GitLab introduces user limits for Free users on SaaS

I work for a team of five people that does contract software development, and we’re using GitLab to store all of our source code. Under the new plan, you’d think we could keep using it for free… but we also use GitLab to distribute source code to our clients by inviting them to the specific projects or sub-groups that belong to them, and the result is that we actually have over 20 “users” in our namespace.

If I’m understanding this correctly, that means we’ll end up paying over $5,000/year for the same level of functionality, which is ridiculous when we could do the same thing with GitHub for free and we don’t need any of the Premium-tier features. We would even be fine with paying for licenses for just our five developers, but being expected to buy a license for every user for every client we interact with, all of whom only need read-only access to clone the repository or access build artifacts, just isn’t feasible.

Is there any alternative here, or are we just going to have to move off of GitLab?

Just another small note on potentially confusing messaging around this change:

1. GitLab Pricing implies that the 5 user limit will be applied to self-hosted “Free” tier. It says “5 users per namespace” under the button that leads to the install page for GitLab self-hosted free.

2. As absurd as this seems now that I’ve gone back and re-read the announcement and FAQ: It was genuinely not clear to me that self-hosted was exempt from the limit.
   2.1. https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/03/24/efficient-free-tier/: “Free and paid self-managed subscriptions” → Self-hosting GitLab is not a subscription. It’s hosting a piece of open source software. No contract is required is it?
   2.2 “Organizations impacted by this change should consider” vs “Free tier users using GitLab […] should”: I’m a free tier user impacted by this, but I’m not an organisation, so it wasn’t clear that paragraph was applicable to me as a non-corporate entity.
   2.3 " the free tier of the self-managed offering and community programs - including GitLab for Open Source, Education and Startups users" The missing oxford comma actually confused me…

Would it be silly to ask for a migration table/flowchart? Because of the confusing terms “self-managed subscription” or “self-managed offering” it’s very hard to parse.

Hi @littleski I understand this must be difficult for you. Thanks for raising your concern here.

May we recommend you to contact our team so they can guide you on options?

Hi @tboby thanks for sharing.

1. Are you referring to the Get Started button on the pricing page? The 5 users per namespace has a link that takes you to the FAQ which says “User limits for the free tier of GitLab SaaS”.

2.1, 2.2 and 2.3 are updated as per this MR

Hmm, this is possibly a more general problem with the “Pricing” page being the summary for both SaaS and self-managed but not making it clear which aren’t relevant to each line of products.

Presumably Premium Self-Managed doesn’t come with 10,000 CI/CD minutes? You could argue that summary box (with no footnote mark for that item) implies it does, and I can’t think of a good non-technical reason you couldn’t make the global shared runners available to self-hosted. (I know in practice the way runners are registered makes it impossible right?).

The FAQ text for user limits explains when the limits will apply from; it doesn’t explicitly say the limit doesn’t apply at all to self-managed.

Awesome, thanks for reacting so rapidly!

Tried that. They did not really provide any option. It’s either we pay, or we go on premise. Seems like there is no really good choice but to move to github.

Our research group publishes all repos as public eventually, but we sometimes need to keep them private until they are published in scientific journals. That puts us out of the program and forces us to look for an alternative.

I wanted to echo some of the sentiment here and add my own opinion. I’m “just” a developer, so it’s not my decision, but I’ll be responsible for offering all the possible options.

We are currently on the free tier with about 100 seats, more in the future.
This change would mean going from $0 to $22k on three months notice. (Which isn’t the world for a company, but it needs to be internally approved and justified)

In general I don’t mind moving to a paid subscription; the reason we didn’t so far is that we don’t really need anything in the higher tiers.

My two issues are:

• we don’t really need any of the extra features, so it becomes hard to justify $19/user/month while the next competitor bills only $4 per month.
• there is only a single flat level per org; I could probably justify the $19/user/month for the core team if there was the possibility to assign free or cheap readonly licenses to everyone else in the periphery.

As it stands, we’d probably move to a competitor. We could self-host, but honestly, we don’t want to, and are willing to pay for the convenience.

As I mentioned above, we only really use the git repository and the CI parts of gitlab (the pipelines work really well, I’m quite happy with that).
For issue tracking, Jira is used company wide (not my decision); docker images are hosted in Azure Container Registry because we also use AKS, and so on.

So if there was a license level (with reduced functionality) that’s at least in the same region ($3 to $9), we’d very likely move to that; if the cheapest level stays at $19 I don’t see myself being able to justify that internally and we’d probably move somewhere else.

Regardless of your decisions, thank you for the last 4 years.

As I read this topic, there are many people having small repos, but large number of users. My case is different - there is 10 of us. The reason why we didn’t upgade to paid plan yet is that for advanced features like Issue boards we need to introduce much more - 10 other internal reporters and dozens of customers who are creating feature requests, bug reports, etc.

