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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

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitLab Team Member here. The pricing is the same for both our SaaS and self-managed products - and the tiers are now identical as well.

This is not clear from the pricing page, which talks about CI pipeline minutes and other SaaS only stuff.

GitLab team member here. Thanks for the feedback. I'll relay that to the team who owns our pricing page.

This page contains comparisons for the self-managed features: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/self-managed/feature-compar...

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

#92
I see Gitlab's point about all the extra features they have built, but the problem for me is that I just don't need them.

What I do need is a reliable remote git repo, a container registry, a CI system, and about 2500-5000 CI minutes per month. $50 a year for that seemed very reasonable or even a bit too cheap, but $250 is kind of stretching it a bit.

I think the problem here is actually the existence of the free plan. It probably isn't bringing in customers that Gitlab would want, and it is taking up space where an effective starter plan should be. Why not replace it with a slightly beefed up "basic" plan at about $120/year? They could throw in a 3 month trial at the start to ease the barrier of initial sign-up.

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

#93

Well, this ruined my teams Tuesday. We are on the Bronze plan with over 300 users company wide. My department of 40 does the vast majority (90% plus of all commits/MRs) of the coding in the company, but we enrolled everyone within operations as well so that they could contribute on occasion. The rest of those users are never going to be worth spending $19 a month on, but it really sucks having to put up barriers from…

You only need a user licenses to log in. Can't you just make the repos public (assuming you are self hosting) so that way anonymous users can still see everything?

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

#94

I see Gitlab's point about all the extra features they have built, but the problem for me is that I just don't need them. What I do need is a reliable remote git repo, a container registry, a CI system, and about 2500-5000 CI minutes per month. $50 a year for that seemed very reasonable or even a bit too cheap, but $250 is kind of stretching it a bit. I think the problem here is actually the existence of the free pla…

Yeah, I'm in favor of axing the free plan in favor of a beefed up basic tier that's cheaper than premium. A lot of free users would probably be livid though.

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

#95
post #70

We're using Azure DevOps at the bank I'm currently working at. I've been a long-time user of it actually, and am a big fan - I just don't see how GitLab's new pricing can compete with AzDo, or even GitHub. $49/user/m for Premium seems really expensive compared to AzDo and GitHub. Does GitLab have some killer feature I'm not aware of that justifies spending 2-10x that of the competition? $99/m for Ultimate eds? It doe…

They offer tons of benefits for Ultimate edition. How could you possibly run a business without "Executive level insights"?

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

#96
post #36
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just looked through the feature list, the security stuff is interesting but it requires a strange scenario where your employees are pushing malicious code to the repo (maybe this happens often and I've just never heard of it). Much of the Agile/project tracking stuff is in Jira/Basecamp/Asana/TeamCity (or GitHub projects + issues can be used if your needs are small). Some of the other stuff is done by a myriad of G…

Recommendation for Jira replacement? Preferably with an emphasis on speed?

We migrated away from Jira to YouTrack, which is quite flexible. Speed wise it's not too bad, could be snappier. But it is really flexible with full APIs. Jetbrains also has "Spaces" which is more simplified but has other toys.

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

#97
post #76
post #70

We're using Azure DevOps at the bank I'm currently working at. I've been a long-time user of it actually, and am a big fan - I just don't see how GitLab's new pricing can compete with AzDo, or even GitHub. $49/user/m for Premium seems really expensive compared to AzDo and GitHub. Does GitLab have some killer feature I'm not aware of that justifies spending 2-10x that of the competition? $99/m for Ultimate eds? It doe…

Ultimate includes a bunch of bells and whistles - full k8s integration, static/dynamic security testing, deep monitoring integration, etc. I have considered it but ultimately at any given time, there are one or two features in the top tier that sound good, but usually you can get 80% of the way there with a FOSS alternative. For example wiring up ArgoCD to run your k8s deploys, or writing your SAST rules yourself.

Also it's all-or-nothing: the security tools are a good example where it could easily be worth paying a reasonable amount for either an optional feature or upgrades for specific users but when that applies a big up-front multiplier to your entire organization it becomes a much harder sale.

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

#98
Very sorry to learn about this very disappointing news about upselling a product that was worth every single penny and that I have been using professionally for the last four years. It is not really the price hike that worries here, but rather the realization that we're locked into a product with a volatile price that can double or even triple at any time.

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

#99
post #45

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…

Everything you said makes sense -- but at the same time, when building a SaaS offering, your initial product may have much less functionality than what you eventually plan to build. If you start at the price you want to charge in the end, people will look at the product and say, you expect me to pay $X for that ? One thing that may work is to offer early adopters a lower price, and keep them at that price forever, wh…

There's a difference between changing the pricing model and raising prices.

gitlab is changing their pricing model; as near as I can tell, they want to be a source control / jira / CI all-in-one environment. My guess is the willingness to pay vs github for just plain source control isn't there.

:shrug:

This is the risk with saas though. Customers are adults; they can choose to continue using your product or not. If customers don't want the saas they buy to be able to change models or raise prices, their choices are (1) don't use it; or (2) sign annual or even multiyear agreements. And if a company evaluates software that won't make multiyear commitments to them, they should take that unwillingness into account when choosing which vendor to use.

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

#100

ok, this might suck. We are on bronze right now and yes there where some things in silver that would have been nice to have it was never worth the costs per user to upgrade (especially because a lot of features already in bronze are not things we actually use or need), this might mean we either switch to free or abandon gitlab if there is an alternative.

> especially because a lot of features already in bronze are not things we actually use or need This has been my org's issue as well. We use dedicated, external products for project management, CI, binary asset storage, container registry, wiki, etc etc. I get that a one-stop shop might be really valuable for a small org with basic needs that align well to what GitLab supplies, but I don't know if it scales up all th…

Yeah, there are a lot of these kind of tickets imho
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