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

Gitlab loses one-third of its value after company issues weak forecast

cnbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 220 posts

Re: Gitlab loses one-third of its value after company issues weak forecast

#141

Post by brasic »

memco wrote: post #126
gregwebs wrote: post #70

Gitlab pricing used to be something like $4/mo and they saw incredible growth. They raised their rates to $19/mo and now are seeing slow growth. In April they are raising to $29/mo- not sure what they think is going to happen. Also, for anyone that actively watches, they have to wonder if there will be another price hike once you are on their platform. Github Enterprise is only $21/mo and for most users it has all th…

> Github Enterprise is only $21/mo and for most users it has all the same features of Gitlab. Of those things that I like more in Gitlab, it is deploy tokens: an easy way to be able to dole out permission to clone code where needed without having to bother with key management or user management. As far as I can tell GitHub has something like this but it requires setting up an app to talk to the API and isn’t nearly s…

Not sure what you mean. Adding a deploy key is about as simple as I can imagine, definitely doesn’t require messing with apps, which I agree is a pain.

https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/connecting-to-gith...

(disclosure, former GH)

Re: Gitlab loses one-third of its value after company issues weak forecast

#143

Post by erlkonig »

Gitlab has been cursed by a marketing team that seemingly just can't imagine having mixed licensing levels. At a side effect, organizations that would adopt them at the low (free) tier (or just above) for the whole company, a higher tier for devs, and max tier for project management, etc, just can't. Instead they have to have separate gitlabs to cover the whole organization, which has a whole set of associated annoyances.

I speak from direct experience, at a company that had the mid level, liked the features, but was forced to eventually jettison them for the free tier to cut costs while broadening internal support.

And we reported this problem to them, this basic lack of a mixed tier system, something many customers want. But Gitlab can't seem to get it through marketing's head that being nearly everywhere is better than just running for few large companies. Running everywhere means that many devs would just bring along an expectation of having gitlab as a matter of course, spreading adoption like a beneficial contagion. Instead, any useful level is being priced into irrelevance from a smaller organization's perspective, something many devs will see at prohibitively expensive, and be the fomites for that perspective instead as they move between companies.

The result is terrible. Our company switched to Git on Microsoft Azure. Good job, Gitlab sales (heavy sarcasm). Hey, Gitlab management, have you checked to make sure your sales team isn't secretly taking kickbacks from Microsoft? (yes, I'm probably kidding, right?)...

Re: Gitlab loses one-third of its value after company issues weak forecast

#144

Post by MrFoof »

trowawee wrote: post #122
mettamage wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A developer costs about 250K a year all up. I currently cost more like 80K in euro's if I reason from my employer's side. So tell me, how are you getting to the 250K exactly? Europe exists as well and even in the US there are enough companies that don't pay FAANG salaries.

Even if you throw out SF salaries as a wild outlier, this isn't actually that ridiculous. An average quality mid-career dev (5-10 years exp.) in a second tier market like Chicago/Denver/Austin/Boston can pretty easily make 170-200 in cash. "[A]ll up" is the key here tho; there's a big non-salary component in the US that doesn't exist in Europe. Tack on health insurance and the total cost to the company will easily bl…

Thing is, even in those 2nd tier markets, you're still looking more towards the top. I say this as someone having spreadsheets "I shouldn't have" from folks towards the top of acquisitions into larger companies that do pay well. Companies you've at least heard of, but certainly aren't disrupting a market. No, they're not the ones at the top of your list, but a fair number you'd consider respectable.

There's a lot of companies paying 2/3rds of that cash.

Then there's the bad ones, that are still trying to pay half. Seriously. They're not places you even realize exist, and if you went in for an interview you'd instantly sense you're not where you want to be. Places where you watch managers basically bully interviewees to look for immediate subservience, because they want to ensure they'll "yessir" without hesitation. These places absolutely exist. In all of those markets. I've seen quite a number of them.

-- -----

I know, this isn't what we all try to aspire to here, but I say this as someone with far too much experience with Boston (very specifically), Denver and Austin over the past 20+ years. I've had the "good but not amazing" and many "bad" companies as clients of mine. I've talked to their staff. I've done my damnedest to ensure the good eggs know where they stand in the market, and help them move on if they wanted to.

HN very much looks at 75th percentile on up. But once you go down the ladder in the compensation offered, you'll encounter a ton of people where $170-200K salary or salary+bonus would be a 20-30% bump in their comp in those markets. Then you get to the bad places, where they're legit making half and feel thankful for it.

Re: Gitlab loses one-third of its value after company issues weak forecast

#145

Post by megous »

argella wrote: post #131
megous wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At $29 * 7 * 12 per year it became way cheaper for us to just piece together functionality we needed from nginx+cgit+homegrown database to store users/repos/acl/push info and a few git hooks written in a few lines of PHP. The cost is now independent of the number of developers using the system. So far it did cost ~1 month of paying for github in dev time and I can't imagine it costing much more when we'll want to add…

Why don’t you just run gitlab community edition or gitea

Gitlab is massive piece of software, and has inordinate HW requirements for the job we'd be using it for. Also it would not run on the VM we already have set up for other services, backed up, etc.

