It's pretty incredible what Gitlab has been able to accomplish considering the market space they're in.
Gitlab from YC to IPO
191–200 of 258 posts
Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO
#192I really like Gitlab, and I wanted to move my team onto their hosted offering, but earlier this year they changed the pricing so abruptly and drastically that it just killed it as an option. It just feels like it does too much, and unless you want to commit to having everyone using it for _everything_ the pricing doesn't seem to make sense.
The pricing model with GitLab is really unfortunate for certain types of companies. For our developers who really do most everything in Gitlab, it's great, but buying the same licenses for literally anyone else who might need to peek in there a couple of times a month? Hell naw. Our spend would be much higher (probably 3-4x) if they allowed some type of reasonable mix of license levels.
Thats is what sales team is for. Talk to them, explain you usecase and set of features you are looking to use, they'll give you a discount based on that. If I remember correctly we managed to get a license for all users who ever need to login, but for the price of number of core active users.
Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO
#193Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
Github is actually a web application, like Gitlab.
Can you download Github and host a private Github instance? No? Then its web-only. Like Google Docs is web-only, while MS Word is offline. Gitlab is hostable software. You can buy and host Gitlab on your own servers, in private. That makes it a fundamentally different market than Github.
>Can you download Github and host a private Github instance?
Yes, that's what Github Enterprise Server is:
https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-server@3.2/admin/overv...
Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO
#195Kudos to GitLab for boldly and successfully going where (almost) no company has gone before - to having a worldwide, distributed workforce. Truly the way of the future, and (IMO) better quality of life for employees once they get used to working remote and stop fighting it. I've been working primarily remote for the past 3 years, and my QOL has never been better. No commute, working hours can be when I feel productive (which tends to be in the evening), and if I'm tired nobody will look at me funny if I take a nap, except maybe my cat.
Most importantly, this forces folks into asynchronous and written communication, which both makes my work less interrupt driven, and reduces reliance on institutional knowledge. I think we're yet to fully realize the benefits of this brave new world. And yes, I'm aware that some folks need water cooler conversations. I don't though.
Sid, if you're reading this, do please write a book on how you did it, so others could replicate your success in terms of geographic distribution. Knowing the legal / accounting / tax pitfalls, and how to avoid getting screwed when hiring abroad would be pretty invaluable to others.
Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO
#196Gitlab is definitely very neat. But I always worry when these sorts of companies go to IPO. What is their financial situation like? Are they currently able to become profitable without drastically changing the deal with users?
Well they're currently trying to test that hypothesis via A/B tests:
https://forum.gitlab.com/t/cant-open-the-signin-page-it-keep...
Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO
#197Gitlab's IPO would also mark the first ever 100% distributed company to IPO. Wild!
Elastic (NYSE: ESTC) was pretty much a fully distributed team upon IPO. They had offices, but they were more like "coworking cafes", where folks who happened to be in the same geographic area would meet up, or have social celebrations. At least, that's my understanding, tracking the company since its early days. On a recent podcast, Shay Banon described it as a fully distributed team of 2,000+ folks.[1] They IPO'ed i…
> They had offices
And Gitlab doesn't.
Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Github makes you do a ton of goofy side work to get simple things you'll expect in Gitlab/etc to work. Want to check out multiple repos? You'll need someone with org admin to create a service account and to manually pull each repo in a CI step with that service accounts token. This means tons of people are using their own PATs to get around "who is the github org admin?" sort of stuff. I could go on and on, Github Ac…
No idea why you've been downvoted. Gitlab CI is lightyears ahead of Github Actions, it's a fact.
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Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO
#199Congratulations to the team. It’s rewarding to make it through, but don’t make the product shittier just because you are big now.
Re: Gitlab from YC to IPO
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
GitHub is Microsoft now. Not going to lie, simply keeping my code away from MS is a good enough use case.
Microsoft is the largest open source organization in the world today. What else do they need to do to gain some kind of trust? I love what they do with Github since the acquisition. VSCode is amazing. They've open source most of their programming language. Github is free for open source org and there are no limits to the CI usage. Trusting Gitlab more than Github is naive at this point. They are in the position of ne…
Largest open source organization based on what metrics ? They havent open up any of their bread making products.