I really like GitLab the product, and am part of their Hero and Core teams, however, the recent changes and changes pricing adjustments have me doubting if I can continue supporting them.
At work we use their hosted ultimate plan and we were looking to move to their premium but might instead go straight to a self hosted CE instance instead since there is nothing between free and $29/user/month (which is actually $348/user/year because they don't support monthly payments) and the free hosted plan is so crazy restricted.
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.
Sorry, but the recommended system requirements are an absolute joke. They might be OK if you really only do pure code hosting and don't use CI, container/package registries, project planning features and whatnot, but on our instance with 400 users, the sidekiq background jobs alone easily eat 12GB RAM (I had to extend sidekiq to 4 processes just to deal with the load, otherwise GitLab would become unresponsive).
Don't tell them it becomes 40k after taxes or people here won't believe you.
Software Engineers work for $40k net in Europe? Genuinely asking.
Yes. In Germany, if you are a good earner, you pay 42% taxes, plus obligatory healthcare about 900EUR/month, pension fund and unemployment insurance (also all obligatory). So if you earn 100k (which is already a high salary in Germany), you usually end up with less than half net. I know this sounds crazy to US citizens, but this system comes with several advantages which I wouldn't want to miss.
You made me curious and I checked their financial report. Gitlab spent 310M of their total 580M$ of operational costs in sales in 2022. Those seem crazy numbers, I see similar ratios in other financial reports (such as Cloudflare's). On one side it means that those companies are essentially cash positive the moment they cut sales expenses, on the other hand GitLab imho does not provide enough over some competitors su…
Without knowing anything my guess is that they give big discounts to large accounts and write that off as sales/marketing cost. Only that it doesn't work because if you don't give me that price again I'll just pull the plug. This only works if you have no competition.
Oh interesting, good to know.
I couldn't figure out how could they spend more than a million per business day in sales.
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…
I reckon their growth was mostly killed by Microsoft purchasing GitHub and making private repositories free. Most of the open source community seem to be on GitHub anyway so it just removed any incitament for average people to join Gitlab. Once you're invested in one environment it takes something special to move.
Software Engineers work for $40k net in Europe? Genuinely asking.
Yes. In Germany, if you are a good earner, you pay 42% taxes, plus obligatory healthcare about 900EUR/month, pension fund and unemployment insurance (also all obligatory). So if you earn 100k (which is already a high salary in Germany), you usually end up with less than half net. I know this sounds crazy to US citizens, but this system comes with several advantages which I wouldn't want to miss.
To be honest, I feel Europeans are simply being underpaid compared to US FAANG salaries. Not necessarily compared to EU FAANG salaries as they are lower and even if that's case, it's not glaringly obvious (to me at least).
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…
I reckon their growth was mostly killed by Microsoft purchasing GitHub and making private repositories free. Most of the open source community seem to be on GitHub anyway so it just removed any incitament for average people to join Gitlab. Once you're invested in one environment it takes something special to move.
This. A while ago Gitlab was really the better option: mostly free and more features (CI, project management...). Github caught up on features and price so why bother going against the network effect when the alternative is not even better?
- Github Action's design is much better, just look at [1] for example, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit in Gitlab that's not done for some reason - I've had tons of issues with their kubernetes runners, hard to debug spurious system failures - They still don't display the last N bytes of the logs when logs get long, just the first N bytes, which is entirely useless when a build fails - It's awfully slow to navigate…
> The `stages` things is just useless noise, I just wanna specify dependencies please, I don't want to be forced to also put each job in a stage, it's weird. You don't have to. GitLab supports dependencies. Using the `needs:` keyword. It was released in August of 2019. https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2019/08/22/gitlab-12-2-rel...
You still need both `needs: ...` and `stage: ...`
> In GitLab 14.0 and older, you can only refer to jobs in earlier stages.
> In GitLab 14.1 and later you can refer to jobs in the same stage as the job you are configuring.
Personally I only care about GitLab because its open source with a good CI and because of Copilot. If the supreme court says the copilot is fully legal, I would probably just revert to using Github for personal projects(their free tier is just unbeatable), i still use it more than anything else, because everything is on Github. I am excited about Gitea Actions[1], as I feel gitea is generally only missing a decent CI…
What's your preferred CI/CD system to pair with Gitea? I tried Drone once and found the configuration to be nasty, specifically OAuth2 under Docker Compose. Also the Drone UI left a lot to be desired. This was a while ago so grain of salt etc.
Honestly none of the currently available ones.
Tried Drone/woodpecker, but still not good enough, looking forward to gitea actions though!