I think we're still on Free, which is awesome and works for us /shrug/. Like they said, we really only need the VCS hosting, though the free static page hosting is nice too.
I just looked through the feature list, the security stuff is interesting but it requires a strange scenario where your employees are pushing malicious code to the repo (maybe this happens often and I've just never heard of it). Much of the Agile/project tracking stuff is in Jira/Basecamp/Asana/TeamCity (or GitHub projects + issues can be used if your needs are small). Some of the other stuff is done by a myriad of GitHub actions/bots (you'd have to spend some time getting that the way you want it though)
If you want everything integrated together this is probably fine, but GitHub Enterprise + Jira Premium is $35 per user per month (and every other project management tool is cheaper and better than Jira, just about). I don't know what the value add is here, other than self-hosting. (Or at least, the $65 value add).
Depends on your needs, Jira has lots of features and plugins.
We're building Linear, focusing on speed and providing sane defaults that sense for software companies. The app offline first so all interactions are <100ms. Sprints, projects, roadmaps, multiple teams, GitHub/Gitlab/Sentry supported etc supported. Lot of YC startups and growth companies (100-300 engineers) use us.
We migrated away from Jira to YouTrack, which is quite flexible. Speed wise it's not too bad, could be snappier. But it is really flexible with full APIs. Jetbrains also has "Spaces" which is more simplified but has other toys.
Security stuff is interesting even in the case where all your employees are saints.
If you are building a docker image for example, you likely are doing a pull from docker hub, the security scanning software can help you catch security issues there.
It can also help with things like dependencies in your node projects, python projects and more (at least, that is what the security scanning software we use at $work does, I assume gitlab is similar).
It's not about employees pushing malicious code, it's about catching issues with dependencies further up the stack, to make sure that the end result you are pushing to your servers/users is not vulnerable.
Github Actions, Github Checks API already offers more ways to extend it than GitLab. GitLab is really disappointing in that regard. Even for $99/mo you don't get it. There is also barely an ecosystem around GitLab.
Today, we’re making GitHub Enterprise Server 3.0 available as a release candidate. Announced in the GitHub Universe Keynote, it’s the biggest ever change to Enterprise Server, bringing customers:
* Actions – developer-first workflow automation and CI/CD
* Packages – publish and consume packages together with code
* Mobile Apps (beta)- iOS and Android apps for collaborating from any device
For companies interested in automating code security with GitHub Advanced Security, we’re also bringing:
* Code scanning – scan every pull request for known vulnerabilities with CodeQL
* Secret scanning (beta) – detect credentials in code before they hit production
When I took a break from my startup, I ended up working for a fintech company and you will be surprised by
a) how much money they have
b) how little understanding of tech they have
For many non-traditional tech companies, they feel spending more money, will help offset tech deficiencies. In the same way that, novice golfers equate spending more money on golf equipment will make them better golfers.
The place I work is on Premium currently. I was starting to look into using some of their application security tools until I realized like 90% of them are Ultimate/Gold features. It was a huge bummer, especially because I don't have the case yet for getting us to upgrade to Ultimate just for those features.
The question for Premium to Ultimate is "are you using GitLab for project and requirements management?"
For that, the ultimate tier is now competing with a Jira suite, or something that PMs use made by Microsoft or a similar type of product.
The licensing for the project management tool can easily run $50+/month/user
Add in the "business/customer access to the issue tracking" and if you've got Jira or similar, that adds on a gain a bit more $$.
Next, adding the artifact scanning tools. Yes, you can get them 3rd party... but its another thing to set up.
In the end, picture the 50-100 employee shop where the sysadmin is weighing in on "get GitLab Premium vs GitLab ultimate" and the reduction of additional installs and licenses that need to be managed.
Yea, it it adds $80/user/month, but if it saves an hour or two per user per month in productivity gains - that can make a difference.
In the organization I currently work for, we were considering the options of (GitLab Ultimate) vs (GitLab Premium + Jira + other tools) and ultimately went with the premium and other for a number of reasons... but GitLab Ultimate made a strong showing.
The thing that killed ultimate for us was the fact that there was no ticket manager only role. Why pay 100/mo for a product manager who just fills out tickets. It's absurd.
The permission model that GitLab has is one of the disappointing things about it and part of the reason we went with a different product for issue management (and I frequently grump about it). I'd really like to be able to define my own roles and assign different actions that that role can do.
I feel that it wasn't made to host enterprise products but rather FOSS in competition with GitHub and then made a pivot to enterprise products but not quite moving away from the "this is for FOSS on the web".
Things like "can modify own comments" not being something that can be modified (people updating their own comments and then not being able to go back over it for an audit or information request of some sort) or having a manager role that can administer the members of a project but not the code.
And yea... having to pay $100/month for a product/project manager in a larger org is a rather firm "nope." Have a dozen of those and that's a lot to pay for not much functionality.
A previous company that I worked at... there was a project manager. Just one. It was a small company - I sat across from the other Java developer. In there, were you've got a small organization where $100/month for a PM is a lot to swallow, but its only $100/month for one PM (and then you get all the other features that saves you from having to hire another operations person) - that's not as hard a price to swallow.
There the thing would be "ok, we've got 10 people at $20/month and all this other stuff that we need to set up on our own, so $200/month vs 11 people at $100/month and a bunch that we don't need to set up on our own $1100" -- the "is it worth $900 for the rest of the infrastructure done for us - along with dumping trello for gitlab issues" and the answer would probably be "yes."
We've used GitLab CE internally for source code control + CI/CD since May 2014 (6+ years) and are currently evaluating their paid offerings as an overall replacement to Jira.
Based on my observations so far, Ultimate is quite expensive when you have an "all in" approach. Every user, despite whether they would use the feature set must be licensed as Ultimate under the current model.
I really wish there was some flexibility in how the licensing model works — right now, the all in approach is prohibitive to bringing on new users, as you need to justify the $1,200 upfront cost per user added — not all users / projects need to be licensed under the same tier — some user's needs are basic and cannot justify the cost of a license.
--
Some thoughts on how this could be addressed...
A) Assign a licence tier to a user (ie: Some users get Ultimate features, others are on premium with limited access to features)
B) Assign licenses based on projects — if a project has "Ultimate" features enabled, all users in that project count towards an "Ultimate" seat
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.
(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.)
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)
ok, this might suck. We are on bronze right now and yes there where some things in silver that would have been nice to have it was never worth the costs per user to upgrade (especially because a lot of features already in bronze are not things we actually use or need), this might mean we either switch to free or abandon gitlab if there is an alternative.
> especially because a lot of features already in bronze are not things we actually use or need
This has been my org's issue as well. We use dedicated, external products for project management, CI, binary asset storage, container registry, wiki, etc etc. I get that a one-stop shop might be really valuable for a small org with basic needs that align well to what GitLab supplies, but I don't know if it scales up all that well. I would worry about getting partly migrated and then discovering some functionality gap, and maybe finding out that the GitLab team that built that feature no longer exists and there was basically no one maintaining it any more.
Spreading themselves so thin does have a real cost— here's an example of recently-resolved ticket for something that I would consider core "repository" functionality (LFS content inclusion in the tarball) but that sat unfixed and unnoted-in-docs for almost four years: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/15079
We did evaluate silver (now premium), and it wasn't worth it. We will probably upgrade, but this is a 5x increase on the price, and as a long term contributor of Gitlab, this does definitely make me angry.
Hi! GitLab Team Member here. Our Premium tier comes with 10,000 minutes per organization per month. You can also buy additional minutes or use your own infrastructure as runners (which would be at no charge from GitLab).
So many projects we use at work (including Qt and GitLab) seem to change their subscription plans to something that is much less favorable for smaller development teams. 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.
Probably into another cycle of cheap products to which you'll migrate to, which will then increase prices and again and again until someone realizes that running sustainable services costs money.
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.
Not all small businesses are stores. A local brewer needs new tooling for their canning line; I’m currently 3d scanning various components and designing replacements that I will machine from stainless and Delrin. I do a lot of this kind of work for local small and mid-sized businesses. I would say that successful local outfits are energetic about making their customers happy and tend to be efficient. I’m sure Siemens could send a team to re-tool this canning line, but it would cost 5x more than having my little company take care of it, and I’m interested in stuff. I don’t mind taking the time to get it right and make it last.
In the past, I considered buying a subscription to show some support but the silver tier was too much for that and the bronze tier had nothing compelling. To be honest even silver/premium only had "pull mirroring" that seemed relevant to my individual use cases.
Just within the last 7-10 days or so, I added a task to my "to-do" list to upgrade my personal account to GitLab's lowest cost ($48/year) tier.
I don't actually need any of the features from that tier but I absolutely do* get value from my (personal) use of GitLab (mostly centered around / related to my fairly extensive home lab) and wanted to support the company. I'm not aware of any way to make a donation so I decided I'd just pay the $48/year to upgrade my account as an alternative.
