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Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

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Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#101

Post by yebyen »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #95

One thing that always confuses me about the business factors in this kind of announcement, where they say that the vast majority of users won't be effected: > We evaluted CI/CD minute usage and found that 98.5% of free users use 400 CI/CD minutes or less per month. Okay, so just that 1.5% of free users, each using at most 1600 minutes more than the 400 under the new limits... is enough cost to actually matter and mak…

The math works out if you presume that 20% or more of that 1.5% is converted into a paying customer. If I was using GitLab that much and could pay $20 to support GitLab but wasn't already a paid subscriber, I probably would think about it. (I'm thinking about it now, and I don't even use GitLab.)

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#103

Post by TimWolla »

lacker wrote: post #98
jrochkind1 wrote: post #95

One thing that always confuses me about the business factors in this kind of announcement, where they say that the vast majority of users won't be effected: > We evaluted CI/CD minute usage and found that 98.5% of free users use 400 CI/CD minutes or less per month. Okay, so just that 1.5% of free users, each using at most 1600 minutes more than the 400 under the new limits... is enough cost to actually matter and mak…

This sort of thing happens a lot when you first set up a free plan. Some part of it turns out to cost more money than you expected, and it’s a small but growing segment. If you’re going to have to pull back in it eventually, why wait? Waiting might just annoy twice as many people when you inevitably have to introduce stricter limits later.

> and it’s a small but growing segment

They could have grandfathered the existing accounts into the 2000 minutes. Then the segment would no longer be growing and stay small, no?

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#104

Post by bsder »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #95

One thing that always confuses me about the business factors in this kind of announcement, where they say that the vast majority of users won't be effected: > We evaluted CI/CD minute usage and found that 98.5% of free users use 400 CI/CD minutes or less per month. Okay, so just that 1.5% of free users, each using at most 1600 minutes more than the 400 under the new limits... is enough cost to actually matter and mak…

> Or they anticipated that number going up if they didn't make the change?

Do CI/CD minutes ever go down once you start? I suspect not.

They probably plotted the trend line and realized that they had to do something.

Or, it could be bifurcated. Most people use like 2 minutes but 1 in 100 use 2000 minutes.

They may also be tracking and saw that people were using the free 2,000 minutes as "overflow" with multiple accounts.

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#105

Post by foota »

TimWolla wrote: post #103
lacker wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This sort of thing happens a lot when you first set up a free plan. Some part of it turns out to cost more money than you expected, and it’s a small but growing segment. If you’re going to have to pull back in it eventually, why wait? Waiting might just annoy twice as many people when you inevitably have to introduce stricter limits later.

> and it’s a small but growing segment They could have grandfathered the existing accounts into the 2000 minutes. Then the segment would no longer be growing and stay small, no?

Except in this case individual users will also grow. You'd have to do something like grant them their current usage plus some buffer (without letting them know ahead of time maybe, since otherwise this is gameable).

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#106

Post by echelon »

nialv7 wrote: post #100
jrochkind1 wrote: post #95

One thing that always confuses me about the business factors in this kind of announcement, where they say that the vast majority of users won't be effected: > We evaluted CI/CD minute usage and found that 98.5% of free users use 400 CI/CD minutes or less per month. Okay, so just that 1.5% of free users, each using at most 1600 minutes more than the 400 under the new limits... is enough cost to actually matter and mak…

These are carefully constructed truthful statistic lies. Of all the free users, how many of them even have a repository? Out of all the users who have a repository, how many of them actually make any use of CI/CD? They are saying "1.5%" to make it sounds small, but those 1.5% could account for a significant portion of total minutes of CI/CD used.

Great point.

And I guarantee you that they did the math to optimize for conversion and churn. Behind all product decisions are an army of analysts.

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#107

Post by contravariant »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #95

One thing that always confuses me about the business factors in this kind of announcement, where they say that the vast majority of users won't be effected: > We evaluted CI/CD minute usage and found that 98.5% of free users use 400 CI/CD minutes or less per month. Okay, so just that 1.5% of free users, each using at most 1600 minutes more than the 400 under the new limits... is enough cost to actually matter and mak…

It wouldn't surprise me if 90% (or more) of their free users use exactly 0 minutes of CI/CD per month.

So then it's more like 1 in 6 of the people that do use CI/CD need more than 400 minutes per month.

Just to be clear, these numbers are completely made up. They seem reasonable though.

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#108

Post by sytse »

echelon wrote: post #106
nialv7 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are carefully constructed truthful statistic lies. Of all the free users, how many of them even have a repository? Out of all the users who have a repository, how many of them actually make any use of CI/CD? They are saying "1.5%" to make it sounds small, but those 1.5% could account for a significant portion of total minutes of CI/CD used.

Great point. And I guarantee you that they did the math to optimize for conversion and churn. Behind all product decisions are an army of analysts.

We certainly did the math. And a small percentage of the users generate a large percentage of the CI minutes. Hence the change.

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#109

Post by darau1 »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #95

One thing that always confuses me about the business factors in this kind of announcement, where they say that the vast majority of users won't be effected: > We evaluted CI/CD minute usage and found that 98.5% of free users use 400 CI/CD minutes or less per month. Okay, so just that 1.5% of free users, each using at most 1600 minutes more than the 400 under the new limits... is enough cost to actually matter and mak…

Don't forget the fact that you have the option of running pipelines on your own machines. I do this for all my projects, and only really use shared runners by mistake when I forget to set it up.

I am a little dismayed to find out that open source projects no longer get unlimited minutes, though.

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