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Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model

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Re: Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model

#51
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just host your own runners https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/install/

That requires on-prem hardware (or I guess you could spin VMs up in the cloud, but I doubt that works out cheaper than hosted CI).

It definitely is. On AWS, you can run it on spot instances with autoscaling. Including also networking price, it is an order of magnitude cheaper.

Re: Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model

#52

Remember when you make a pricing model for your company: you can never change it without some kind of backlash unless you can make things cheaper . So it's fine to charge a bit more initially and figure things out as you go, you can then lower the price once you've worked the numbers and/or have to respond to competitive pressure. But changing your model will upset your customers, no matter how well you intend it and…

I generally agree. We've always taken the "grand-fathering" approach, but it can get a bit more complicated as your product and offerings grow. If someone was paying $XX /mo for your initial offering, and a few years later, you're able to provide a number of new features within that product, I don't think you necessarily need to continue providing those extra features simply because someone signed up earlier.

To your point, you may face a backlash. But it also costs a lot of time and $$ to support new development and features. Therefore, having some backlash may still be the right decision in the medium/long term. Can be hard to weather that storm initially, though.

Re: Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model

#53

So many projects we use at work (including Qt and GitLab) seem to change their subscription plans to something that is much less favorable for smaller development teams. I wonder where this will lead to in the big picture, when more and more small companies can simply no longer justify paying for those subscriptions.

Probably into another cycle of cheap products to which you'll migrate to, which will then increase prices and again and again until someone realizes that running sustainable services costs money.

Re: Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model

#55

I'm pretty sure we'll just downgrade to free, or move away after this. We only use the MR approval features from bronze, and that's proooobably not worth the price of premium. But who knows, since we have to contact a sales rep to "guide you through your transition discount offers.

GitLab Team Member here. If you could reach out to your account team, that would be great. We’d love to hear your thoughts and have an opportunity to understand what is valuable to you. We realize that this is a significant change for Starter/Bronze users, and we want to make sure we can provide you with the best possible service through the transition. We’re also offering a free upgrade to Premium for the first 25 users, which may help you get a better sense of Premium's value for your team.

Re: Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model

#56
post #37

I assume they are hoping at least 1 out of 5 bronze users will transition to silver and increase net profits. But still... we just transitioned from BitBucket to GitLab because the $4 self-hosted tier was just too good a deal. $20 seems a bit steep considering we are using our own hardware for hosting, CI, etc. I really hope we don't transition back to BitBucket...

I'm trying to move away from bit bucket but now the price is again more and this is difficult to sell.

Re: Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model

#57

Why on earth am I getting a cookie dialogue that includes a checkbox for “personalization” and asks for permission to track me “to personalize content and ads” on the pricing page of a company that makes money selling an actual product ? Can't we do anything at all these days without pointless cookie dialogues and downright insulting behaviour? I like GitLab, but I don't like getting advertising cookies stuffed down…

> Why on earth am I getting a cookie dialogue [...]

Use NoScript. There is simply no reason for pages like that to [attempt to] stuff so many cookies and scripts for what is a simple page of static content.

Re: Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model

#58

Why on earth am I getting a cookie dialogue that includes a checkbox for “personalization” and asks for permission to track me “to personalize content and ads” on the pricing page of a company that makes money selling an actual product ? Can't we do anything at all these days without pointless cookie dialogues and downright insulting behaviour? I like GitLab, but I don't like getting advertising cookies stuffed down…

So they can retarget you as a potential customer.

I totally get your annoyance, but they probably do mostly online marketing, so it makes sense for them.

Re: Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model

#59
post #9

Top tier is still ~$100/(user*month); that seems a little much… does anyone here pay to use the top tier? Edit: Wow! I really appreciate everyone’s perspectives here!

Especially considering GitHub enterprise is $21/month/user

I'm under the impression that GitHub Enterprise's on prem ci/cd pipelines isnt available yet

Re: Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model

#60
post #31

Never forget that there's a 4th tier plan: host it yourself. With containers it is really easy to setup a GitLab instance. It isn't difficult to integrate GitLab with other tools. We are a Gov company and it is really easier to put man power to customize it than to climb all the bureaucratic hurdles to buy it.

Which features do you get with self hosted?
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