I've been working on a (personal, "offline") project for about the last week and a half -- meaning so I've not been sitting at my workstation during that time -- or else I almost certainly would have just upgraded to the now defunct bronze/starter plan.
Maybe I'll just buy some extra CI/CD minutes (which I don't use) or something similar as a way to show support for the company by giving them a few dollars.
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 there will always be a backlash, especially from developers for tools because there is always going to be someone else that does it cheaper. Rely on the 'cost too switch' once too often and you will shed users and users that leave will never come back. It is easier to attract a new user than it is to get someone that got burned to return.
Do what you can to get it right the first time and build in some room. And if you do have to change it be willing to grandfather in the users that got you there for ever.
Everything you said makes sense -- but at the same time, when building a SaaS offering, your initial product may have much less functionality than what you eventually plan to build.
If you start at the price you want to charge in the end, people will look at the product and say, you expect me to pay $X for that?
One thing that may work is to offer early adopters a lower price, and keep them at that price forever, while charging later customers more. But to do that, you need to raise the price for new customers early and often -- otherwise you'll end up with too many people at the lower price. And if your costs scale with the scope of your product, that could mean you're losing money on a large fraction of your users.
There's a difference between changing the pricing model and raising prices.
gitlab is changing their pricing model; as near as I can tell, they want to be a source control / jira / CI all-in-one environment. My guess is the willingness to pay vs github for just plain source control isn't there.
:shrug:
This is the risk with saas though. Customers are adults; they can choose to continue using your product or not. If customers don't want the saas they buy to be able to change models or raise prices, their choices are (1) don't use it; or (2) sign annual or even multiyear agreements. And if a company evaluates software that won't make multiyear commitments to them, they should take that unwillingness into account when choosing which vendor to use.
In other industries for example gaming and desktop tools, people eventually just ship a new version that existing users have to buy again. For continuously deployed web products a repricing is the only way to frame it in customer's minds.
It’s a subscription, so you’re rebuying it every month/year whether you want the new features or not. I miss the days when you bought something and could use it forever, and only had to re-up if the next version was actually so much better as to be worth the cost.
* Grandfather current customers, which gitlab did at near minimum here (current year / ~no changes ?). ~Lifetime / tier would be better, esp as a growing co should be fine here revenue wise. Better current customers sing your praises internally + externally than say you're yet another couldn't-care-less quarter-driven bigco / sales-driven vc co: growth wins.
* Put new stuff in new plans/tiers. Gitlab VPs seem to be choosing a weak balance here.
I'm all for offering higher prices. Trick is, when adding stuff, people should pay more for more, and same / less for standing still. Let hungrier/spendier teams spend more, and cost-sensitive ones happily spread the good word.
Not what happened here? Gitlab seems big enough that all this doesn't really matter though, they are probably reaching a customer size and capital-intensitive enough moat that they don't care toooo much.
---
A good contrast is github / microsoft, which also is way into clever pricing:
- Way cheaper per-user at all tiers. We got tier-shifted at some point, but don't recall any pricing funniness during that.
- Adding customer abilities to spend infinite amounts, but via new layers, like pay-as-you-go CI/CD offerings that do not gauge existing users. I expect the prices to go down, not up, as they figure out more scaling tricks / computing improves and they try to get users more addicted.
GH/MS is probably working on a much bigger timescale than GitLab, as GH doesn't need to look at juicing numbers to fundraise / sell while buyers are willing, and instead focus on being a friendly shift-left answer to AWS/GCP
My last employer had been on the same GH tier for over 6 years or something like that, and was on a much older tier.
It lacked some of the new features, but the price-point was right for our team size, and we weren't yet at the point where the newer features (ci/cd stuff like Actions) were worth the cost hike.
We were planning on switching tiers to get the new features, which is exactly what you described. Let those who want the new things pay for them if/when they decide to make the switch.
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 Ultimate features.
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 the entire company and dismiss the entire product suite as they can't afford it.
> 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
One approach for solving that can be (but might not work always) to add new features only to more expensive packages. Of course the lower tier users won't be happy with that either, but if there are notable new features they can make an argument.
I generally agree. We've always taken the "grand-fathering" approach, but it can get a bit more complicated as your product and offerings grow. If someone was paying $XX /mo for your initial offering, and a few years later, you're able to provide a number of new features within that product, I don't think you necessarily need to continue providing those extra features simply because someone signed up earlier.
To your point, you may face a backlash. But it also costs a lot of time and $$ to support new development and features. Therefore, having some backlash may still be the right decision in the medium/long term. Can be hard to weather that storm initially, though.
The features that they paid for in the first year have already been paid for by the customers. While it costs the vendor time and money for new features it doesn't cost them money for old features. Therefore under a subscription model that payment should be covering the cost of new features.
I think I'd reply to this with a "yes and no" kinda thing. For us, maintaining anything requires time and $$. This is, in part, because technology changes. Even in a vacuum with no new active development, money and $$ is required to ensure everything stays up and running.
eg. as our use base has grown, so too has our database. And so while the optics of it from the end-user POV is that the product has remain unchanged, we've had to invest in database and scaling services in order to continue to meet the initial offerings.
It's not as simple as that, but you probably get the gist of it.
A more relevant example might be a web service that emails you once a week. If the mailing service that powers this requires DNS or integration changes to help fight spam, over time that will require time (and perhaps $$).
If I'm misunderstanding your point, let me know :)
I’m by no means a marketing expert, but showing your early users respect, courtesy, and-dare I say it-loyalty, seems intuitive to me but also less and less common in today’s Anything As A Service (pronounced like “ass”) tech environment. I don’t miss months-long sales cycles, prohibitive up-front costs, oppressive support contracts, etc., but I do miss having companies that will bend over backward to retain long-time customers. Everything has become a transaction, and every customer is just a fraction of a company’s overall revenue. I’m not dissing GitLab as I am not (yet) a paying customer, just commenting on the state of software in general.
I remember an in-person presentation by Unbounce talking about their pricing model. They realized that anyone paying less than $99/month was not worth their time, so they removed those plans, barely reducing their monthly revenue, and focused on the high-end customers.
Looking at their pricing structure today, I see $80 being the lowest tier, going all the way to $300
Depending on your market, killing off cheaper plans might barely impact your revenue at all... right up until you stop getting bigger contacts because there's no on-ramp customers to try your services before going all-in.
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.
It's also really difficult to work out the impact of this. The feature comparison never really seems to include important git features, just headline sales features.
This was a while ago, so I imagine things will have changed but:
1. As the dev of a code quality tool, it was (and still is) super unclear to me which tiers allow test reports, or custom reports.
2. For at least 6 months it was very unclear which tiers got true Jira "smart commits". The solution was simply to rewrite the docs to not use that wording, and push users to pay for a Jira extension rather than support it in Gitlab shrug.
Do you have a list of features that were promoted from starter to premium or free? We invested a lot of time to evaluate features and decided on starter. Now it's confusing to understand what features we're gaining/losing if we go to premium or free.
We don't need all those features, what we need is a competitive alternative to bitbucket. Your Bronze plan although more expensive was that. I was able to make the argument to switch to gitlab even thought bronze was a bit more but I can't make that for going to this tier.
Never forget that there's a 4th tier plan: host it yourself. With containers it is really easy to setup a GitLab instance.
It isn't difficult to integrate GitLab with other tools. We are a Gov company and it is really easier to put man power to customize it than to climb all the bureaucratic hurdles to buy it.
Exactly the same as with the hosted version. All you would gain is unlimited CI minutes but you can configure the hosted one to use your own CI runner anyway.
What's the justification for the self-managed and SaaS products being priced the same? That isn't intended to be snarky but a legitimate question, by the way.
I assume they are hoping at least 1 out of 5 bronze users will transition to silver and increase net profits. But still... we just transitioned from BitBucket to GitLab because the $4 self-hosted tier was just too good a deal. $20 seems a bit steep considering we are using our own hardware for hosting, CI, etc. I really hope we don't transition back to BitBucket...
I'm pretty sure we'll just downgrade to free, or move away after this. We only use the MR approval features from bronze, and that's proooobably not worth the price of premium. But who knows, since we have to contact a sales rep to "guide you through your transition discount offers.
GitLab Team Member here. If you could reach out to your account team, that would be great. We’d love to hear your thoughts and have an opportunity to understand what is valuable to you. We realize that this is a significant change for Starter/Bronze users, and we want to make sure we can provide you with the best possible service through the transition. We’re also offering a free upgrade to Premium for the first 25 users, which may help you get a better sense of Premium's value for your team.
We're in the same situation. We're in bronze only because of approvals, team of 17. We picked Gitlab precisely for best price of this feature on the market. We've already paid for full year starting February, in December.
Why on earth am I getting a cookie dialogue that includes a checkbox for “personalization” and asks for permission to track me “to personalize content and ads” on the pricing page of a company that makes money selling an actual product?
