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Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model

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Re: Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model

#251

Post by pfranz »

slivanes wrote: post #200
ShakataGaNai wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea. Love gitlab but the pricing does add up quickly. Even if with all the features, it's really hard to get value out of Gold/Ultimate. When I add up all the major SaaS apps an average user has: SSO, Email, Chat, Storage, Zoom, Support. Combined, GitLab Ultimate costs 2-3x that. And I promise you that as much as we all hate a messy inbox, email is more broadly useful than GitLab. The other problem with ultimate is t…

Can you create an account e.g: gitlab@mycompany.com and get all your Gitlab users to use/share that account? I understand that this type of usage would only be suitable for small teams.

Ugg. I've seen that system used at other places and it's miserable. Devs had accounts but users and interns used a shared account. You get a vague ticket opened and they forgot to add their name. Also, would updates get blasted to everyone at the company? I'm pretty sure our's just turned them off for that account. So they don't get pinged when the ticket is resolved or needs feedback.

Re: Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model

#252

Post by raro11 »

SulfurHexaFluri wrote: post #192
raro11 wrote: post #48

We have a small development team (20) but 100+ clients that have reporter role. We are in the process of moving out some clients so we could use Starter. Premium was too expensive because reporters count as a user and guests are only free in Ultimate. So now we are looking for alternatives, which sucks because as a developer I really liked Gitlab. Does anyone have any recommendations?

There is a feature that lets non users report issues via email which might be usable. It would prevent them participating in more advanced issue tracking and seeing other users issues though.

We tried it but it didn't work out for us.

You don't know what your issue description was after you send an issue through service desk. You just get a generic reply that starts as the email-chain.

The issue templating doesn't work obviously, the quality of created issues drop.

Re: Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model

#253

Post by ilmiont »

Almost all the comments in this thread can be summarised as:

GitLab: your product is great; your pricing is madness.

This removal of Starter doesn’t seem to have helped anyone except GitLab. You really need to look at how you’re pricing your service and seriously consider much stronger user role management.

GitLab pricing is unworkable for many smaller teams, so we stay on Free and give you nothing at all. The pricing actively discourages whole-org adoption - no way are we paying $19/mo for a non-dev user who would rarely use the system. So we pay nothing at all and keep everyone on free, because that user does still need some access, so you get nothing at all.

To be clear - I love GitLab and I want to pay for more features. I don’t want Premium for nothing but the way it’s billed is completely impractical and hard to get value from for small dev teams, as we have to think very carefully about who gets an account.

I would love it if you’d think about allowing different users on an instance to have a different plan - like with Microsoft 365, where some users have the full works and others just have an email inbox. I need 5 Premium users, 3 Starter users and 2 Free users, for example. You’d now be getting payment for 8 users instead of 0 in my scenario!

Not all my users need Premium; some do. Consequently, we all stay on Free, because I can only justify/afford the pricing for the handful of Premium licenses I actually need.

I really hope this makes sense - there is money waiting for you, and I know many other small dev shop owners feel the same way, but you’re not doing anything to claim it!

You need to look within yourself and work out how you can sell your product to smaller teams in a way that makes sense for everyone. It kinda feels like you just don’t care about your roots anymore and that you only want Ultimate users on your service; I hope you don’t make the mistake of turning your back on the users who started you off and who vocally endorse and support your product.

Re: Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model

#254

Post by webmaven »

stirlo wrote: post #217
itronitron wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking at their pricing page, it seems that the Ultimate tier, and even the premium tier, has a lot of features that many of their customers will never use. I am assuming that the pricing plan is set by deployment and not by user, otherwise a company could buy 5 Ultimate seats, 20 Premiums, and the rest join for free. There is no point in buying Ultimate for 100 users when only 5 of them would ever want to use the U…

From the FAQ on their pricing page: "Can I acquire a mix of licenses? No, all users in the group need to be on the same plan." Which is frankly stupid. You make more money from 20 devs on ultimate and the rest of the company (100) on silver than you get from having 25 devs + essential managers on the ultimate plan and no one else using it at all. Let alone the number of customers who will look for 120 licenses for th…

> You make more money from 20 devs on ultimate and the rest of the company (100) on silver than you get from having 25 devs + essential managers on the ultimate plan and no one else using it at all.

