Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model • Hacker News Board

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

#121

Post by addicted » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 9:19 PM UTC

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…

In my unfortunate experience, having evangelized Gitlab in my company from the days when they made money through support and subscriptions, as expensive as Gitlab already is, it will only get more expensive a few years later.

It's nice that they keep adding these features, but in reality, we have already integrated most of the functionality they've added well before they get around to buying the company making the features they want to add.

So the actual practical effect on us is that we simply have to pay additional costs for those features that we don't use (or pay in time and money to migrate to those new features, with no real benefit and a massive downside of further increasing dependence).

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

#122

Post by toyg » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 9:21 PM UTC

gnfargbl wrote: post #111

umvi wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... .

Gitlab only established a foothold thanks to free users, when Github did not have free private repos. Free users sooner or later upgrade to paid plans, when they really want this or that feature.

Gitlab in many ways stays relevant by being “the nicer github” - if they become all about the money, they’ll die like bitbucket.

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

#123

Post by john_cogs » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 9:23 PM UTC

godtoldmetodoit wrote: post #81

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…

GitLab team member here. We are currently researching the non-developer use case. You can follow along here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/213185

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

#124

Post by itronitron » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 9:24 PM UTC

onassar wrote: post #52

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…

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…

The features that they paid for in the first year have already been paid for by the customers. While it costs the vendor time and money for new features it doesn't cost them money for old features. Therefore under a subscription model that payment should be covering the cost of new features.

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

#125

Post by toyg » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 9:26 PM UTC

randompwd wrote: post #20

sdesol wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I took a break from my startup, I ended up working for a fintech company and you will be surprised by a) how much money they have b) how little understanding of tech they have For many non-traditional tech companies, they feel spending more money, will help offset tech deficiencies. In the same way that, novice golfers equate spending more money on golf equipment will make them better golfers.

Great. Why should tech companies (and by extension software engineers) provide discounted service to non tech businesses? No other industry has made themselves so available at such affordable pricing than tech has? Where are all the blog posts/free software/free advise from those finance companies? Where is all the free legal/free court counsel info from all lawyers? It's about time tech started charging for commerci…

Is this satire? Have you noticed that the richest companies in the world are tech companies?

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

#126

Post by john_cogs » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 9:35 PM UTC

Achshar wrote: post #101

john_cogs wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Thanks. I will share this, too.

Edit - we share why we prioritize annual pricing over monthly in our handbook: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/pricing/#annual-pricin...

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

#127

Post by zmmmmm » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 9:40 PM UTC

It's interesting, Gitlab is one of the products I most want my organisation to pay for but am constantly defeated by their pricing plans.

It sort of maps onto this decision because what I consistently found was that Bronze offered almost no value in terms of features but the step up to Silver was so big that there was no way we could dive in at that level. So we just lived on the free tier and by and large get by with that.

Part of the problem is having a lot of users who interact with the system at a fairly casual level. To license everyone at Silver/Premium would be really prohibitive. But licensing a small number up to Premium and leaving the rest on free or bronze doesn't work either.

Gitlab is one of my favorite products so I really want it to succeed.

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

#128

Post by harrisonjackson » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 9:44 PM UTC

umvi wrote: 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...

Isn't there a free option? What were the main features pushing you to the $4 plan?

edit: looks like for multi-user you need paid?

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

#129

Post by onassar » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 9:46 PM UTC

itronitron wrote: post #124

onassar wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The features that they paid for in the first year have already been paid for by the customers. While it costs the vendor time and money for new features it doesn't cost them money for old features. Therefore under a subscription model that payment should be covering the cost of new features.

I think I'd reply to this with a "yes and no" kinda thing. For us, maintaining anything requires time and $$. This is, in part, because technology changes. Even in a vacuum with no new active development, money and $$ is required to ensure everything stays up and running.

eg. as our use base has grown, so too has our database. And so while the optics of it from the end-user POV is that the product has remain unchanged, we've had to invest in database and scaling services in order to continue to meet the initial offerings.

It's not as simple as that, but you probably get the gist of it.

A more relevant example might be a web service that emails you once a week. If the mailing service that powers this requires DNS or integration changes to help fight spam, over time that will require time (and perhaps $$).

If I'm misunderstanding your point, let me know :)

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

#130

Post by scoodah » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 9:47 PM UTC

boleary-gl wrote: post #54

devicenull wrote: post #33

What happened to the pricing for self-managed instances? We rather like our onprem setup.

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.

What's the justification for the self-managed and SaaS products being priced the same? That isn't intended to be snarky but a legitimate question, by the way.