Can't we do anything at all these days without pointless cookie dialogues and downright insulting behaviour?
I like GitLab, but I don't like getting advertising cookies stuffed down my throat for showing an interest in your offering.
> Why on earth am I getting a cookie dialogue [...]
Use NoScript. There is simply no reason for pages like that to [attempt to] stuff so many cookies and scripts for what is a simple page of static content.
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.
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.
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.
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 magnitude more expensive. Even with discounts, which got things closer (but not all the way there), the fear was after a period of time, the discounts would be ended/phased out and we'd be stuck.
I'd love to see those features that compete directly with Jira (like roadmaps and multi-level epics) come down to the Premium level, which is more price/feature competitive.
We love GitLab, but find ourselves stuck using the free tier and paying for services we don't love, rather than supporting GitLab. I'd suspect we're not alone there, either.
I also have a small dev team of 25 that wants to move to gitlab paid model but the upfront cost is too much. We need a monthly payment plan even if it costs more than annual one because I can't justify a high upfront cost to my ceo. We're rapidly expanding and expect to be 100 within 2021.
Many of these points come back to "it's easier or cheaper for gitlab this way" which isn't a great way to convince a customer. Some of which seem to actually be "due to our inability to onboard, manage and retain customers in an automated hands off way it's cheaper or easier this way" which is a terrible way to convince customers.
None of these is convincing, mostly because "its better for Gitlab".
I don't care. I want what's better for our company.
And right now, that is not paying for GitLab.
It sucks because I am an evangelist for GitLab, but I'm fighting a losing battle and we will be switching paid Github over free GitLab because of things like this.
This is not a new issue. There is an issue somewhere on the Gitlab repo that I’ve been subscribed to for more than two years. At this point it seems unlikely to change.
It's what you make of it. Most companies make it into a mess. And the UI is slow and bloated like a dead whale.
It is however not that expensive which matters especially when most of the company needs accounts and not just engineers. $7/user/month for basic or $14 for everything you reasonably care about. Gitlab is $19 or $99/user/month.
I use a couple dozen tools on a regular basis. JIRA is by far the worst. The functionality is ok. Maybe it is a bit bloated. Maybe our process is a little over complicated. That's not a big deal. The thing that really gets me is performance.
The performance is absolute dog shit. Every interaction with it painfully slow. For example, the page to view a single issue is almost 20MB fetched over 100 HTTP requests and takes 10 seconds to load. This is without cache. With assets cached, it is still 4 seconds to render. This is the fastest interaction by the way. Everything else is worse.
Maybe some of this is my organization's fault. I really don't know. What I do know is that it is so slow that I dread every interaction with it.
Nope. We _just_ switched to Jira/Confluence from Notion+Trello (sigh), so we really don't have a complicated set up, and it is definitely "absolute dog shit" for performance. It is hands down the slowest tool I use. I've used it at large organizations with hundreds of devs and it's even worse. I regret not pushing back harder, since it is totally overkill for 1.5 PMs managing 3.5 devs.
Seconding the performance issues. This is obviously amplified when screen sharing, which makes certain types of collaboration difficult. (Remote grooming sessions, for instance.) I also find recent UI changes have made the product harder to use, at least for our version and processes, and have added nothing of value in return.
As far as how useful Jira is, a huge percentage of that is going to be your team's processes external to Jira. I have found it to be a very good mirror. If your team's processes are a mess, your Jira instance will quickly become one as well. But if your team is organized and is bringing an existing, functional system to Jira, I have found that it's a good enough value add to be worth it.
It's definitely an enabler, though, rather than a tool that will funnel you into good practices. (The same can be said for Confluence but it's even more true there IMO.)
Same performance problems here. I hate it. I also need to access other JIRA boards with different email addresses occasionally. It takes forever to sign out, login again, navigate to board, find the issue. It puts me off using it so much.
One light at the end of the tunnel is the Mac app (for some reason there is no Windows or Linux version). It's much more lightweight and feels way faster than the web version. However, it is buggy in my experience, and a fair few things I do a lot can't be done in it and require the web interface, but for quickly checking stuff it mostly works.
Hi - I'm coming from the Confluence team working on Performance, but I can say that we (all of Atlassian) are aware of performance is an area needing improvement, and we're working on it. Customer feedback (including logs, recordings, and exports of slow pages) is always very helpful to us. If you're open for followup over email to provide specific information, please let me know.
In my case, I´ve used JIRA for a long time (8 years) and consider myself a "power user" (I've connected Lambda's with its API and webhooks, later used their "actions" scripting, I've delved deep into workflow modification, projects, board, views the whole gamut). It is a very powerful tool that if you REALLY know how to use it (like, really make sense of permissions, workflows, hooks and other features) you get really good ROI.
Nevertheless... it is an absolute and horrible hog. It is so slow and clumsy that it is frustrating. Also, when they changed the interface they kind of hid a lot of stuff that used to be there. Also the free "Gantt" feature they have sucks, and the paid one is OK but does not justify upgrading 50+ users to the plan that makes it available.
Jira's performance is absolute garbage. It's painful and embarrassing.
I'd use GitHub if my team were willing to do non-technical project management with it as well. I wish GitHub would add features for non-technical users on projects. It would be a huge win.
Literally just spend some time on some docs features and provide a view of projects that isn't centered on code for those users that aren't involved in the code.
For a reasonably technical user, you can make it work, except that the views just aren't built for them, so it's a lot of visual clutter that isn't necessary and holds the product back.
Been looking at Clickup since, like Jira+Confluence, you can integrate wiki/web documents with your project management tooling. I've found that this is a pretty critical feature. I've tried repeatedly to get folks to rally around Google Drive or a folder of Office documents, and it's just not the same as working in a single, integrated web experience.
Definitely not alone. We use the self-hosted GitLab that comes with MatterMost out of the box: great!
Now offer something to kill of Jira at a reasonable price and you've got another customer. The functionality is all there, it's just distributed awkwardly across tiers for many small outfits.
Same, we ended up pushing back our subscription for almost a year, in which we really could've used their service. Just because the upfront cost was so high. And when we finally got a subscription it was a silver subscription, which is great but doesn't let us drop Jira. The gold subscription cost is just insane. It might make sense if you're used to paying SV wages.
We are are in a similar situation: We were using Github Team, paying I think $4 a month per account (between 10 and 15 users). I (head of the Eng group) love Gitlab and had used it for some time in personal/open-source projects. I managed to convince the team about Gitlab and we migrated, initially in the Free tier.
My first surprise was that Gitlab does not allow for Monthly payments...if I wanted to go into the Bronze tier, I would have had to pay a whole year in full. My startup doesn't do whole-year payments (quarterly or monthly) so that stopped me on my tracks.
I guess with the full weight of Microsoft, Github will out-price Gitlab. It's kind of sad because I prefer Gitlab CI/CD to Github actions (I just couldn't make sense of them).
Honestly curious what bad decisions you’ve encountered? I’ve used Gitlab CI/CD on ~20 or so projects of varying complexity (small to enterprise) and have found it enjoyable to use each time.
I'd be interesting in hearing more about some of these.
We're currently using GitLab's CI/CD for ~50 or so private repositories, covering ~7 different languages without any issues. That includes testing, Docker builds and documentation generation for most projects.
We only use private runners though, I don't know if any issues are related to their own runners.
So runners are a good example:
The runner config is stored in a config.toml on the runner. If you want autoscaling runners, it gets very complex so you might want to version control it or back it up, but you have to store your AWS secrets in this config.toml. It also contains hashes that have to be matched with settings in the UI, and of course, tags, which need to be tied into your .gitlab-ci. UI configuration changes take places instantly and there's no undo. So you have configuration in 3 places, only one of which is version controlled. And lets say you have some new runners with new tags -- you aren't going to be able to run an old pipeline on the new runner.
Agreed with other commenters, we use gitlab CI extensively, and we find it great. That's the main reason we use gitlab, the code/repository part is not that great and we don't use the other stuff
Talking about bad design decisions, I prefer GitLab's way to handle Pages over GitHub. It's just strange to store generated artifacts in a (`gh-pages`) branch. Instead, in GitLab it's stored as separate files and removed automatically after a certain period.
The free tier users? I'm amazed actually at what the free tier offers to small startups. We have hundreds of gigabytes worth of docker images in the gitlab package registry that we can't even delete/cleanup properly (just keeping the last two would do for us), and Gitlab is keeping all that data for free.
In my unfortunate experience, having evangelized Gitlab in my company from the days when they made money through support and subscriptions, as expensive as Gitlab already is, it will only get more expensive a few years later.
It's nice that they keep adding these features, but in reality, we have already integrated most of the functionality they've added well before they get around to buying the company making the features they want to add.
So the actual practical effect on us is that we simply have to pay additional costs for those features that we don't use (or pay in time and money to migrate to those new features, with no real benefit and a massive downside of further increasing dependence).
