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

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

#131

Post by harrisonjackson » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 9:48 PM UTC

theptip wrote: post #76

GordonS wrote: 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.

They push features down to the lower tiers pretty frequently. Easier to launch them on ultimate and then move them down than the other way.

Silver got a lot of great project management features around roadmapping and epics last year that allowed our team to cancel jira sub, so that was sweet.

edit: wouldn't count on the fancier devops tools getting moved through :/

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

#132

Post by addicted » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 9:52 PM UTC

harrisonjackson wrote: post #131

theptip wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They push features down to the lower tiers pretty frequently. Easier to launch them on ultimate and then move them down than the other way. Silver got a lot of great project management features around roadmapping and epics last year that allowed our team to cancel jira sub, so that was sweet. edit: wouldn't count on the fancier devops tools getting moved through :/

That's not reassuring in a comment on an update where they are completely eliminating a tier.

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

#133

Post by mpreuss » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 9:54 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #80

GordonS wrote: 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…

> $49/user/m for Premium seems really expensive compared to AzDo and GitHub Sure, but you know what else $49/user/month for “Premium” is really expensive compared to? GitLab Premium, which is $19/user/month. [0] > Does GitLab have some killer feature I'm not aware of that justifies spending 2-10x that of the competition? At least some of the described features seem to be closer to GitHub Enterprise ($21/user/mo) or A…

Thanks for catching that usability issue, we agree the double scrolling is not ideal. This wasn't the intended functionality and I can't imagine how long it would have taken for us to catch this. Here's the link to the MR https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_request... we'll have a fix going live shortly

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

#134

Post by itsbenweeks » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 9:55 PM UTC

Seems like there's too much bait-and-switch happening here to trust GitLab anymore. They enacted an account-locking change to their MFA reset policy without so much as an e-mail to effected users over the summer, and now they're increasing their pricing. There must be a way for GitLab to grow that doesn't involve them inconveniencing existing users like this.

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

#135

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 9:58 PM UTC

umvi wrote: post #60

neves wrote: 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?

[deleted]

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

#136

Post by time0ut » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 10:00 PM UTC

tentacleuno wrote: post #68

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…

How was your experience with Jira?

I use a couple dozen tools on a regular basis. JIRA is by far the worst. The functionality is ok. Maybe it is a bit bloated. Maybe our process is a little over complicated. That's not a big deal. The thing that really gets me is performance.

The performance is absolute dog shit. Every interaction with it painfully slow. For example, the page to view a single issue is almost 20MB fetched over 100 HTTP requests and takes 10 seconds to load. This is without cache. With assets cached, it is still 4 seconds to render. This is the fastest interaction by the way. Everything else is worse.

Maybe some of this is my organization's fault. I really don't know. What I do know is that it is so slow that I dread every interaction with it.

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

#137

Post by ajford » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 10:15 PM UTC

lmeyerov wrote: post #103

jonas21 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 VP…

Agreed.

My last employer had been on the same GH tier for over 6 years or something like that, and was on a much older tier.

It lacked some of the new features, but the price-point was right for our team size, and we weren't yet at the point where the newer features (ci/cd stuff like Actions) were worth the cost hike.

We were planning on switching tiers to get the new features, which is exactly what you described. Let those who want the new things pay for them if/when they decide to make the switch.

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

#138

Post by harrisonjackson » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 10:19 PM UTC

addicted wrote: post #132

harrisonjackson wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They push features down to the lower tiers pretty frequently. Easier to launch them on ultimate and then move them down than the other way. Silver got a lot of great project management features around roadmapping and epics last year that allowed our team to cancel jira sub, so that was sweet. edit: wouldn't count on the fancier devops tools getting moved through :/

That's not reassuring in a comment on an update where they are completely eliminating a tier.

My response was to someone considering the ultimate tier. I'd recommend they keep an eye on the premium (silver) tier for the functionality they want which may at some point become available.

Premium was an easy sell for us as we were able to eliminate other subscriptions. Ultimate does not have features we'd be willing to pay an extra $80 per user per month for.

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

#139

Post by time0ut » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 10:20 PM UTC

I love GitLab. It has really won me over versus GitHub over the past couple of years. I've found it to be much more suited to enterprise use.

That said, they really need to work on the pricing model. We have 1,000 potential users. But only 300 of them would really use all of the features. It is a tough sell to pay equally for all of them.

I'd really love to use some of the features of ultimate, but the pricing model makes it a complete non-starter. It is an order of magnitude more expensive than the hodgepodge of tools it would replace if we have to pay ~100k a month for it. Our account exec has offered to talk about discounts and stuff, but it is just too far out there and too much risk since the lock-in would be so high.

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

#140

Post by threeseed » Tue, Jan 26, 2021, 10:28 PM UTC

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.

You can solve a lot of the pricing issues by offering add-ons.

Buy the Premium tier and add Kubernetes or Security for an additional $4 / month.