Gitea is fun and all, but it's not in debian repo, so would require manual updates. Annoying.

Re: Gitlab loses one-third of its value after company issues weak forecast

#146

Post by megous »

koolba wrote: post #135
megous wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but all we used gitlab for was git repo hosting with push access control for about 40 repositories to allow sharing code via push/pull and not much else (almost no issues/pull requests). It's ridiculous to pay $2500/yr so that 7 people can do push/pull over slow growing set of ~200MiB of data when it can be handled in much more performant way by a 36$/yr (+ a small one time setup cost) VM we already had for runn…

Why were you paying for it then? GitLab has a CE version that’s free for commercial use. It sounds like you just want a pretty interface for git repos with some merge flow.

Running gitlab yourself is just too expensive. Too many docs to read, hard to understand, just too much software in general (just compressed deb package alone is 1GiB in size), hard to backup, hard to debug issues, would require a new separate much more expensive VM, etc. It does weird shit during installation, like contacting letsencrypt and trying to fetch a certificate and failing if the machine is IPv6 only, etc. etc. Recovering from that is not documented anywhere. Too many moving parts. Just sort of blergh for people who like simple solutions.

It doesn't sound like a 1-2hr/year self support software.

Re: Gitlab loses one-third of its value after company issues weak forecast

#147

Post by onion2k »

megous wrote: post #95
gregwebs wrote: post #70

Gitlab pricing used to be something like $4/mo and they saw incredible growth. They raised their rates to $19/mo and now are seeing slow growth. In April they are raising to $29/mo- not sure what they think is going to happen. Also, for anyone that actively watches, they have to wonder if there will be another price hike once you are on their platform. Github Enterprise is only $21/mo and for most users it has all th…

At $29 * 7 * 12 per year it became way cheaper for us to just piece together functionality we needed from nginx+cgit+homegrown database to store users/repos/acl/push info and a few git hooks written in a few lines of PHP. The cost is now independent of the number of developers using the system. So far it did cost ~1 month of paying for github in dev time and I can't imagine it costing much more when we'll want to add…

The problem with a homegrown system is that every developer working within it will see it as a barrier rather than a cost saving. Whenever they can't do something that's trivial on Github/Gitlab it'll be a reminder that the company would rather save $xxx/year than make their job easier.

Ultimately, having a simple, well-integrated, industry standard stack that includes the same tooling every other company uses is a perk of working at a well-funded or profitable company. People leave for less.

Re: Gitlab loses one-third of its value after company issues weak forecast

#148

Post by hamandcheese »

onion2k wrote: post #147
megous wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At $29 * 7 * 12 per year it became way cheaper for us to just piece together functionality we needed from nginx+cgit+homegrown database to store users/repos/acl/push info and a few git hooks written in a few lines of PHP. The cost is now independent of the number of developers using the system. So far it did cost ~1 month of paying for github in dev time and I can't imagine it costing much more when we'll want to add…

The problem with a homegrown system is that every developer working within it will see it as a barrier rather than a cost saving. Whenever they can't do something that's trivial on Github/Gitlab it'll be a reminder that the company would rather save $xxx/year than make their job easier. Ultimately, having a simple, well-integrated, industry standard stack that includes the same tooling every other company uses is a p…

> it'll be a reminder that the company would rather save $xxx/year than make their job easier.

My company has already made this crystal clear by switching to MS Teams.

Re: Gitlab loses one-third of its value after company issues weak forecast

#149

Post by brightball »

gregwebs wrote: post #70

Gitlab pricing used to be something like $4/mo and they saw incredible growth. They raised their rates to $19/mo and now are seeing slow growth. In April they are raising to $29/mo- not sure what they think is going to happen. Also, for anyone that actively watches, they have to wonder if there will be another price hike once you are on their platform. Github Enterprise is only $21/mo and for most users it has all th…

$29 / month as it relates to developer salaries is not impactful.

Re: Gitlab loses one-third of its value after company issues weak forecast

#150

Post by jcrawfordor »

megous wrote: post #133
mardifoufs wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I dislike the gitlab pricing increases, and we are kind of regretting sticking with them (especially since everyone on the Gitlab instance has to pay for a seat, even when not using any of the premium features) considering how Github is cheaper and has a higher release velocity at this point... But to be very fair, we never saw what you describe about memory leaks or slow ruby services. Migrations are also usu…

My bad experience was mostly just with installing gitlab on a 1GiB RAM VM, to see how it will fare and how easy it is to manage. I expect it to work for people who don't mind throwing a 16GiB+ RAM machine at it. But our dataset is currently like ~200 MiB and simple relatively dumb git hosting just works much better in our case.

GitLab should run fine on a machine with 4GB memory - this is the smallest recommended memory allocation, spec'd for up to 500 users. 2GB tends to work okay for testing but 1GB is indeed probably too small for all of the services to start. Postgres actually tends to be the long pole in the tent on small systems.
Post reply on HN