues is why I left GitLab years ago. I have a personal rule of; "if there is a reasonable OSS alternative to a proprietary software, use it." Unfortunately they are not reasonable. I was even a a paying customer but they changed their pricing structure so many times and moved features around for different tiers I couldn't justify it as a business. I've been happy moving back to GitHub post Microsoft acquisition. If I ever got fed up with GitHub I find Gitea to be refreshingly simple and does basically everything I need. I do wish the best for GitLab though and am rooting for them. Any company that makes an OSS model work is one worth having hope for.

slicktux 3y ago

When will people just host their own GIT?? It’s open source and web hosting services are cheap enough now a days that all you need is a domain and an internet facing server (raspberry pi)with SELinux…

RussianCow 3y ago
Are you seriously suggesting that companies host their mission critical Git repositories on a Raspberry Pi that they then have to manually manage?
- slicktux 3y ago
  Way to take my comment out of context… Read the headline at least…it’s affecting users with free accounts. Obviously not a company and even if it was a company that small…I would never recommend “mission critical” code to be hosted in such way.
  - RussianCow 3y ago
    Okay fine, but replace "companies" with "people" and remove "mission critical" from my comment and the question still stands. Setting up and managing a Git repository on a Raspberry Pi in your own home is at least an order of magnitude more effort than creating a repository on GitHub or a similar service, and you miss out on all the non-Git-related benefits of using such a service.
Strom 3y ago
I wonder how many people even care that git is involved. I know my personal choice of GitHub has absolutely nothing to do with git. I would use it just as well if it had a different source control system. Indeed I used to use Mercurial and only switched because that's what GitHub demanded. I wasn't out looking for a git host.

Brian_K_White 3y ago

Question for Gitlab: Why did you collect an email address from the user in the first place? Why does it exist in your db? Now explain why it was not used for it's only legitimate reason for existing in your posession, first, let alone followed up with a few updates as the deadline got closer. You have a communication channel that not only is good for this, but exists for this exact sole purpose in the first place. If you aren't going to use it for that, then you have no legitimate reason to have it and I want you to delete it.

rhaway84773 3y ago

I don’t understand why anyone uses Gitlab anymore. In stark contrast to GitHub, it’s been an exercise in promising features which are then taken away from you, for years. Gitlab is almost certainly the most unethical company I’ve ever seen.

iFire 3y ago

Does this means introducing a gradual rolloff of Gitlab? Gitlab does have a monopoly on opensource hosting. Personally, I'd leave all my existing gitlab archived as readonly, open, and move on.

aussiedude 3y ago

Is anyone happy with Gitlab public runners? I've found them extremely unreliable both in my free account (every failure takes 1-2 mins away from my 50 minutes!) and in my employers paid subscription so we self run but run into issues with not being able to scale runners enough to meet developers demands. Its also super annoying that you can't use your own docker containers hosted on ECR on public runners (no way to provide auth)

jamesfinlayson 3y ago
> Its also super annoying that you can't use your own docker containers hosted on ECR on public runners (no way to provide auth) Yeah this is odd - it's slightly annoying having to docker login as part of jobs.

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