My idea:

• Free reporters
• Free developers with none or just a few commits per month
• Optional CI/CD minutes - Premium 10K mins equal 5 free users - I would rather choose the 2nd option

Quite mixed feelings here as a huge fan of GitLab. I recommend you frequently and as one of the tiny faction of affected users, yes it’s going to be a huge pain. We are a small internal facing software development team and we are going to be paying $19/month/employee so people can file tickets and I just struggle to justify that. I have wanted to pay for our dev use for a long time, as we get a lot of value for the heavy users, but paying that much just so that an employee might once in a while file a ticket makes zero sense. I guess we have migration ahead of us. As an aside, I really only found out about this quite randomly from someone and it’s 8 weeks out till we are effectively dead in the water. I think you could have been more proactive with the communication. I really admire GitLab as an org, but the pricing structure has never made any sense for our use case (and we’ve explained this to your sales team - even they were apologetic but said it was non neogitable). Now I have devs asking me if we should look at Jira and I’m turning cold inside. As a pratical matter, if you have a path to migrate to self hosted (I couldn’t find anything looking admittedly quickly), that would be helpful to hear.

Hi GitLab Team,

When you apply these changes, a user that have a Premium license could have users without license with role Maintainer or Developer in projects that are in his own namespace without taking any seat?

Thanks

Hi,

Big fan of Gitlab, been promoting and installing self-hosted instances since 2014, but in the recent years advocated for the Starter plan to my customers, as it is important to pay for a great service. But last year you killed the 4$ plan and all of my customers went for the free plan as they did not care for the advanced features, are not “tech companies” so the budget for tech licences is seen as secondary.

I could “sell” the 20$/u/m for devs, project managers etc… but since you force a full account for every single user, no matter how occasional she logs in, this is not gonna fly with any of my clients. You are basically telling them all “gimme 3k+$ in the next 3 months or f**k off”.

This is a terrible way of treating customers, but I get that from an economical stand point there is no discussion: now that the Starter tier is dead, all of those people are just dead weight for you.

If you lost them all but one, that switched to the 20$/u/m plan, it’s would be a definitive win for you (less cost, more revenue).
And now that you are a public company, stock prices and financial reports are all that count I guess.

That’s a shame but that’s how things works. Thx for the service so far.

Always been a fan of github and am super grateful for the advocacy work done around remote work, transparency, CI/CD, the handbook, focusing on people, etc. All of this work has had such a positive impact on my career and helped us to grow our business.

However the idea that the GitLab organization is willing to impose such a price hike on so many of it’s users after locking them into it with several years of a VC-subsidized free tier makes me question the organization’s ethics and how much they really care about their users vs making money. I wonder if this idea was the plan all along.

Maybe it is a better idea to just have a sustainable business model that manages expectations rather than chasing the proverbial hocky stick using bait-and-switch tactics?

Hi! GitLab Product Leader here. Licensing is at the namespace/group level - so any user in that namespace consumes a Premium license. You might be mentioning guest users which are available in our Ultimate tier. Permissions and roles | GitLab

Hi Hershaw. GitLab Product Leader here. Thanks for your interest and positive impression of GitLab. I can tell you that this has not been our plan all along, but our free SaaS service does incur significant costs - particularly when used by larger organizations. We believe that our user limits are reasonable for the smaller organizations that we target for our free SaaS tier and as on open-source product we always maintain the option of running your own version of GitLab CE without limits.

Nice. We are a non-profit org doing projects with a lot of university students. Looks like we will need to move back to Github.

Well this sucks. I’ve been using and advocating the use of GitLab almost 3 years now for the non-profit hobby projects I’ve been part of. This change however will very likely force these projects to move back to GitHub. We can barely afford our current yearly bill, so there is no chance in hell we could afford paying $2000+ a year for any service…

I have to ask where the 5-person limit came from. Why not cut it off at 15, which would still prevent large organizations from effectively using it but wouldn’t hamstring smaller users? The CI/CD minutes restrictions made way more sense and could be even lower from my perspective, but the user count restriction is set way too low for an offering that doesn’t have a low-cost introductory level.

Dear GitLab team,

I would also like to share my situation with you, hopefully it will contribute to making either a policy change, or an offering of a viable alternative.

I am regularly helping out in pro-bono projects for civil organization, we are running various mentor programs for high school students, or simple collaborations between students groups for their pet projects. Looking at my gitlab, I am member in 213 projects. Most of these are without budget.

GitLab was so far our go-to source code management system, but with these changes all these usecases will become infeasible.

I will be forced to spend time on moving the still active projects to another provider which will result in:

• lost time
• loss of information, as issue management history and the boards will not survive migration
• a very bad taste in my mouth because of this experience

If you look at the combined load of those 200+ projects, you will see that beside storage capacity, there is activity only on a handfull of them at any period in time, and the CI load that we generate is very little.

If there would be a pricing plan that charges based on activity, that could be acceptable, but the /user flat rate fee makes your platform unviable for most of our usecases.

I have seen many nice projects flourish not is small part due to the possibilities GitLab offered, and it made me a big advocate of GitLab. But this pricing option puts you in par with Azure DevOps, or other platforms that have much better integrations with other products of the same vendors.

I will be very sorry to move our projects, but if this policy remains unchanged, I will probably have to redirect all our usage to Azure.

Sincerely yours,
Sándor Kolumbán

HI Gitlab team,

Does that mean that this wil be $19/user/namespace? or per organisation? We have multiple groups (namespaces) to keep the projects organized. but this would make Gitlab very expensive. It would be a lot of work to put them all in one group.