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Introducing paid subscriptions on GitLab.com

about.gitlab.com

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Re: Introducing paid subscriptions on GitLab.com

#51

Post by sytse »

nik736 wrote: post #43
smarx007 wrote: post #8

Plans don't seem to have a monthly payment instead of annual: https://customers.gitlab.com/subscriptions/new?plan_id=2c92a... P.S. Why do I need to enter my login again after signing in via Gitlab API? P.P.S. Group pricing seems unfair. I will be paying 4x for 4 users with the same amount of CI minutes split across 4 users?

I think the GitLab Frontend team should improve this site. The navbar is not aligned correct, missing clearfixes and in general just carelessly put together. You want my money, so I can at least expect you to provide me with a proper page to pay you. :)

We'll have a look at improving this.

Re: Introducing paid subscriptions on GitLab.com

#52

Post by btashton »

mydigitalself wrote: post #37
btashton wrote: post #30

I have been a huge supporter of gitlab the last few years and have brought it into a few companies. The latest company we opted for their githost.io offering where you get your own instance to avoid the performance issues that they have had with gitlab.com Unfortunately this has really painful with random unannounced outages and the inability to get insight to what is going on when all of a sudden your disk is fillin…

Sorry to hear about your issues with GitHost - feel free to share any ticket IDs and we can look into it further on our side.

Tickets from the last year excluding application bugs, that resulted in downtime. I did not get any notification of outages on these. Everything has been resolved and I am very happy with the product when it is working. I get that some of these are due to companies you rely on for your infrastructure.

#26561 Server Not Responding (No reponse for over a day)

#24895 500 on Application Settings (17 hour for response 24 for fix)

#29731 Sever Not Responding (disk full with no warning [actually at 67% but that hangs backups]) Solution expand block storage which failed several times.

#41739 Repositories Unavailable (Githost infrastructure failure moving storage to block storage)

#45163 DNS failure (DYN Attack)

#22524 Expired SSL Certificate

#72593 Server Not Responding (Data Center Outage)

Re: Introducing paid subscriptions on GitLab.com

#53

Post by kbutler »

Mz wrote: post #18
kbutler wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a common meme, but unless you are privy to the company's internal financials, you really can't say whether a paid subscription model is more sustainable than others. Just ask newspapers and magazines. There are many products and services I've paid for that are no longer provided. Sometimes companies even cancel profitable services that are a distraction from their core business.

Just ask newspapers and magazines. They never made the majority of their money from subscribers. They made it from ads. And ad revenue has been under heavy assault of late, while publishing has been moving increasingly to the internet and away from the dead tree version. Your example does not really support your statement.

It absolutely supports the statement: where does the majority of gitlab's money come from?

Their strategy page (https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/) suggests that these subscriptions, at least for some time, will be a small part of the revenue (enterprise customers being the larger revenue source).

So with these subscriptions being a supplemental revenue source, it's pretty apt.

Re: Introducing paid subscriptions on GitLab.com

#54

Post by bluGill »

jacquesm wrote: post #26
mydigitalself wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitLab as a company has had paying customers for a long time. If you take a look at our web site ( https://about.gitlab.com/ ) you can see some amazing companies who license GitLab EE including IBM, NASA, Nasdaq, Sony and Uber to name just a few. GitLab.com has become increasingly popular over time and we want to continue to not only provide a great self-hosted product, but also an amazing hosted (SaaS) solution.

There is a difference between having paying customers and being a profitable business. Now, you have access to the gitlab books and I don't but from where I'm sitting the more revenue streams you have the better I feel (because I really like gitlab...), on the off chance that you weren't profitable yet.

Not always. Often a revenue stream costs more time (money) than you get from it.

Note that the above is tricky. There are revenue streams that lose money by the books, but are worth having because they help something else. An example is a store sells milk at (or below) cost because people come for the cheap milk and buy lots of other things.

Re: Introducing paid subscriptions on GitLab.com

#56

Post by jacquesm »

kbutler wrote: post #49
jacquesm wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having run a couple of companies both with and without an income stream judging by that experience I strongly believe that companies with an income stream are generally speaking more solid than those without. Yes, of course there are odd ducks but as a general rule it is a pretty good one. And given that this is their core business I don't see them canceling it any time soon.

But is adding this subscription a sign that their previous subscription and other revenue efforts are insufficient, and therefore they are flailing for a viable business model and going under in N months unless this really takes off? Or is it a sign that they are being conservative and responsible and taking the long view on their finances? You simply cannot tell from the simple fact that they are adding a subscripti…

No, but you can tell that if this gains adoption that they will be better off than they were last week.

Re: Introducing paid subscriptions on GitLab.com

#57

Post by Mz »

kbutler wrote: post #53
Mz wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just ask newspapers and magazines. They never made the majority of their money from subscribers. They made it from ads. And ad revenue has been under heavy assault of late, while publishing has been moving increasingly to the internet and away from the dead tree version. Your example does not really support your statement.

It absolutely supports the statement: where does the majority of gitlab's money come from? Their strategy page ( https://about.gitlab.com/strategy/ ) suggests that these subscriptions, at least for some time, will be a small part of the revenue (enterprise customers being the larger revenue source). So with these subscriptions being a supplemental revenue source, it's pretty apt.

Have an upvote for supporting your POV, but I am not convinced that detail makes it apt.

Publications made money primarily from ads. A subscriber base was valuable for being able to prove audience size. Then ad costs were tied to that. Having enterprise customers plus individual customers is fundamentally a different model.

Re: Introducing paid subscriptions on GitLab.com

#58

Post by sytse »

btashton wrote: post #52
mydigitalself wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to hear about your issues with GitHost - feel free to share any ticket IDs and we can look into it further on our side.

Tickets from the last year excluding application bugs, that resulted in downtime. I did not get any notification of outages on these. Everything has been resolved and I am very happy with the product when it is working. I get that some of these are due to companies you rely on for your infrastructure. #26561 Server Not Responding (No reponse for over a day) #24895 500 on Application Settings (17 hour for response 24…

That are a lot of issues, I sorry that you've had all those problems with GitHost.io.

GitHost.io is a service we've offered because GitLab.com was not usable for everyone. One of the problems was the latency of GitLab.com. We're making good progress in fixing that.

Are there other things that keep you on GitHost.io? We've heard that people want LDAP sync and we're planning to bring this to GitLab.com. Is there anything else we should focus on?

Re: Introducing paid subscriptions on GitLab.com

#59

Post by btashton »

sytse wrote: post #58
btashton wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tickets from the last year excluding application bugs, that resulted in downtime. I did not get any notification of outages on these. Everything has been resolved and I am very happy with the product when it is working. I get that some of these are due to companies you rely on for your infrastructure. #26561 Server Not Responding (No reponse for over a day) #24895 500 on Application Settings (17 hour for response 24…

That are a lot of issues, I sorry that you've had all those problems with GitHost.io. GitHost.io is a service we've offered because GitLab.com was not usable for everyone. One of the problems was the latency of GitLab.com. We're making good progress in fixing that. Are there other things that keep you on GitHost.io? We've heard that people want LDAP sync and we're planning to bring this to GitLab.com. Is there anythi…

Not to be snarky but our instance is still non-responsive.

Re: Introducing paid subscriptions on GitLab.com

#60

Post by mydigitalself »

jacquesm wrote: post #48
sytse wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We will fix it in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...

Super. That's a pretty quick turn around :)

That's live now, thanks for your help.

https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/

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