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?
> It seems like every SaaS out there is targeting only the very occasional users and large enterprise users, but nothing in between.
It's like that for everything IT related. I've done part time IT service work for 20 years and in the last 5 years the cost of IT for small businesses has drastically increased. I'd estimate that things like email and network devices (management + updates) have increased by 5-10x for a lot of small businesses.
Family run businesses that are providing income for 1 or 2 people can't absorb those kinds of costs. Imagine if every appliance in your house all of a sudden became an annual subscription that's the same amount as the one time cost used to be. That's what small business IT is like now.
Normally I'd be optimistic and say all that means is a lot of opportunity for anyone that wants to start a business, but it's not. The high prices are being driven by consolidation and reduced competition in every area where there's some type of barrier to entry. Network devices are the best example. You can't decide to start a hardware manufacturing business without a ton of capital.
It's only going to get worse too. My prediction is that within 2 years Ubiquiti will go subscription based, within 5 years Windows will be subscription only for business use, and getting a perpetual version of MS Office will be nearly impossible within the next 3-4 years. I also think both Microsoft and Google will discontinue their non-profit / education offerings by the end of the decade because all the budget friendly options (aka competitors) will be completely eliminated by then.
> I also think both Microsoft and Google will discontinue their non-profit / education offerings by the end of the decade
Not going to happen because both of them are buying Mindshare: Microsoft is trying to salvage their staple of being a must-have requirement for office IT with Excel/other MS Office (including Office Online) dominance, while Google is trying to take all of that away and get people hooked on the power of collaborative document/spreadsheet editing, now with Notion-style features like inline people mentions.
In general it seems like Google is winning in lower education with the advent of chromebooks, MS is winning on the higher education front (Uni staff don't want to move away from Office), and Google Workspace is winning on the Startup front, but I doubt either offerings are going to charge schools for their basic offerings and will instead opt to throw more new features into their own separately-subscribed SKUs (eg. Google Voice having a different per-user subscription cost).
Cloud is inherently subscription based though. Packaged software like Windows can always survive with a one time fee.
Hardware is interesting, there’s ongoing fees for the business if it’s connected hardware. However, almost all of them (b2c) charge a one time fee (IoT devices such as smart switches, security camera) and then charge a subscription for more advanced features or cloud storage (such as for the camera).
Also, it’s definitely a lot easier to produce and sell hardware products now compared to before!
The cloud service business model usually seems to turn into some form of bait+switch, based on getting loads of new users in, some percentage who will become quite dependent on the service, then cranking up the prices.
If something is free, cheap, and relatively new, be prepared for disappointment.
I wouldn't say it's an intentional bait and switch, just the "natual" pivot to b2b/enterprise sales where its a lot more straightforward with how to make money, I guess.
I have a hard time seeing how offering something for free that costs you something to provide, then making it no longer free once you have a large number of users, is not an intentional bait and switch. How did they think they were going to keep providing the free offering at scale?
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.
Also smaller companies tend to come with an outsize support burden that can chip away their profitability to be a net loss that grows over time. That burden grows the more people you have using the product.
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.
and your costs track a certain number (e.g. number of checks/hosts)
why would you bill per user?
if you did all that and you have the right LTV and CAC numbers, at certain point you could basically run it on auto pilot
billing per user, but maybe you have 1 power user in a team, and a few extra accounts for non tech/backup/etc, which login once a month to check something
It isn't and the cost of developing something... is too much for a side gig with the intended purpose for the VPS to pay for itself.
> why would you bill per user?
In my situation I don't need to bill per user (and it would be counterproductive for me to do so in the long run), my point here is what my price calculation per resources spent doesn't correlate with my resources cost in any meaningful way, at least with anything with the word 'income' in it.
> and your costs track a certain number (e.g. number of checks/hosts)
In the end I just drew some arbitrary numbers for a checks/hosts numbers, slapped the price tag of a couple bottles of beer and called it a day. One person was happy with it and he uses only a couple of basic HTTP checks (so maybe around 0.002% of VPS? Who knows). Other one said it was too much for him. *shrug_emoji*
SaaS is definitely hard to price but some trends are hostile. Recently, Netlify contacted us about our pricing and we had a call with them; because we had more than 7 users, based on their new pricing structure we were consider "enterprise" to them, and our bill was going to go from ~$200/mo to $2500/mo (not a typo) very graciously "discounted" for a length of time to $1000/mo.