Variation of the same here. We did try to show, for example, that we could roll off some contractors if we shut down all of the various jenkins instances. But that wasn't enough to justify the "ultimate" tier, we went with "premium".
And the business case still had to include fluff to make it sound at all like a good idea. Note that it IS a good idea in this case, but for reasons that are hard to show as dollars.
It seems like they need something (low base + ala cart add ons?) to have a better pitch for Jira/Bitbucket self-hosted customers to switch.
One thing they could do is reduce the cost for non-developer seats. Lots of people need access to the issues, or builds/deploys, etc, without needing to commit code.
"One thing they could do is reduce the cost for non-developer seats. Lots of people need access to the issues, or builds/deploys, etc, without needing to commit code."
Exactly! Lower tier users would solve many of the issues.
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 that it strongly incentives you to NOT let anyone else on the platform. At $1200/year there is no way in heck I'm letting the artists use Git, they can stick to their terribly Dropbox hacks. Marketing team working on assets with developers? Use email, no way you're getting access to GitLab. The $100/user/month model makes sense if they are a core developer (still too expensive, but makes sense) using every single feature in the system, but nothing else.
> The other problem with ultimate is that it strongly incentives you to NOT let anyone else on the platform.
This is my biggest problem as their pricing model discourages collaborative development.
We use GitLab to generate docs that are read by hundreds of internal users. On the free tier, if a user wants to suggest a change it’s no problem. Even though that is a very rare user and might only create one issue a year. Or maybe they add a tutorial or something to a project.
They aren’t developers, but having them involved in the git lifecycle is really helpful. Also data scientists who just want to archive their pipelines.
But with the ultimate tier those users suddenly cost $1200/year for minimal features. We can’t upgrade for free for the developers because we’ll disconnect all those “casual users.”
The suggestion to run two instances is stupid and confusing to users who now have to learn about mirroring, etc.
It’s weird that they don’t allow individual users to have tiers, we would buy more GitLab.
As of now, we will likely have to switch off of GitLab because there’s not a clear dividing line between software developers who need GitLab features and staff who write software who just need git, issue tracking, wikis and pages.
It's not a high number of accounts before you can have a person dedicated 50% of the time to just running a local gitlab setup with any options you want. Including infra costs + on-demand CI/CD.
Yes, I'm fairly certain it is. We switched to the SaaS because of that, it wasn't worth the hassle of self-hosting when you get all the responsibility and still pay the same price.
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.
This is confusing to users. Seeing who made changes and who opened issues is really important. Having all users share an account would be confusing to see the same person asking and answering questions.
Also, making a thousand users learn a new userid and password is a support nightmare.
$1200 a year is expensive but you mentioned artists. Autodesk Maya is $1600 a year, 3DSMax is $1600 a year, Houdini is $500 a year, Zbrush is $900 a year, Adobe creative suite is $630 a year.
I'm not saying you want to add another $1200 a year to that. Just putting it in perspective to "artist" expenses
The argument here is that if you want an artist to have access to your instance - even if only to occasionally use features that are available in the free tier - you have to shell out the full $1200/year.
Something like Maya or 3DSMax is something an artist can reasonably be expected to use a lot of the functionality of the product pretty often. Expecting an artist to use the majority of a gitlab license on a daily basis is a bit of a stretch.
I don't use gitlab but github has issue and project planning. I'd expect every team member to use those. Further, github issues supports easy images and videos. Great for artists, and designers to track things. Assuming gitlab does the same I'd expect the same there.
Maybe there are better solutions and so you don't want your artists do that there.
It goes the same the other way. As a programmer I've always needed a license to the same 3d software the artists are using even though I don't use it daily I might need to write or debug an exporter or script.
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.
The only price tier that is worth it is the silver. The gold/ultimate is just way too expensive. It's a shame that the jump is so crazy for a team of 10, from paying 3K a year to paying over 14K a year.
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.
Not surprised. I rail on this all the time. One of my major problems is only the Ultimate allows free guest users.
Its a big reason we haven't paid for GitLab. And we are also looking to go toward Github for that reason and some others too (and those others might be solved if we paid for support, but see the first reason).
We're using Azure DevOps at the bank I'm currently working at. I've been a long-time user of it actually, and am a big fan - I just don't see how GitLab's new pricing can compete with AzDo, or even GitHub.
$49/user/m for Premium seems really expensive compared to AzDo and GitHub. Does GitLab have some killer feature I'm not aware of that justifies spending 2-10x that of the competition?
$99/m for Ultimate eds? It doesn't even explain on the pricing page what you get for that, beyond a couple of bullet points of biz-speak - it's almost like they think anyone who buys that kind of language has more money than sense. Might have a point there to be fair, but still hard to see the point of Ultimate - would be really interested to hear if anyone here pays for it, and why?
Ultimate includes a bunch of bells and whistles - full k8s integration, static/dynamic security testing, deep monitoring integration, etc.
I have considered it but ultimately at any given time, there are one or two features in the top tier that sound good, but usually you can get 80% of the way there with a FOSS alternative.
For example wiring up ArgoCD to run your k8s deploys, or writing your SAST rules yourself.
Also it's all-or-nothing: the security tools are a good example where it could easily be worth paying a reasonable amount for either an optional feature or upgrades for specific users but when that applies a big up-front multiplier to your entire organization it becomes a much harder sale.
Agreed, this is the problem with Gitlab's bloat; the more features they add, the harder it is to justify a cheap price-point like the old $5/month -- and everybody's idea of what should go into the $20/month tier is going to be different. You can't disaggregate the offerings to pay for just the pieces you are interested in.
If they are focusing more on the Enterprise side of things, I could see it being a good idea for them to split out the licensing and billing for different offerings; see Datadog for an example of the opposite extreme, where every service is optional, and you pay (handsomely) for whatever you use.
If Gitlab split their offerings into a few packages, say $10/mo for k8s integration, $10/mo for security, $10/mo for the Jira replacement that I've never touched, and so on, they could potentially get more stickiness - users would be using the top-tier functionality for the modules that they care about, instead of missing a few killer features that are stashed away in the gold tier. I'm not paying $100/mo for a Gitlab seat, but I would have considered $20-30/mo extra for the k8s/prometheus CD integration without having to pay for all the rest of the top-tier features I'm not interested in.
This might help Gitlab to focus a bit more, too, as they would be able to see exactly what product lines are bringing in the most revenue, and focus on making those better.
It's especially tricky with some competitors' choices: for example, Github's free dependency update service is a HUGE chunk of the day-to-day security value for most projects and there's not much room to say you can justify a double-digit dollars-per-user-per-month to get the other tools.
They push features down to the lower tiers pretty frequently. Easier to launch them on ultimate and then move them down than the other way.
Silver got a lot of great project management features around roadmapping and epics last year that allowed our team to cancel jira sub, so that was sweet.
edit: wouldn't count on the fancier devops tools getting moved through :/
My response was to someone considering the ultimate tier. I'd recommend they keep an eye on the premium (silver) tier for the functionality they want which may at some point become available.
Premium was an easy sell for us as we were able to eliminate other subscriptions. Ultimate does not have features we'd be willing to pay an extra $80 per user per month for.
If you want your SAST tool to be worth a damn you need to write your own rules, at a minimum configure sources and sinks manually especially in an app that has a lot of dependencies.
Last time I checked the security scanning tools that GitLab provides don’t really allow you to do that, SAST is expensive and also require manpower to manage well I guess if you only want to tick a box it might be worth it but I wouldn’t call the security features of GitLab worth the money you’re paying for especially with a large number of users.
> $49/user/m for Premium seems really expensive compared to AzDo and GitHub
Sure, but you know what else $49/user/month for “Premium” is really expensive compared to? GitLab Premium, which is $19/user/month. [0]
> Does GitLab have some killer feature I'm not aware of that justifies spending 2-10x that of the competition?
At least some of the described features seem to be closer to GitHub Enterprise ($21/user/mo) or AzDo Basic+Test ($52/user/mo) than the lower tiers on those, but that's not consistent across the board and the three don't describe features in a way which makes side-by-side comparison easy. But I don't see Premium as clearly overpriced compared to the competition.
> $99/m for Ultimate eds? It doesn’t even explain on the pricing page what you get for that, beyond a couple of bullet points of biz-speak
There’s a detailed feature breakdown of all three plans on the pricing page, with links to more details about each feature.
Unfortunately, its in a stupid scrolling table that only lets you see a few lines at a time, though.
Thanks for catching that usability issue, we agree the double scrolling is not ideal. This wasn't the intended functionality and I can't imagine how long it would have taken for us to catch this. Here's the link to the MR https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_request... we'll have a fix going live shortly
The premium tier is $19/user/m, not $49. Still, I agree that even $19 is high relative to the competition. We're currently on the (soon to disappear) $4/user/m Gitlab plan and now I'm wasting time trying to figure out if we'll lose anything we care about by dropping down to the free tier.
