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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

#221

Post by acdha »

theptip wrote: post #219
acdha wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also it's all-or-nothing: the security tools are a good example where it could easily be worth paying a reasonable amount for either an optional feature or upgrades for specific users but when that applies a big up-front multiplier to your entire organization it becomes a much harder sale.

Agreed, this is the problem with Gitlab's bloat; the more features they add, the harder it is to justify a cheap price-point like the old $5/month -- and everybody's idea of what should go into the $20/month tier is going to be different. You can't disaggregate the offerings to pay for just the pieces you are interested in. If they are focusing more on the Enterprise side of things, I could see it being a good idea f…

It's especially tricky with some competitors' choices: for example, Github's free dependency update service is a HUGE chunk of the day-to-day security value for most projects and there's not much room to say you can justify a double-digit dollars-per-user-per-month to get the other tools.

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

#222

Post by marcinzm »

john_cogs wrote: post #126
Achshar wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Many of these points come back to "it's easier or cheaper for gitlab this way" which isn't a great way to convince a customer. Some of which seem to actually be "due to our inability to onboard, manage and retain customers in an automated hands off way it's cheaper or easier this way" which is a terrible way to convince customers.

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

#223

Post by ehvatum »

curryst wrote: post #202
TonyTrapp wrote: post #14

So many projects we use at work (including Qt and GitLab) seem to change their subscription plans to something that is much less favorable for smaller development teams. I wonder where this will lead to in the big picture, when more and more small companies can simply no longer justify paying for those subscriptions.

Personally, I think it's a side effect of globalization. All else equal, large companies beat small companies by economy of scale. It follows that larger companies beat large companies. The inevitable outcome is an aggregation of tons of small companies into a small number of very large companies. That changes 2 things for a SaaS company: 1) Large companies pay more (in absolute amounts). They are also likely to be l…

Not all small businesses are stores. A local brewer needs new tooling for their canning line; I’m currently 3d scanning various components and designing replacements that I will machine from stainless and Delrin. I do a lot of this kind of work for local small and mid-sized businesses. I would say that successful local outfits are energetic about making their customers happy and tend to be efficient. I’m sure Siemens could send a team to re-tool this canning line, but it would cost 5x more than having my little company take care of it, and I’m interested in stuff. I don’t mind taking the time to get it right and make it last.

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

#224

Post by twistedpair »

time0ut wrote: post #136
tentacleuno wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tak…

Truth. On Jira Cloud, most painful part of my day, daily. I wish I could say it was free. Far from it.

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

#225

Post by phonon »

enra wrote: post #206
time0ut wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tak…

If anyone is considering switching, we built liner.app as an offline first app, so all interactions are <100ms.

> we built liner.app

linear.app :-)

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

#227

Post by addicted »

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…

Azure Devops is such a good product.

I’m really surprised it doesn’t get more love to be honest.

And the CLI is fully featured and well supported, and makes automating stuff, and building your own UIs ridiculously simple.

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

#228

Post by addicted »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #177
O5vYtytb wrote: post #145

We just recently purchased a license (~200 users) for self-hosted "starter". There was no mention of a change to the pricing models, and this forced change to "premium" doesn't add any value for us. The things that would give us value include multi-level epics, but "ultimate" is just way too expensive. Very disappointed in this direction from Gitlab. I'll be advocating for us to switch platforms.

If you were on starter anyway, why would you this affect you? Just keeping using free?

Starter isn’t the free tier. It’s the self hosted equivalent of Bronze. And that’s also being removed.

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

#229

Post by addicted »

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... .

I’m not sure how pulling the rug out from under paying customers is helping retain paying customers.

And a race to bottom is creating an open source product “GitLab”, funding it with donations, creating a separate company “GitLab.com” which makes money by supporting GitLab, and at some point creating an entirely new product that isn’t open source but making that GitLab while letting the original open source version basically languish into something that is not useful at all.

I’m constantly surprised by why they don’t get more flak. I understand the developers are very active in the HN community and that is appreciated, but GitLab has been among the worse companies in how they’ve treated their open source, and now paying, users.

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

#230

Post by addicted »

temac wrote: post #171
xrd wrote: post #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 th…

Of course you can, it would not be open source / free software otherwise. (Yes, some people are attempting to redefine "open source" to other meanings, but gitlab does no such thing and Open Source GitLab is truly Open Source)

But to be clear, Open a source GitLab is not the same thing as Free GitLab.
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