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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

#101

Post by Achshar »

john_cogs wrote: post #66
dak1 wrote: post #62

We recently spent a couple weeks going over pricing with a GitLab regional Account Leader. We already use GitLab for all our source repos, CI/CD pipelines, and had been using it for issue management as well — all fully self-hosted. The hope was to drop Jira, which was also being used for project planning, and fully adopt GitLab, but the costs were simply unjustifiable. Basically GitLab ended up being a full order of…

GitLab team member here. Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. Will share with our team.

I also have a small dev team of 25 that wants to move to gitlab paid model but the upfront cost is too much. We need a monthly payment plan even if it costs more than annual one because I can't justify a high upfront cost to my ceo. We're rapidly expanding and expect to be 100 within 2021.

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

#102

Post by afterwalk »

jonas21 wrote: post #45
jacquesm wrote: post #17

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…

In other industries for example gaming and desktop tools, people eventually just ship a new version that existing users have to buy again. For continuously deployed web products a repricing is the only way to frame it in customer's minds.

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

#103

Post by lmeyerov »

jonas21 wrote: post #45
jacquesm wrote: post #17

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…

Not so bad --

* Grandfather current customers, which gitlab did at near minimum here (current year / ~no changes ?). ~Lifetime / tier would be better, esp as a growing co should be fine here revenue wise. Better current customers sing your praises internally + externally than say you're yet another couldn't-care-less quarter-driven bigco / sales-driven vc co: growth wins.

* Put new stuff in new plans/tiers. Gitlab VPs seem to be choosing a weak balance here.

I'm all for offering higher prices. Trick is, when adding stuff, people should pay more for more, and same / less for standing still. Let hungrier/spendier teams spend more, and cost-sensitive ones happily spread the good word.

Not what happened here? Gitlab seems big enough that all this doesn't really matter though, they are probably reaching a customer size and capital-intensitive enough moat that they don't care toooo much.

---

A good contrast is github / microsoft, which also is way into clever pricing:

- Way cheaper per-user at all tiers. We got tier-shifted at some point, but don't recall any pricing funniness during that.

- Adding customer abilities to spend infinite amounts, but via new layers, like pay-as-you-go CI/CD offerings that do not gauge existing users. I expect the prices to go down, not up, as they figure out more scaling tricks / computing improves and they try to get users more addicted.

GH/MS is probably working on a much bigger timescale than GitLab, as GH doesn't need to look at juicing numbers to fundraise / sell while buyers are willing, and instead focus on being a friendly shift-left answer to AWS/GCP

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

#104

Post by wdb »

0x008 wrote: post #13
aaomidi wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Especially considering GitHub enterprise is $21/month/user

Well but it seems gitlab offers a lot more value?

Github Actions, Github Checks API already offers more ways to extend it than GitLab. GitLab is really disappointing in that regard. Even for $99/mo you don't get it. There is also barely an ecosystem around GitLab.

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

#105

Post by leipert »

jeswin wrote: post #6

I cannot find if project-scoped access tokens (which was a Bronze+ feature) are available in the Free tier, or whether they require Silver. It's such a glaring omission on GitHub - which only has personal access tokens which give apps full access to all your repos.

GitLab employee here. Just asked the Product Manager responsible. Project Access Tokens [0] will be available on Premium for GitLab.com and available on Free for self-hosted.

[0]: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/settings/project_acc...

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

#106

Post by wdb »

Jonnax wrote: post #59
aaomidi wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The v3 release candidate got it: https://github.blog/2021-01-15-github-enterprise-server-3-0-...

Today, we’re making GitHub Enterprise Server 3.0 available as a release candidate. Announced in the GitHub Universe Keynote, it’s the biggest ever change to Enterprise Server, bringing customers:

* Actions – developer-first workflow automation and CI/CD * Packages – publish and consume packages together with code * Mobile Apps (beta)- iOS and Android apps for collaborating from any device

For companies interested in automating code security with GitHub Advanced Security, we’re also bringing:

* Code scanning – scan every pull request for known vulnerabilities with CodeQL * Secret scanning (beta) – detect credentials in code before they hit production

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

#107

Post by xtracto »

dak1 wrote: post #62

We recently spent a couple weeks going over pricing with a GitLab regional Account Leader. We already use GitLab for all our source repos, CI/CD pipelines, and had been using it for issue management as well — all fully self-hosted. The hope was to drop Jira, which was also being used for project planning, and fully adopt GitLab, but the costs were simply unjustifiable. Basically GitLab ended up being a full order of…

We are are in a similar situation: We were using Github Team, paying I think $4 a month per account (between 10 and 15 users). I (head of the Eng group) love Gitlab and had used it for some time in personal/open-source projects. I managed to convince the team about Gitlab and we migrated, initially in the Free tier.

My first surprise was that Gitlab does not allow for Monthly payments...if I wanted to go into the Bronze tier, I would have had to pay a whole year in full. My startup doesn't do whole-year payments (quarterly or monthly) so that stopped me on my tracks.

I guess with the full weight of Microsoft, Github will out-price Gitlab. It's kind of sad because I prefer Gitlab CI/CD to Github actions (I just couldn't make sense of them).

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

#108

Post by mdaniel »

jeswin wrote: post #6

I cannot find if project-scoped access tokens (which was a Bronze+ feature) are available in the Free tier, or whether they require Silver. It's such a glaring omission on GitHub - which only has personal access tokens which give apps full access to all your repos.

> I cannot find if project-scoped access tokens (which was a Bronze+ feature) are available in the Free tier, or whether they require Silver.

The manual says "Bronze and above" for gitlab.com https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/user/project/settings/project_acc... but I tried the open-source "CE" docker container earlier this week and found that they worked there (maybe that's what "Core" means?)

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

#110

Post by SomeHacker44 »

I guess the one thing I don't understand is why removing the tier does not split its features between the two adjacent tiers. In this case all features become the tier up. That makes me feel this is simply and effectively a price raise, pure and simple.
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