There's a single bullet in that table that makes it all make sense:
> Free Guest users
Guest users can:
* Create issues
* Leave comments
* Clone or download the project source
That sounds like it covers the use case for a substantial portion of people who currently have paid accounts.
So Basic -> Bronze -> Silver pricing pays for the increase in features. Ultimate/Gold/whatever includes price increases for features, as well as not having to pay for accounts for people who don't really use GitLab much at all.
I strongly suspect the Ultimate tier is geared towards large companies who's primary line of business is not technology. They have a lot of people who need minimal access to GitLab, and a small number of people who need to access GitLab a lot. It wouldn't be super surprising to me if the difference in cost between Silver and Gold is minimal for someone like Walmart or P&G because they can stop paying for accounts for PMs, helpdesk workers, the people that actually use the software, etc.
It's probably not really of much interest to a tech company because so many people need access to GitLab that you get very little gain from free Guests.
Because Microsoft isn’t signing big clients on to it anymore, as they are slowly trying to transition (it’s very early days still) to GitHub Enterprise. They probably won’t talk much about it until the missing features are replicated, but it’s coming. (Based on anecdotes on previous threads about Azure DevOps, and the fact that GitHub is a bit more user friendly).
While technically you can do anything, there's no community discovery of CI scripts like with GitHub.
Afaik there isn't a Checks API equivalent, or it's not uses by the limited range of built-in CI functions.
And finally, the caching is terribly slow. It's faster to reinstall packages than to cache them, meaning you can't run a build in less than 3/4 minutes.
This is a surprising move to me. Seems like they are further deprioritizing trying to win small companies, which might make sense based on their revenue split, but I do wonder if it’s going to hamper them in the long term.
For enterprise users, $20/mo is not going to move the needle. But for a startup, that is actually a material spend, particularly given that Gitlab still don’t support monthly billing on subscriptions like most SaaS services do. (I would not be surprised if they lost a number of cost-conscious customers to GitHub due to the “annual only” pricing model.)
For user acquisition, broadly speaking you can acquire big customers in two ways; either you convince a big company to switch to your product, or you win a small company that then grows into a large one. The latter requires you to have mindshare and GitHub clearly wins on this count.
The risk with just trying to win large companies is that there is significant inertia involved in core tooling like CI/CD; to convince someone to switch off their current system will require a lot of benefit, and the amount of work only increases as the company gets bigger. It’s way easier to convince a startup to use Gitlab from the get-go than to convince someone to convert a 100-1000 person org.
So talking all of this through, I can see why Gitlab doesn’t want to scrap with GitHub over supporting all of the low-margin $5/mo companies, and wants to focus on higher margin enterprise deals. If they are seeing better performance in that segment, then jettisoning the $5/mo plan might let them focus on fewer customer profiles, and make the product more polished there. But it seems potentially risky, going all in on one sales strategy vs. having a diversified approach that gives some hedging.
Well, this ruined my teams Tuesday. We are on the Bronze plan with over 300 users company wide.
My department of 40 does the vast majority (90% plus of all commits/MRs) of the coding in the company, but we enrolled everyone within operations as well so that they could contribute on occasion.
The rest of those users are never going to be worth spending $19 a month on, but it really sucks having to put up barriers from people who do like to contribute on occasion. Feels like we're going in the wrong direction here, so much for devops :(
You only need a user licenses to log in. Can't you just make the repos public (assuming you are self hosting) so that way anonymous users can still see everything?
Yeah, we are self hosting and everyone could have read access without much hassle. We are losing that long tail of contributors though as they won't be able to push any new commits with guest access.
If I can give you a strong hint: grandfather in everybody at todays rates and prices and simply drop the bronze plan from your new signup page. That way you keep your existing users happy. The last thing you want is to kill off your early adopters. Besides the very bad PR. I'm a huge gitlab advocate and this move sits wrong with me. Your 'bronze' users did not ask you to develop features that they probably won't use anyway so your justification to force them to pay more sounds hollow at best and disingenuous at worst. Fix it while you still can.
I'm struggling to see why you need further research 9 months down the road on such an obvious issue.
Just to put it in perspective, your lowest non-free tier is 50% more expensive than the standard Office365 Business subscription... for which non-dev does this make any kind of sense?
The fact that you then proceed to launch the new prices regardless of having a solution for this obvious issue is to me a really strong indicator that GitLab is not the way to go once we're moving away from the self-hosted JIRA later this year.
We're an organisation that builds and runs products (mostly in the open but with occasional confidential issues). We are a silver member with about a dozen developers but 3x as non-developers who need to participate on issues.
Although most issues are open, there are occasionally confidential issues that staff need to be able to view and comment on. The entire annual seat license is required for every member, to work on only a handful of tickets. It's very poor value for money.
For the devs the license is reasonable value for money (we use CI, git, docker repos etc).
But for the majority of staff, and therefore the whole org, value for money is very bad. The GitLab pricing model gives us no option.
It's made it a more difficult sell in the organisation. Boasting about dev features leaves a bad taste in the mouth when only the minority of seat licenses actually need to use them.
A large number of our users on GitLab are Ops, Artists, Marketing or similar groups that can utilize GitLab a little (like leaving comments, or doing straight commits, no ci/cd/security/etc). $20/mo/user means some don't get access and the Ultimate plan at $100/mo/user? Oh hell no. No one would have access to GitLab except for maybe a dozen core devs.
It seems like they could fix this by defining pricing based on active users.
I use a SaaS product and they only count users with 10 logins and changes per month as an actual user. This has let us “grow” infrequent users into frequent users.
I think having few barriers between internal user customers and dev is good. Making someone email their ticket in, or not letting someone watch an issue to see when it builds unless they pay $1000/year makes me find products with compatible license models.
This price hike in combination with the change of how they count users made it a 1100% price increase for us.
It went from having active devs in the organization being paid users to "anyone with guest access to a subproject" requiring a seat.
It also went from "you can have guests at no cost" to "you must pay seats for guest access".
And it wants payment on bot accounts as well, as they ALSO use a seat.
So, our organization went from 7 active users and 14 in the organization, to suddenly requiring 30+ seats. This includes us paying for people who are ONLY involved in the Open Source projects we have.
And then the price hike on top of that.
Let me just say it leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.
The page mentions 89% of the features available in Starter being available in the free tier. Is there a good enumeration anywhere of what those features are and what they 11% that would be lost is?
I'll need to evaluate this for my company in the next year and that would be extremely helpful, as the new pricing grid of course does not include the phased out tier for comparison, which is the specific direct comparison I actually need to make here.
Most of the features you can get for $4 per month for at Github you need to pay $49/mo for at Gitlab, such as the integration of security dependency scanning, secret scanning, dependabot alerts. My understanding is that you need to pay the top tier to get UI integrations for these things.
As the monorepo support could be better as it wouldn't support multiple reporter files, like junit xmls.
Personally, if I had the choice I would go for Github Enterprise. Big chance with Gitlab you have to pay for hosting your own Gitlab runners anyways.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 274 ms ] threadThis appears to be a simplification though, which works for me.
Edit: Wow! I really appreciate everyone’s perspectives here!
If you want everything integrated together this is probably fine, but GitHub Enterprise + Jira Premium is $35 per user per month (and every other project management tool is cheaper and better than Jira, just about). I don't know what the value add is here, other than self-hosting. (Or at least, the $65 value add).
Preferably with an emphasis on speed?
We're building Linear, focusing on speed and providing sane defaults that sense for software companies. The app offline first so all interactions are <100ms. Sprints, projects, roadmaps, multiple teams, GitHub/Gitlab/Sentry supported etc supported. Lot of YC startups and growth companies (100-300 engineers) use us.
https://linear.app
If you are building a docker image for example, you likely are doing a pull from docker hub, the security scanning software can help you catch security issues there.
It can also help with things like dependencies in your node projects, python projects and more (at least, that is what the security scanning software we use at $work does, I assume gitlab is similar).
It's not about employees pushing malicious code, it's about catching issues with dependencies further up the stack, to make sure that the end result you are pushing to your servers/users is not vulnerable.
Today, we’re making GitHub Enterprise Server 3.0 available as a release candidate. Announced in the GitHub Universe Keynote, it’s the biggest ever change to Enterprise Server, bringing customers:
* Actions – developer-first workflow automation and CI/CD * Packages – publish and consume packages together with code * Mobile Apps (beta)- iOS and Android apps for collaborating from any device
For companies interested in automating code security with GitHub Advanced Security, we’re also bringing:
* Code scanning – scan every pull request for known vulnerabilities with CodeQL * Secret scanning (beta) – detect credentials in code before they hit production
a) how much money they have
b) how little understanding of tech they have
For many non-traditional tech companies, they feel spending more money, will help offset tech deficiencies. In the same way that, novice golfers equate spending more money on golf equipment will make them better golfers.