Despite our low usage of resources and features that hadn't changed in a year, they suddenly wanted to charge us more than 10x a month, solely based on user count. If we dropped our user count below 7, we could still have the same pricing. It's absolutely absurd.
Zapier has similarly unfriendly user pricing; one of our team needed a few basic simple zaps for a workflow and since it's business process, we needed someone to have access to it too for management. That means we now qualified for the "team plan" which jumps the cost from $0 for the free plan (which already offered more features than needed) to minimum of $299/mo, with a whole ton of resources and features we didn't need, just to have an extra user.
For all that cloud pricing is difficult to predict, I'd much rather be charged by usage than arbitrary metrics like users (except where it makes sense).
As with all things, there’s a lot of flex in there. In our environment, if you don’t use it in 90 days your license goes back to the pool. If you log back in after that, you immediately gain it back. Your user is just disabled, not deleted.
As a solo-founder, I have this exact feeling. I can not use almost any SaaS tool as all of them have a (too limited) free plan and the next one starts at around $100/mo with "5 seats". Can't you just give me a $20/mo option with one seat?
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?
> Having said that, I think they're killing the golden goose.
I think it might signal another thing too: "We're big enough, so we don't need that booster anymore".
Trello did that back then. They provided a middle tier called Gold which gave personal users all the goodies, sans the enterprise features. When they got big enough, they moved to strip it out and everybody (incl. me) were up in arms.
We've agreed in a trade-off, and then they still moved us gradually to enterprise. Now we're all using "Team of One" professional accounts with $99/yr. price tags. Trello is an enterprise platform and we're using it expensively just because we are a bunch of people who can use Kanban boards with katana-like precision for our personal projects and/or workflows.
GitLab might be doing this move to position themselves for bigger customers. Knowledgeable people can either pay, or use self-hosted versions they may think. Also, self hosted GitLab has evolved from a simple GitHub clone to a complete pipeline solution with extremely powerful functions. Even GitLab SaaS can talk with your in-house runners, so you can have an on-premise CI/CD pipeline with cloud frontend. It's kinda crazy.
Either like it or not, but you can't burn money like Microsoft + GitHub for free tier.
Which Trello features are you paying for? I use it a lot for personal organization but not the paid tier. Curious what I'm missing or if there's an implication of a feature I didn't understand.
Gitlab had continuing problems with people using the free CI service for crypto mining.
It seems to be the bane of all services that offer any kind of free tier for any compute.
Oof, I agree. I'm trying to move our repos in my current company from Github to GitLab and was using the free tier to move repos one by one until I could convince enough people that we get enough value out of it to pay and switch over.
Now there's no chance of that happening, as we aren't going to pay for both, and we aren't going to switch wholesale, so it's looking that I'm going to have to move everything to Github...
At a previous company I (Head of Engineering) was pushing to move from Github to Gitlab. However it was exactly at the time when Gitlab removed their lower price tier (I think $5 or $10 per user) and butchered the free version. In addition to that, they do not allow monthly payment (only yearly pre-payment), which was incompatible with our business.
We were actually a Github paying customer and were going to pay to move to Gitlab, but given all those changes and rug-pulls, we decided to stay in Github. GH actions resulted to be enough for the CI/CD stuff we needed.
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.
I'm not sure what you're saying. AWS literally has a free tier. They're playing the same game as Gitlab, and part of that is paying for potential customers to get access to a baseline level of service to grow their experience with the product and generate goodwill.
I don't have any inside details, but I'd suspect that AWS also pays for PR, either through an internal team or external vendors. So "customer goodwill" is (probably) something they pay money for. Real dollars. This isn't free; you have to pay for it somehow. Whether it's dollars to fund a PR team (and the whole funnel of marketing/sales/etc.), or through free tiers designed to spread by word of mouth... you can't expect to acquire customers for free.
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 ($0.50/GB) is steep. This stopped me from importing my large Git LFS project
- No way to have "view only" members for a repo or issue board without it contributing to your user number count and having to pay full price for them.
It's clear that I'm not that target market for them which is fine but its a bit of a shame as I do like gitlab.
