Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model

about.gitlab.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 300 posts

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

#161

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

ppeetteerr wrote: post #86
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 remember an in-person presentation by Unbounce talking about their pricing model. They realized that anyone paying less than $99/month was not worth their time, so they removed those plans, barely reducing their monthly revenue, and focused on the high-end customers. Looking at their pricing structure today, I see $80 being the lowest tier, going all the way to $300

Depending on your market, killing off cheaper plans might barely impact your revenue at all... right up until you stop getting bigger contacts because there's no on-ramp customers to try your services before going all-in.

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

#162

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

ehutch79 wrote: post #64
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'm pretty sure people would be upset about price reductions as well

Why?

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

#163

Post by liaukovv »

throwawayboise wrote: post #144
godtoldmetodoit wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Email a diff to someone who has access?

Could skip source control entirely and just mail diffs around all day

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

#164

Post by ninju »

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…

If you click the "View More" option at the bottom the scroll region expands to fill the view...but still a confusing UI

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

#165

Post by viraptor »

ShakataGaNai wrote: post #150
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…

Yea. Love gitlab but the pricing does add up quickly. Even if with all the features, it's really hard to get value out of Gold/Ultimate. When I add up all the major SaaS apps an average user has: SSO, Email, Chat, Storage, Zoom, Support. Combined, GitLab Ultimate costs 2-3x that. And I promise you that as much as we all hate a messy inbox, email is more broadly useful than GitLab. The other problem with ultimate is t…

> The $100/user/month model

It's not a high number of accounts before you can have a person dedicated 50% of the time to just running a local gitlab setup with any options you want. Including infra costs + on-demand CI/CD.

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

#166

Post by johannes1234321 »

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…

One approach for solving that can be (but might not work always) to add new features only to more expensive packages. Of course the lower tier users won't be happy with that either, but if there are notable new features they can make an argument.

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

#167

Post by magicalhippo »

john_cogs wrote: post #123
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

I'm struggling to see why you need further research 9 months down the road on such an obvious issue.

Just to put it in perspective, your lowest non-free tier is 50% more expensive than the standard Office365 Business subscription... for which non-dev does this make any kind of sense?

The fact that you then proceed to launch the new prices regardless of having a solution for this obvious issue is to me a really strong indicator that GitLab is not the way to go once we're moving away from the self-hosted JIRA later this year.

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

#168

Post by CMCDragonkai »

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…

The only price tier that is worth it is the silver. The gold/ultimate is just way too expensive. It's a shame that the jump is so crazy for a team of 10, from paying 3K a year to paying over 14K a year.

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

#169

Post by dogma1138 »

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.

If you want your SAST tool to be worth a damn you need to write your own rules, at a minimum configure sources and sinks manually especially in an app that has a lot of dependencies.

Last time I checked the security scanning tools that GitLab provides don’t really allow you to do that, SAST is expensive and also require manpower to manage well I guess if you only want to tick a box it might be worth it but I wouldn’t call the security features of GitLab worth the money you’re paying for especially with a large number of users.

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

#170

Post by TavsiE9s »

GordonS wrote: post #146
deeviant wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Yep, that's exactly the kind of language I'm talking about - wtf does that even mean?

We recently downgraded from Ultimate to Premium exactly because of that: it was not providing us with clear benefits.
Post reply on HN