No other industry has made themselves so available at such affordable pricing than tech has?
Where are all the blog posts/free software/free advise from those finance companies?
Where is all the free legal/free court counsel info from all lawyers?
It's about time tech started charging for commercial use.
Software engineers worldwide deserve more of the pie and letting traditional industries eat Michelin quality food at fast food prices has to end.
Retailers don't sell at cost - they never have. They sell at as much profit as they can get (and yet free ERPs exist/cheap e-commerce exists).
All so the non-tech business people can have greater profit? Fuck that.
For that, the ultimate tier is now competing with a Jira suite, or something that PMs use made by Microsoft or a similar type of product.
The licensing for the project management tool can easily run $50+/month/user
Add in the "business/customer access to the issue tracking" and if you've got Jira or similar, that adds on a gain a bit more $$.
Next, adding the artifact scanning tools. Yes, you can get them 3rd party... but its another thing to set up.
In the end, picture the 50-100 employee shop where the sysadmin is weighing in on "get GitLab Premium vs GitLab ultimate" and the reduction of additional installs and licenses that need to be managed.
Yea, it it adds $80/user/month, but if it saves an hour or two per user per month in productivity gains - that can make a difference.
In the organization I currently work for, we were considering the options of (GitLab Ultimate) vs (GitLab Premium + Jira + other tools) and ultimately went with the premium and other for a number of reasons... but GitLab Ultimate made a strong showing.
I feel that it wasn't made to host enterprise products but rather FOSS in competition with GitHub and then made a pivot to enterprise products but not quite moving away from the "this is for FOSS on the web".
Things like "can modify own comments" not being something that can be modified (people updating their own comments and then not being able to go back over it for an audit or information request of some sort) or having a manager role that can administer the members of a project but not the code.
And yea... having to pay $100/month for a product/project manager in a larger org is a rather firm "nope." Have a dozen of those and that's a lot to pay for not much functionality.
A previous company that I worked at... there was a project manager. Just one. It was a small company - I sat across from the other Java developer. In there, were you've got a small organization where $100/month for a PM is a lot to swallow, but its only $100/month for one PM (and then you get all the other features that saves you from having to hire another operations person) - that's not as hard a price to swallow.
There the thing would be "ok, we've got 10 people at $20/month and all this other stuff that we need to set up on our own, so $200/month vs 11 people at $100/month and a bunch that we don't need to set up on our own $1100" -- the "is it worth $900 for the rest of the infrastructure done for us - along with dumping trello for gitlab issues" and the answer would probably be "yes."
Based on my observations so far, Ultimate is quite expensive when you have an "all in" approach. Every user, despite whether they would use the feature set must be licensed as Ultimate under the current model.
I really wish there was some flexibility in how the licensing model works — right now, the all in approach is prohibitive to bringing on new users, as you need to justify the $1,200 upfront cost per user added — not all users / projects need to be licensed under the same tier — some user's needs are basic and cannot justify the cost of a license.
--
Some thoughts on how this could be addressed...
A) Assign a licence tier to a user (ie: Some users get Ultimate features, others are on premium with limited access to features)
B) Assign licenses based on projects — if a project has "Ultimate" features enabled, all users in that project count towards an "Ultimate" seat
It's such a glaring omission on GitHub - which only has personal access tokens which give apps full access to all your repos.
If so this would mean I would consider to moving to a platform where the repository owner can control the tokens.
[0]: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/settings/project_acc...
- CE: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/d0b75f214f67345c...
- EE: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/d0b75f214f67345c...
(I think Project Access Tokens create bot users under the hood that are associated with the token. So if one were to create hundreds of tokens that means hundreds of users.)
Different features at different levels between self-hosted and gitlab.com seem counterproductive in that regard.
The manual says "Bronze and above" for gitlab.com https://docs.gitlab.com/ce/user/project/settings/project_acc... but I tried the open-source "CE" docker container earlier this week and found that they worked there (maybe that's what "Core" means?)
Free -> 9$/m -> 49$/m seems like a much more reasonable pricing. I'm sure more users would pay if fhe price is better.
This has been my org's issue as well. We use dedicated, external products for project management, CI, binary asset storage, container registry, wiki, etc etc. I get that a one-stop shop might be really valuable for a small org with basic needs that align well to what GitLab supplies, but I don't know if it scales up all that well. I would worry about getting partly migrated and then discovering some functionality gap, and maybe finding out that the GitLab team that built that feature no longer exists and there was basically no one maintaining it any more.
Spreading themselves so thin does have a real cost— here's an example of recently-resolved ticket for something that I would consider core "repository" functionality (LFS content inclusion in the tarball) but that sat unfixed and unnoted-in-docs for almost four years: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/15079
We did evaluate silver (now premium), and it wasn't worth it. We will probably upgrade, but this is a 5x increase on the price, and as a long term contributor of Gitlab, this does definitely make me angry.
>issue dependencies
FWIW these are available in Gitea, along with some other Gitlab features that require payment.
It's a much more lightweight alternative, though.
https://github.com/go-gitea/gitea/
Depending on your needs, automatically managing and deploying this could also be interesting. We have started a new project called the "5 min production app": https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/12/15/first-code-to-ci-cd...
Alternatively, partners provide hosted runners, if that is an option for you: https://partners.gitlab.com/English/directory/search?f0=Serv...
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.
I don't actually need any of the features from that tier but I absolutely do* get value from my (personal) use of GitLab (mostly centered around / related to my fairly extensive home lab) and wanted to support the company. I'm not aware of any way to make a donation so I decided I'd just pay the $48/year to upgrade my account as an alternative.
I've been working on a (personal, "offline") project for about the last week and a half -- meaning so I've not been sitting at my workstation during that time -- or else I almost certainly would have just upgraded to the now defunct bronze/starter plan.
Maybe I'll just buy some extra CI/CD minutes (which I don't use) or something similar as a way to show support for the company by giving them a few dollars.
But changing your model will upset your customers, no matter how well you intend it and there will always be a backlash, especially from developers for tools because there is always going to be someone else that does it cheaper. Rely on the 'cost too switch' once too often and you will shed users and users that leave will never come back. It is easier to attract a new user than it is to get someone that got burned to return.
Do what you can to get it right the first time and build in some room. And if you do have to change it be willing to grandfather in the users that got you there for ever.
If you start at the price you want to charge in the end, people will look at the product and say, you expect me to pay $X for that?
One thing that may work is to offer early adopters a lower price, and keep them at that price forever, while charging later customers more. But to do that, you need to raise the price for new customers early and often -- otherwise you'll end up with too many people at the lower price. And if your costs scale with the scope of your product, that could mean you're losing money on a large fraction of your users.
gitlab is changing their pricing model; as near as I can tell, they want to be a source control / jira / CI all-in-one environment. My guess is the willingness to pay vs github for just plain source control isn't there.
:shrug:
This is the risk with saas though. Customers are adults; they can choose to continue using your product or not. If customers don't want the saas they buy to be able to change models or raise prices, their choices are (1) don't use it; or (2) sign annual or even multiyear agreements. And if a company evaluates software that won't make multiyear commitments to them, they should take that unwillingness into account when choosing which vendor to use.
* Grandfather current customers, which gitlab did at near minimum here (current year / ~no changes ?). ~Lifetime / tier would be better, esp as a growing co should be fine here revenue wise. Better current customers sing your praises internally + externally than say you're yet another couldn't-care-less quarter-driven bigco / sales-driven vc co: growth wins.
* Put new stuff in new plans/tiers. Gitlab VPs seem to be choosing a weak balance here.
I'm all for offering higher prices. Trick is, when adding stuff, people should pay more for more, and same / less for standing still. Let hungrier/spendier teams spend more, and cost-sensitive ones happily spread the good word.
Not what happened here? Gitlab seems big enough that all this doesn't really matter though, they are probably reaching a customer size and capital-intensitive enough moat that they don't care toooo much.
---
A good contrast is github / microsoft, which also is way into clever pricing:
- Way cheaper per-user at all tiers. We got tier-shifted at some point, but don't recall any pricing funniness during that.
- Adding customer abilities to spend infinite amounts, but via new layers, like pay-as-you-go CI/CD offerings that do not gauge existing users. I expect the prices to go down, not up, as they figure out more scaling tricks / computing improves and they try to get users more addicted.
GH/MS is probably working on a much bigger timescale than GitLab, as GH doesn't need to look at juicing numbers to fundraise / sell while buyers are willing, and instead focus on being a friendly shift-left answer to AWS/GCP
My last employer had been on the same GH tier for over 6 years or something like that, and was on a much older tier.
It lacked some of the new features, but the price-point was right for our team size, and we weren't yet at the point where the newer features (ci/cd stuff like Actions) were worth the cost hike.
We were planning on switching tiers to get the new features, which is exactly what you described. Let those who want the new things pay for them if/when they decide to make the switch.
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 Ultimate features.