The changes they made (I guess a couple years now) to their pricing model really bit us in the ass. We had a 130 user licence on the old 5$ 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.
This is a problem at every org scale as well. We have this issue with a 1000+ developer org where we still can't give our PMs and other non-developers read-only access to the gitlab issues because it would be another 200 headcount worth of full-price licenses. It's basically the sole reason we can't utilize most of their jira/confluence alternative product line and still keep issue tracking and docs mostly outside of gitlab.
If you are just using the .git hosting part, it would be really easy to setup an open-ssh server yourself... Could you explain why you are not hosting your own ssh server already ?
They didn't say they're only using the git hosting, they're just not using the issue trackers because that would require adding non-devs. For all you know they could be using GitLab for CI, merge requests, package management, and deployments, none of which require adding new people to the team.
Exactly this, we use it for all of those things. None of which provide value to PMs, designers, and other non-engineer roles within teams that still need to collaborate on issue tracking and documentation.
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
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.
I also found LFS pricing too steep, so I just spun up a gitea and grabbed 150GB block storage for $10/month. Kinda funny actually, since doing this I've slowly migrated all my personal projects off github and gitlab and i no longer have private repos on either site because I don't need them. I pay $5/mo for the server running gitea, which grants me as many private repos as i want with 50GB base storage. Much more cost effective, and I'll honestly probably never use 150GB so a lot of peace of mind there. Backups are managed by my cloud service for $1/mo.
But I guess I don't use a lot of the features a business would need, so I'm only speaking for personal projects. I dunno, I've never actually looked at collaboration features for gitea.
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".
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.
This is not a critique of your comment, but I am curious about our ambivalence regarding the following line of thoughts:
- It seems to me that we are promoting in IT a lot the idea of taking decisions based on data i.e data-driven companies.
- What does it mean to make decisions based on data? It seems to me that it looks exactly like this: we should look at what we want to change, look at the data and decide if the change will hurt/help/support a number of users. Do some math and then the result will be Yes/No for the decision.
- Now, of course, we could add "look at the data, but also think about second-order effects, about hidden relations ..." but that looks to me more like a No true Scotsman argument where only companies taking decisions that we like are really doing data-driven.
If we want data-driven decisions then why does it feel that the decision to impact only 1% of the users is wrong?
(please note: I am not saying this Gitlab decision is a good one. Probably it affects more than 1% of the users. I am mostly discussing the idea of the OP about "impacts 1% of our users")
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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)
There usually is a mod framework available, and in paradox games you often use the base game's script files as a starting point.
The point is generally irrelevant though, as a condition of uploading a mod to Steam or the game's mod system will be to give unconditional usage rights to the publisher which is incompatible with FOSS.
In that licensing case, a mod project could dual-license with both a license that conforms to the requirements for mod distribution and an open-source license, although this would complicate the efforts of any derivative code who might want to distribute.
That being said, mod authors seem weirdly defensive and secretive about their code and ideas; I think it would be a hard sell to get most of them to use an open-source license even if it were possible.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Not really. You can't compare it to bluechips. It's down like all the other IPOs that went crazy at the peak of liquidity driven euphoria. Those all-time high were not based on fundamentals.
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.
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.
Even in a worst case where they don't survive -- and I hope that they will survive -- it seems near-guaranteed that GitLab will turbo-boost the next generation of technology companies.
The stack that they provide within the free edition alone is phenomenally consistent and capable compared to the collaboration tools that teams had available when they started - a mere seven years 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.
- 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-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.
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?
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 )
If a company offers a free tier and a paid tier of their product, and the free tier is sufficiently useful, you can bet their salespeople hate it. Even when it’s the thing driving customers to their platform in the first place. They see it as unnecessary competition. While sales leadership may not be the most important people in the org chart, sales focused thinking permeates executive culture. Sooner or later, the that free tier will end up in their crosshairs. Some companies have the discipline to hold out longer, but when quarterly performance is at risk, it’s only a matter of time.
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.
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.
In many situations, that is unrealistic. Somebody has to pay for me (or some other engineer) to set up and maintain said open source. It is often cheaper to just pay for the offering.
There is business risk in being trapped in non-free, but sometimes that is still the prudent option.
I like open source -- mostly because it can be debugged! -- but it's not the solution to every problem.
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.
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.
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/).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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?