That only has to be true WRT revenue. Depending on the margins (which, in the case of loss-leaders, are negative), it might not be true for profits

Re: Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model

#255

Post by globular-toast »

ShakataGaNai wrote: post #150
dak1 wrote: post #62

We recently spent a couple weeks going over pricing with a GitLab regional Account Leader. We already use GitLab for all our source repos, CI/CD pipelines, and had been using it for issue management as well — all fully self-hosted. The hope was to drop Jira, which was also being used for project planning, and fully adopt GitLab, but the costs were simply unjustifiable. Basically GitLab ended up being a full order of…

Yea. Love gitlab but the pricing does add up quickly. Even if with all the features, it's really hard to get value out of Gold/Ultimate. When I add up all the major SaaS apps an average user has: SSO, Email, Chat, Storage, Zoom, Support. Combined, GitLab Ultimate costs 2-3x that. And I promise you that as much as we all hate a messy inbox, email is more broadly useful than GitLab. The other problem with ultimate is t…

Yep. We upgraded from free to starter to get one feature. Now everyone is really careful about who to let on Gitlab because too many would bump us up to the next pricing bracket. We might even go back to free.

Re: Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model

#256

Post by leipert »

TavsiE9s wrote: post #172
leipert wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitLab employee here. Just asked the Product Manager responsible. Project Access Tokens [0] will be available on Premium for GitLab.com and available on Free for self-hosted. [0]: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/settings/project_acc...

But not in the CE?

Not working on the feature, but it seems to be available in CE. We disable it for GitLab.com because the feature has some potential to be abused:

- CE: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/d0b75f214f67345c...

- EE: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/d0b75f214f67345c...

(I think Project Access Tokens create bot users under the hood that are associated with the token. So if one were to create hundreds of tokens that means hundreds of users.)

Re: Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model

#257

Post by solidnerd »

sjburt wrote: post #201
Twixes wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love GH Actions so much, though would love dive into GitLab's CI/CD too if anyone has good resources on that.

Gitlab's CI/CD a minefield of bad design decisions piled upon each other. Not worth it unless you're stuck with it.

Would be interested what are your current Problems ?

Re: Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model

#258

Post by leipert »

Aeolun wrote: post #214
leipert wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitLab employee here. Just asked the Product Manager responsible. Project Access Tokens [0] will be available on Premium for GitLab.com and available on Free for self-hosted. [0]: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/settings/project_acc...

I thought you were going to make the layers easier to understand? :P Different features at different levels between self-hosted and gitlab.com seem counterproductive in that regard.

Certain features are disabled on GitLab.com in order to prevent abuse, are difficult to scale or just make no sense. In the case of the Project Access Tokens, the feature is quite new and it is to prevent abuse. See also the (nephew/niece?) comment I made in the thread (one to the side from yours, one down)

Re: Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model

#259

Post by rleigh »

malikolivier wrote: post #198

We are a small company and have been paying for GitLab's Bronze plan for about two years now. We have about 5 devs, but the bulk of our GitLab users are non-technical (sales, customer support, etc.) who probably do not even know what git is. Those users are lurkers, but their input can be valuable and if possible I'd like them to be able to login onto GitLab. Getting billed $228/users/year upfront is a harsh blow. I…

I'm currently just using a single-user Bronze subscription for consulting work. I was previously thinking of adding customers and other end users to the plan, but it already gets far too expensive. None of these users would be developers; it would primarily be so they could download sources, read and comment on issues, and generally observe what was going on.

The one-size-fits-all fixed-tier subscription makes no sense from the point of view of an end user. I would love to have users/projects with differing access levels. Likewise, GitLab is too bloated; I might want one or two features from the higher tiers but I can't justify paying for them. Why not let people pay for the features they actually need selectively?

I've also not been too impressed by the inflexibility of GitLab's billing practices. Not only is it fixed annual subscription, if you don't pay by auto-renewal you have to renew the subscription on a specific week. You can't even pay them in advance! I was effectively forced into the auto-renewal due to not being around on that specific week, and in the following year when I was winding up the company and finalising the accounts, I got a surprise bill due to that coerced auto-renewal. I was not happy with that. They really need to get their billing system sorted out.

Re: Gitlab is moving to a three-tier product subscription model

#260

Post by jacquesm »

Ayesh wrote: post #235
jacquesm wrote: post #17

Remember when you make a pricing model for your company: you can never change it without some kind of backlash unless you can make things cheaper . So it's fine to charge a bit more initially and figure things out as you go, you can then lower the price once you've worked the numbers and/or have to respond to competitive pressure. But changing your model will upset your customers, no matter how well you intend it and…

If you increase the pricing by 475%, and only 400% customers left, it's still a net win.

I can't tell if this comment is meant sarcastically but if 100% of your customers leaves you are dead in the water. Most companies would not survive a 50% drop, especially not companies where network effects and evangelism are a strong factor in their survival. Gitlab is one of those.
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