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 the entire company and dismiss the entire product suite as they can't afford it.
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
To your point, you may face a backlash. But it also costs a lot of time and $$ to support new development and features. Therefore, having some backlash may still be the right decision in the medium/long term. Can be hard to weather that storm initially, though.
eg. as our use base has grown, so too has our database. And so while the optics of it from the end-user POV is that the product has remain unchanged, we've had to invest in database and scaling services in order to continue to meet the initial offerings.
It's not as simple as that, but you probably get the gist of it.
A more relevant example might be a web service that emails you once a week. If the mailing service that powers this requires DNS or integration changes to help fight spam, over time that will require time (and perhaps $$).
If I'm misunderstanding your point, let me know :)
Looking at their pricing structure today, I see $80 being the lowest tier, going all the way to $300
For instance, alienating customers who go on to become anti-evangelists for your product.
* https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/23166#note_494...
It's also really difficult to work out the impact of this. The feature comparison never really seems to include important git features, just headline sales features.
Let me know if there are specific features you have questions about.
1. As the dev of a code quality tool, it was (and still is) super unclear to me which tiers allow test reports, or custom reports.
2. For at least 6 months it was very unclear which tiers got true Jira "smart commits". The solution was simply to rewrite the docs to not use that wording, and push users to pay for a Jira extension rather than support it in Gitlab shrug.
It isn't difficult to integrate GitLab with other tools. We are a Gov company and it is really easier to put man power to customize it than to climb all the bureaucratic hurdles to buy it.
This page contains comparisons for the self-managed features: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/self-managed/feature-compar...
edit: looks like for multi-user you need paid?
Can't we do anything at all these days without pointless cookie dialogues and downright insulting behaviour?
I like GitLab, but I don't like getting advertising cookies stuffed down my throat for showing an interest in your offering.
Use NoScript. There is simply no reason for pages like that to [attempt to] stuff so many cookies and scripts for what is a simple page of static content.
I totally get your annoyance, but they probably do mostly online marketing, so it makes sense for them.
https://github.blog/2020-12-17-no-cookie-for-you/
Note that I'm not justifying the behaviour, just commenting on it.
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?
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.
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 magnitude more expensive. Even with discounts, which got things closer (but not all the way there), the fear was after a period of time, the discounts would be ended/phased out and we'd be stuck.
I'd love to see those features that compete directly with Jira (like roadmaps and multi-level epics) come down to the Premium level, which is more price/feature competitive.
We love GitLab, but find ourselves stuck using the free tier and paying for services we don't love, rather than supporting GitLab. I'd suspect we're not alone there, either.
Edit - we share why we prioritize annual pricing over monthly in our handbook: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/pricing/#annual-pricin...
I don't care. I want what's better for our company.
And right now, that is not paying for GitLab.
It sucks because I am an evangelist for GitLab, but I'm fighting a losing battle and we will be switching paid Github over free GitLab because of things like this.
Buy the Premium tier and add Kubernetes or Security for an additional $4 / month.
It is however not that expensive which matters especially when most of the company needs accounts and not just engineers. $7/user/month for basic or $14 for everything you reasonably care about. Gitlab is $19 or $99/user/month.
The performance is absolute dog shit. Every interaction with it painfully slow. For example, the page to view a single issue is almost 20MB fetched over 100 HTTP requests and takes 10 seconds to load. This is without cache. With assets cached, it is still 4 seconds to render. This is the fastest interaction by the way. Everything else is worse.
Maybe some of this is my organization's fault. I really don't know. What I do know is that it is so slow that I dread every interaction with it.
As far as how useful Jira is, a huge percentage of that is going to be your team's processes external to Jira. I have found it to be a very good mirror. If your team's processes are a mess, your Jira instance will quickly become one as well. But if your team is organized and is bringing an existing, functional system to Jira, I have found that it's a good enough value add to be worth it.
It's definitely an enabler, though, rather than a tool that will funnel you into good practices. (The same can be said for Confluence but it's even more true there IMO.)
One light at the end of the tunnel is the Mac app (for some reason there is no Windows or Linux version). It's much more lightweight and feels way faster than the web version. However, it is buggy in my experience, and a fair few things I do a lot can't be done in it and require the web interface, but for quickly checking stuff it mostly works.
linear.app :-)
Nevertheless... it is an absolute and horrible hog. It is so slow and clumsy that it is frustrating. Also, when they changed the interface they kind of hid a lot of stuff that used to be there. Also the free "Gantt" feature they have sucks, and the paid one is OK but does not justify upgrading 50+ users to the plan that makes it available.
I'd use GitHub if my team were willing to do non-technical project management with it as well. I wish GitHub would add features for non-technical users on projects. It would be a huge win.
Literally just spend some time on some docs features and provide a view of projects that isn't centered on code for those users that aren't involved in the code.
For a reasonably technical user, you can make it work, except that the views just aren't built for them, so it's a lot of visual clutter that isn't necessary and holds the product back.
Been looking at Clickup since, like Jira+Confluence, you can integrate wiki/web documents with your project management tooling. I've found that this is a pretty critical feature. I've tried repeatedly to get folks to rally around Google Drive or a folder of Office documents, and it's just not the same as working in a single, integrated web experience.
Now offer something to kill of Jira at a reasonable price and you've got another customer. The functionality is all there, it's just distributed awkwardly across tiers for many small outfits.
My first surprise was that Gitlab does not allow for Monthly payments...if I wanted to go into the Bronze tier, I would have had to pay a whole year in full. My startup doesn't do whole-year payments (quarterly or monthly) so that stopped me on my tracks.
I guess with the full weight of Microsoft, Github will out-price Gitlab. It's kind of sad because I prefer Gitlab CI/CD to Github actions (I just couldn't make sense of them).
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5705U8s_nQ
Docs: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/quick_start/
Slides and a demo exercise: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-de/swiss-meetup-2021-jan
We're currently using GitLab's CI/CD for ~50 or so private repositories, covering ~7 different languages without any issues. That includes testing, Docker builds and documentation generation for most projects.
We only use private runners though, I don't know if any issues are related to their own runners.
It's nice that they keep adding these features, but in reality, we have already integrated most of the functionality they've added well before they get around to buying the company making the features they want to add.
So the actual practical effect on us is that we simply have to pay additional costs for those features that we don't use (or pay in time and money to migrate to those new features, with no real benefit and a massive downside of further increasing dependence).
And the business case still had to include fluff to make it sound at all like a good idea. Note that it IS a good idea in this case, but for reasons that are hard to show as dollars.
It seems like they need something (low base + ala cart add ons?) to have a better pitch for Jira/Bitbucket self-hosted customers to switch.
One thing they could do is reduce the cost for non-developer seats. Lots of people need access to the issues, or builds/deploys, etc, without needing to commit code.
Exactly! Lower tier users would solve many of the issues.
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 that it strongly incentives you to NOT let anyone else on the platform. At $1200/year there is no way in heck I'm letting the artists use Git, they can stick to their terribly Dropbox hacks. Marketing team working on assets with developers? Use email, no way you're getting access to GitLab. The $100/user/month model makes sense if they are a core developer (still too expensive, but makes sense) using every single feature in the system, but nothing else.
This is my biggest problem as their pricing model discourages collaborative development.
We use GitLab to generate docs that are read by hundreds of internal users. On the free tier, if a user wants to suggest a change it’s no problem. Even though that is a very rare user and might only create one issue a year. Or maybe they add a tutorial or something to a project.
They aren’t developers, but having them involved in the git lifecycle is really helpful. Also data scientists who just want to archive their pipelines.
But with the ultimate tier those users suddenly cost $1200/year for minimal features. We can’t upgrade for free for the developers because we’ll disconnect all those “casual users.”
The suggestion to run two instances is stupid and confusing to users who now have to learn about mirroring, etc.
It’s weird that they don’t allow individual users to have tiers, we would buy more GitLab.
As of now, we will likely have to switch off of GitLab because there’s not a clear dividing line between software developers who need GitLab features and staff who write software who just need git, issue tracking, wikis and pages.
It's not a high number of accounts before you can have a person dedicated 50% of the time to just running a local gitlab setup with any options you want. Including infra costs + on-demand CI/CD.
https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/
So it's missing everything you'd pay GitLab for.
so far didn't miss anything from Github since our dev mostly use it as git server only.
Please remember that this description does not actually apply to Gitlab, it’s $1200/year or nothing. There is no monthly option.
I understand that this type of usage would only be suitable for small teams.
Also, making a thousand users learn a new userid and password is a support nightmare.
I'm not saying you want to add another $1200 a year to that. Just putting it in perspective to "artist" expenses
Something like Maya or 3DSMax is something an artist can reasonably be expected to use a lot of the functionality of the product pretty often. Expecting an artist to use the majority of a gitlab license on a daily basis is a bit of a stretch.
Maybe there are better solutions and so you don't want your artists do that there.
