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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

#291

Post by smcleod »

viraptor wrote: post #165
ShakataGaNai wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't think that's the case, it's pretty set and forget for 100-2000 user installs, generally you're only touching it during upgrades as required.

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

#292

Post by gfxgirl »

riknos314 wrote: post #234
gfxgirl wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$1200 a year is expensive but you mentioned artists. Autodesk Maya is $1600 a year, 3DSMax is $1600 a year, Houdini is $500 a year, Zbrush is $900 a year, Adobe creative suite is $630 a year. I'm not saying you want to add another $1200 a year to that. Just putting it in perspective to "artist" expenses

The argument here is that if you want an artist to have access to your instance - even if only to occasionally use features that are available in the free tier - you have to shell out the full $1200/year. Something like Maya or 3DSMax is something an artist can reasonably be expected to use a lot of the functionality of the product pretty often. Expecting an artist to use the majority of a gitlab license on a daily b…

I don't use gitlab but github has issue and project planning. I'd expect every team member to use those. Further, github issues supports easy images and videos. Great for artists, and designers to track things. Assuming gitlab does the same I'd expect the same there.

Maybe there are better solutions and so you don't want your artists do that there.

It goes the same the other way. As a programmer I've always needed a license to the same 3d software the artists are using even though I don't use it daily I might need to write or debug an exporter or script.

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

#293

Post by apple4ever »

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…

Not surprised. I rail on this all the time. One of my major problems is only the Ultimate allows free guest users.

Its a big reason we haven't paid for GitLab. And we are also looking to go toward Github for that reason and some others too (and those others might be solved if we paid for support, but see the first reason).

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

#294

Post by apple4ever »

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...

None of these is convincing, mostly because "its better for Gitlab".

I don't care. I want what's better for our company.

And right now, that is not paying for GitLab.

It sucks because I am an evangelist for GitLab, but I'm fighting a losing battle and we will be switching paid Github over free GitLab because of things like this.

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

#295

Post by apple4ever »

stirlo wrote: post #217
itronitron wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 U…

From the FAQ on their pricing page: "Can I acquire a mix of licenses? No, all users in the group need to be on the same plan." Which is frankly stupid. You make more money from 20 devs on ultimate and the rest of the company (100) on silver than you get from having 25 devs + essential managers on the ultimate plan and no one else using it at all. Let alone the number of customers who will look for 120 licenses for th…

Their whole pricing scheme is ludicrous, which they defend as "its better for GitLab!"

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

#296

Post by apple4ever »

ilmiont wrote: post #253

Almost all the comments in this thread can be summarised as: GitLab: your product is great; your pricing is madness. This removal of Starter doesn’t seem to have helped anyone except GitLab. You really need to look at how you’re pricing your service and seriously consider much stronger user role management. GitLab pricing is unworkable for many smaller teams, so we stay on Free and give you nothing at all. The pricin…

You really hit the problem exactly.

Instead of doing that, they are removing the Starter tier.

I bet next they'll be double the price, then dropping the free tier.

Then five years later wonder why their company isn't doing well.

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

#297

Post by apple4ever »

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

You've been researching it for 5 years. How about stop researching and just do the easy thing that will bring GitLab lots of money?

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

#298

Post by apple4ever »

gnfargbl wrote: post #92

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…

> I think the problem here is actually the existence of the free plan.

Only because the next paid tier is expensive (even more so now).

I would absolutely pay $5 a month for a higher tier but GitLab doesn't like money I guess.

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

#299

Post by sjburt »

suicas wrote: post #262
sjburt wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gitlab's CI/CD a minefield of bad design decisions piled upon each other. Not worth it unless you're stuck with it.

I'd be interesting in hearing more about some of these. We're currently using GitLab's CI/CD for ~50 or so private repositories, covering ~7 different languages without any issues. That includes testing, Docker builds and documentation generation for most projects. We only use private runners though, I don't know if any issues are related to their own runners.

So runners are a good example: The runner config is stored in a config.toml on the runner. If you want autoscaling runners, it gets very complex so you might want to version control it or back it up, but you have to store your AWS secrets in this config.toml. It also contains hashes that have to be matched with settings in the UI, and of course, tags, which need to be tied into your .gitlab-ci. UI configuration changes take places instantly and there's no undo. So you have configuration in 3 places, only one of which is version controlled. And lets say you have some new runners with new tags -- you aren't going to be able to run an old pipeline on the new runner.

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

#300

Post by Dayshine »

GordonS wrote: post #282
Dayshine wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is such a shame, because Azure DevOps is honestly better (apart from the CI system).

What don't you like about AzDo's CI system?

While technically you can do anything, there's no community discovery of CI scripts like with GitHub.

Afaik there isn't a Checks API equivalent, or it's not uses by the limited range of built-in CI functions.

And finally, the caching is terribly slow. It's faster to reinstall packages than to cache them, meaning you can't run a build in less than 3/4 minutes.

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