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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

#111
post #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.

Does it matter? GitHub are the inevitable winners of any race to the bottom. GitLab would be better off trying to retain actual paying customers like me, instead of encouraging me to read https://docs.github.com/en/actions/learn-github-actions/migr....

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

#112

$4/m to $20/m? That's a pretty steep increase. It's also really difficult to work out the impact of this. The feature comparison never really seems to include important git features, just headline sales features.

GitLab team member here. I think you will find these feature comparison pages to be pretty robust: - https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/gitlab-com/feature-comparis... - https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/self-managed/feature-compar... Let me know if there are specific features you have questions about.

This was a while ago, so I imagine things will have changed but:

1. As the dev of a code quality tool, it was (and still is) super unclear to me which tiers allow test reports, or custom reports.

2. For at least 6 months it was very unclear which tiers got true Jira "smart commits". The solution was simply to rewrite the docs to not use that wording, and push users to pay for a Jira extension rather than support it in Gitlab shrug.

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

#113
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…

This is not an uncommon complaint, but it is surprising, especially given their well below-market pay for employees. Where's all this money going?

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

#114
post #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?

Yeah, we are self hosting and everyone could have read access without much hassle. We are losing that long tail of contributors though as they won't be able to push any new commits with guest access.

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

#115
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 Bro…

Invest time in GH actions, they are actually really good once you get over the initial hump.

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

#116
Wow, this is so expensive. Really glad we don't use gitlab, which appears to be approximately 10x the per user price pay for these products on a standalone basis. I think if this was billed monthly and cost about 1/5 the level, it would be in the ballpark.

Maybe they are just getting their clock cleaned by GitHub so are trying to be a pure enterprise play, and dump startups.

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

#117
One of my favorite Mad magazine cartoons has this patient sitting with his dentist. The dentist tells him the cost of the dental work, and the payment plans for it. The patient says "sounds like I'm buying a car!" The dentist replies: "Yes, I am!" I think some of the comments here are confused about how pricing works and why GitLab is doing it. And, IMHO, there is so much value in even the free open source version that they'll have to do a lot worse to lose my business.

Does anyone know if the open source (totally free) version, under these new pricing guidelines, permits you to charge people for accounts on a self-hosted GitLab instance? Am I able to run a business based on GitLab without paying a penny to GitLab as long as I use the open source features?

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

#118
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...

[deleted]

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

#119
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…

Looking at their pricing page, it seems that the Ultimate tier, and even the premium tier, has a lot of features that many of their customers will never use.

I am assuming that the pricing plan is set by deployment and not by user, otherwise a company could buy 5 Ultimate seats, 20 Premiums, and the rest join for free. There is no point in buying Ultimate for 100 users when only 5 of them would ever want to use the Ultimate features.

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