It goes the same the other way. As a programmer I've always needed a license to the same 3d software the artists are using even though I don't use it daily I might need to write or debug an exporter or script.
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.
Its a big reason we haven't paid for GitLab. And we are also looking to go toward Github for that reason and some others too (and those others might be solved if we paid for support, but see the first reason).
$49/user/m for Premium seems really expensive compared to AzDo and GitHub. Does GitLab have some killer feature I'm not aware of that justifies spending 2-10x that of the competition?
$99/m for Ultimate eds? It doesn't even explain on the pricing page what you get for that, beyond a couple of bullet points of biz-speak - it's almost like they think anyone who buys that kind of language has more money than sense. Might have a point there to be fair, but still hard to see the point of Ultimate - would be really interested to hear if anyone here pays for it, and why?
I have considered it but ultimately at any given time, there are one or two features in the top tier that sound good, but usually you can get 80% of the way there with a FOSS alternative.
For example wiring up ArgoCD to run your k8s deploys, or writing your SAST rules yourself.
If they are focusing more on the Enterprise side of things, I could see it being a good idea for them to split out the licensing and billing for different offerings; see Datadog for an example of the opposite extreme, where every service is optional, and you pay (handsomely) for whatever you use.
If Gitlab split their offerings into a few packages, say $10/mo for k8s integration, $10/mo for security, $10/mo for the Jira replacement that I've never touched, and so on, they could potentially get more stickiness - users would be using the top-tier functionality for the modules that they care about, instead of missing a few killer features that are stashed away in the gold tier. I'm not paying $100/mo for a Gitlab seat, but I would have considered $20-30/mo extra for the k8s/prometheus CD integration without having to pay for all the rest of the top-tier features I'm not interested in.
This might help Gitlab to focus a bit more, too, as they would be able to see exactly what product lines are bringing in the most revenue, and focus on making those better.
Silver got a lot of great project management features around roadmapping and epics last year that allowed our team to cancel jira sub, so that was sweet.
edit: wouldn't count on the fancier devops tools getting moved through :/
Premium was an easy sell for us as we were able to eliminate other subscriptions. Ultimate does not have features we'd be willing to pay an extra $80 per user per month for.
Last time I checked the security scanning tools that GitLab provides don’t really allow you to do that, SAST is expensive and also require manpower to manage well I guess if you only want to tick a box it might be worth it but I wouldn’t call the security features of GitLab worth the money you’re paying for especially with a large number of users.
Sure, but you know what else $49/user/month for “Premium” is really expensive compared to? GitLab Premium, which is $19/user/month. [0]
> Does GitLab have some killer feature I'm not aware of that justifies spending 2-10x that of the competition?
At least some of the described features seem to be closer to GitHub Enterprise ($21/user/mo) or AzDo Basic+Test ($52/user/mo) than the lower tiers on those, but that's not consistent across the board and the three don't describe features in a way which makes side-by-side comparison easy. But I don't see Premium as clearly overpriced compared to the competition.
> $99/m for Ultimate eds? It doesn’t even explain on the pricing page what you get for that, beyond a couple of bullet points of biz-speak
There’s a detailed feature breakdown of all three plans on the pricing page, with links to more details about each feature.
Unfortunately, its in a stupid scrolling table that only lets you see a few lines at a time, though.
[0] https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/
The premium tier is $19/user/m, not $49. Still, I agree that even $19 is high relative to the competition. We're currently on the (soon to disappear) $4/user/m Gitlab plan and now I'm wasting time trying to figure out if we'll lose anything we care about by dropping down to the free tier.
I’m sure that the executives may be happy with it, but I personally found it a bit of a letdown.
There's a single bullet in that table that makes it all make sense:
> Free Guest users
Guest users can: * Create issues * Leave comments * Clone or download the project source
That sounds like it covers the use case for a substantial portion of people who currently have paid accounts.
So Basic -> Bronze -> Silver pricing pays for the increase in features. Ultimate/Gold/whatever includes price increases for features, as well as not having to pay for accounts for people who don't really use GitLab much at all.
I strongly suspect the Ultimate tier is geared towards large companies who's primary line of business is not technology. They have a lot of people who need minimal access to GitLab, and a small number of people who need to access GitLab a lot. It wouldn't be super surprising to me if the difference in cost between Silver and Gold is minimal for someone like Walmart or P&G because they can stop paying for accounts for PMs, helpdesk workers, the people that actually use the software, etc.
It's probably not really of much interest to a tech company because so many people need access to GitLab that you get very little gain from free Guests.
I’m really surprised it doesn’t get more love to be honest.
And the CLI is fully featured and well supported, and makes automating stuff, and building your own UIs ridiculously simple.
Afaik there isn't a Checks API equivalent, or it's not uses by the limited range of built-in CI functions.
And finally, the caching is terribly slow. It's faster to reinstall packages than to cache them, meaning you can't run a build in less than 3/4 minutes.
For enterprise users, $20/mo is not going to move the needle. But for a startup, that is actually a material spend, particularly given that Gitlab still don’t support monthly billing on subscriptions like most SaaS services do. (I would not be surprised if they lost a number of cost-conscious customers to GitHub due to the “annual only” pricing model.)
For user acquisition, broadly speaking you can acquire big customers in two ways; either you convince a big company to switch to your product, or you win a small company that then grows into a large one. The latter requires you to have mindshare and GitHub clearly wins on this count.
The risk with just trying to win large companies is that there is significant inertia involved in core tooling like CI/CD; to convince someone to switch off their current system will require a lot of benefit, and the amount of work only increases as the company gets bigger. It’s way easier to convince a startup to use Gitlab from the get-go than to convince someone to convert a 100-1000 person org.
So talking all of this through, I can see why Gitlab doesn’t want to scrap with GitHub over supporting all of the low-margin $5/mo companies, and wants to focus on higher margin enterprise deals. If they are seeing better performance in that segment, then jettisoning the $5/mo plan might let them focus on fewer customer profiles, and make the product more polished there. But it seems potentially risky, going all in on one sales strategy vs. having a diversified approach that gives some hedging.
My department of 40 does the vast majority (90% plus of all commits/MRs) of the coding in the company, but we enrolled everyone within operations as well so that they could contribute on occasion.
The rest of those users are never going to be worth spending $19 a month on, but it really sucks having to put up barriers from people who do like to contribute on occasion. Feels like we're going in the wrong direction here, so much for devops :(
Just to put it in perspective, your lowest non-free tier is 50% more expensive than the standard Office365 Business subscription... for which non-dev does this make any kind of sense?
The fact that you then proceed to launch the new prices regardless of having a solution for this obvious issue is to me a really strong indicator that GitLab is not the way to go once we're moving away from the self-hosted JIRA later this year.
We're an organisation that builds and runs products (mostly in the open but with occasional confidential issues). We are a silver member with about a dozen developers but 3x as non-developers who need to participate on issues.
Although most issues are open, there are occasionally confidential issues that staff need to be able to view and comment on. The entire annual seat license is required for every member, to work on only a handful of tickets. It's very poor value for money.
For the devs the license is reasonable value for money (we use CI, git, docker repos etc).
But for the majority of staff, and therefore the whole org, value for money is very bad. The GitLab pricing model gives us no option.
It's made it a more difficult sell in the organisation. Boasting about dev features leaves a bad taste in the mouth when only the minority of seat licenses actually need to use them.
A large number of our users on GitLab are Ops, Artists, Marketing or similar groups that can utilize GitLab a little (like leaving comments, or doing straight commits, no ci/cd/security/etc). $20/mo/user means some don't get access and the Ultimate plan at $100/mo/user? Oh hell no. No one would have access to GitLab except for maybe a dozen core devs.
I use a SaaS product and they only count users with 10 logins and changes per month as an actual user. This has let us “grow” infrequent users into frequent users.
I think having few barriers between internal user customers and dev is good. Making someone email their ticket in, or not letting someone watch an issue to see when it builds unless they pay $1000/year makes me find products with compatible license models.
This price hike in combination with the change of how they count users made it a 1100% price increase for us.
It went from having active devs in the organization being paid users to "anyone with guest access to a subproject" requiring a seat.
It also went from "you can have guests at no cost" to "you must pay seats for guest access".
And it wants payment on bot accounts as well, as they ALSO use a seat.
So, our organization went from 7 active users and 14 in the organization, to suddenly requiring 30+ seats. This includes us paying for people who are ONLY involved in the Open Source projects we have.
And then the price hike on top of that.
Let me just say it leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.
I'll need to evaluate this for my company in the next year and that would be extremely helpful, as the new pricing grid of course does not include the phased out tier for comparison, which is the specific direct comparison I actually need to make here.
As the monorepo support could be better as it wouldn't support multiple reporter files, like junit xmls.
Personally, if I had the choice I would go for Github Enterprise. Big chance with Gitlab you have to pay for hosting your own Gitlab runners anyways.