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

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

#201

Post by aynyc »

sophiabits wrote: post #56
aynyc wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When was GitLab ahead of GitHub? I've been using both for as long as I remember, I always thought GitLab is more marketing than GitHub. Believe or not, I prefer BitBucket because I don't care much for CI integrations.

While you might not value it, GitLab’s CI story was for a long time way better than GitHub and even a number of dedicated CI/CD providers. If you want to build and deploy microservices from a monorepo independently based on what changed in a PR, for instance, then GitLab supports that out of the box whereas you need to hack something together yourself on Buildkite. GitHub actions has significantly reduced the gap, an…

Ah, I see. I never bother with CI features. I was playing with all the CI providers when they came out. Never truly got comfortable with them to run my personal projects. At work, we can't use those anyway.

Thanks for pointing that out!

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

#202

Post by gbourne »

kiratp wrote: post #105
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…

A developer costs about 250K a year all up. That doesn’t include opportunity cost. 49, 40 hour weeks a year = $127.55 an hour. 29* 7 * 12 / (127.55) = 19.09 hours If it takes you more than 2.3 dev days (100% productive) you’re negative ROI doing it yourself. This math doesn’t even factor in the opportunity cost of doing this.

I think the point is too many times developers are a penny wise and a pound foolish when it comes to build vs buy. Because they can build, and it is often fun if you haven't done it before.

Though I often don't take my own advice, I try to ask is what I'm about to build core to our ROI/product, is there an existing solution that gets us 80% there, and yes, what is the cost.

If it is not core to the business, won't drive revenue, and cost are not outrageous, which is a company by company truth, then I much prefer to spend X time building new product than recreating an existing product/tool.

One final point - don't forget to consider the maintenance costs, which in the long term often greater then the initial investment. If your CI goes down, you just blew away and savings you were planning on.

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

#203

Post by lazypenguin »

gbourne wrote: post #202
kiratp wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A developer costs about 250K a year all up. That doesn’t include opportunity cost. 49, 40 hour weeks a year = $127.55 an hour. 29* 7 * 12 / (127.55) = 19.09 hours If it takes you more than 2.3 dev days (100% productive) you’re negative ROI doing it yourself. This math doesn’t even factor in the opportunity cost of doing this.

I think the point is too many times developers are a penny wise and a pound foolish when it comes to build vs buy. Because they can build, and it is often fun if you haven't done it before. Though I often don't take my own advice, I try to ask is what I'm about to build core to our ROI/product, is there an existing solution that gets us 80% there, and yes, what is the cost. If it is not core to the business, won't dr…

There are also maintenance costs with the off the shelf solutions. E.g. Gitlab self-hosted runners don’t handle very large artifacts well and frequently caused CI to timeout. We had to roll our own artifact management system.

In general I agree with you off-the-shelf is usually better but sometimes a custom tailored solution rather than a generic system can be better.

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

#204

Post by spacebanana7 »

awill wrote: post #77

Instead of Gitlab actually attracting more customers, they're trying to extract more money from their existing customers. This never ever goes well. Why can CEOs not see this. I'm moving to GitHub. I've always championed the small guy, but the last couple of years have been terrible for Gitlab users.

I wish that were true but Oracle, Cisco, PayPal etc all seem to have succeeded in pivoting to more extractive business models over growth. At least in terms of earnings.

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

#205

Post by memco »

brasic wrote: post #141
memco wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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)

That's a different thing. Here's some info on deploy tokens: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/deploy_tokens/. It's a one-off username+password pair that can be used for HTTP cloning without setting up SSH keys or creating users. As far as I can tell in Github you use either automatic tokens[1] or personal tokens[2]. Personal tokens look easier to set up, but they are tied to a user and not the repo or organization, which isn't great if you're using this for a company—you have to create a whole separate token user if you don't want it tied to someone's personal account. Automatic tokens require a script to manage.

As nice as this one feature of Gitlab is it is not a major show-stopper. Almost everything we need is available in most git services. So to GGP's point: we are likely to go for the most affordable option even if there's some tradeoffs.

[1]: https://docs.github.com/en/actions/security-guides/automatic... [2]: https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/keeping-your-accou...

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

#206

Post by awill »

spacebanana7 wrote: post #204
awill wrote: post #77

Instead of Gitlab actually attracting more customers, they're trying to extract more money from their existing customers. This never ever goes well. Why can CEOs not see this. I'm moving to GitHub. I've always championed the small guy, but the last couple of years have been terrible for Gitlab users.

I wish that were true but Oracle, Cisco, PayPal etc all seem to have succeeded in pivoting to more extractive business models over growth. At least in terms of earnings.

When you are compared to Oracle, it's always, always, always bad.

A lot of companies want and try to move off OracleDB, but it's really, really hard. I don't think that's the case for moving off Gitlab.

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

#207

Post by maldev »

nimbius wrote: post #21

things like github and gitlab always struck me as oddities. it costs virtually nothing to deploy a containerized gitea and jenkins, or gitlab CE, and you have direct control over its performance and options without any spend. call me old fashioned but these online git-o-matic sites just seem more like rent-seeking during a recession.

I think Github knows that and that's why it's turned into more of a "Social Media" site. Jr Dev's grind it and view it as a gateway to a job. Constant memes about "Green boxes". "Only want my Sr Dev's to have full green!111!!". In reality nobody cares, but you can tell that's how the marketing is going. And it's to the point that if I have a public product, I might as well put it on github and get that stuff for free. Even though I do run gitea in a docker container for 99% of my projects offline.

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

#208

Post by msm_ »

brightball wrote: post #149
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.

In my previous organisation $19/month (IIRC) was a dealbreaker. That was non-US so salaries are lower, and suddenly I had to explain why we absolutely needed the paid version so much (instead of sticking to the free one). To make it worse, most of the people that had access to gitlab were researchers/managers/non-technical people and not actually developers, so only a few people would benefit from the paid version. So we never bought the paid version.

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

#209

Post by brightball »

speedgoose wrote: post #182
brightball wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It adds up. 29$ for GitHub, 19$ for GitHub Copilot, 20$ for ChatGPT Plus, a few codespaces and runners, perhaps 7.5$ for the sadomasochist project managers who wants Jira, and you may get a nice bill at the end of the month. And then you have people like GitKrakken who ask 19$ for a git client, or Teleport who ask 36$ for a ssh client.

It does, but you have to associate these cost as part of the employee expense and not a separate budget line item. An extra $100 / month for tools needed by somebody being paid $5,000+ / month is nothing.
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