Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model

Personally, I think it's a side effect of globalization. All else equal, large companies beat small companies by economy of scale. It follows that larger companies beat large companies. The inevitable outcome is an aggregation of tons of small companies into a small number of very large companies.

That changes 2 things for a SaaS company:

1) Large companies pay more (in absolute amounts). They are also likely to be less of a support burden, since they're a single company so they should be relatively uniform. They're unlike to ask for both AWS and GCP support, but the 1,000 small businesses you need to replace that revenue are likely to ask for AWS, GCP and Azure cumulatively.

2) Small companies are more likely to fail. It's not enough to create a competitive product. They have to create a competitive product at a price that allows them to overcome the economy of scale. Creating an equivalent to Google is great. You're probably still going to pay more per-search than Google is, so they can cut prices until you can't keep up.

> I wonder where this will lead to in the big picture, when more and more small companies can simply no longer justify paying for those subscriptions.

I would argue that we're seeing the fruition of that. The answer is that you go ahead and pay for it. You hope that you can get enough growth to be a company that can afford to pay for it before you run out of money. Or you get acquired by a company whom you're more valuable to, and they can afford to pay for it.

I don't see a viable path forward for small businesses under current circumstances. They can't compete on cost, big businesses are getting really good at emulating small business features (e.g. Spotify does a good job of recommending new music to me, so I don't need the record store to do that), and people are adapting to interfacing with machines instead of humans. I struggle to think of an advantage local stores have other than being able to get the thing you want in less than a day or two.

In theory we have this x,y coordinate system that shows the cost of a feature and the value of the feature. Which is great if you are living in a bubble by yourself, or some similar products. Making someone decide between CI and shared document writing is a terrible choice to have to make.

The other way to present this graph is the classic triangle, Cheap, Good, Fast, but the way we typically use that triangle suffers the same failure mode, because 'expensive' is some weird variant on cheap vs fast, as represented by Brook's Law.

I think the Discord Team has a different interpretation of this - the maintenance cost of the feature matters more to the user than the initial development cost. I can deliver you a feature now that will cost $X a month to operate, or I can deliver you that feature in a couple of months and it'll cost 1/10th that amount. Which means we can offer it to users at a price point they can afford.

It feels like Gitlab has, like so many of us, a bunch of features that create opportunity costs that the customers can't stomach.

If anyone is considering switching, we built liner.app as an offline first app, so all interactions are <100ms.

This is it. My engineering team needs all the features. My product manager only needs basic ticket creation access.

Why are these two types of users costing me the same amount?

In the past few years, my org has gone from Gerrit to Jira, and recently Jira to Gitlab. I'm guessing we're in for another move with these pricing changes.