Back in the day, when I was advocating for the Bronze plan ($5/month/user), you guys came and botched it off but I thought to myself “ok, the free plan is good enough”.
Now we’re looking at $20/month/user, that is more than Github + Jira respective entry plans combined, not to mention the flexibility in paying for one but not another depending on whether the user is a manager/reporter/whatever or a developer, which you don’t get with Gitlab’s “everyone must use the same plan” policy.
What is going on? I can’t and won’t advocate for a monthly cost of $200+ to host and manage the software projects in a south american startup while even the AWS bill is is around 1/4 of that.
Why don’t you guys listen to your costumers? The generous free plans were cool and all that while they lasted but even since back then people have been wanting to give you money but the entry barrier was high, and so was the cost of upgrading, due to nonsense pricing strategy.
Countless people have complained about how the flat pricing prevents them from becoming paying costumers and/or expanding their plan. I mean, really, how would you justify paying a hundred dollars for a bot account under the ultimate plan? That is almost half the minimum wage in Brazil.
I hope Microsoft and Atlassian pay a commission for all the sales you have directed towards them.
Dev-lead for a medium-sized company here, and we are using GitLab for some time now.
This is the second time I feel screwed by the pricing changes. When the Bronze plan went out the door we accessed that we actually only use the MR approvals for that plan. Now using the free plan would not be possible. We don’t use the issues, because we have other software for that, we run our own runners. We are currently on the extended bronze plan, but after that I will not pay 20$ for a few git repo’s. Not only that, but we are already limiting usage of Gitlab to product engineers because our testers can also create a release (we don’t want to pay for 1 single feature). Although we are already because the testers are only getting the test URL from the MR’s. Let alone that we pay for one financial person because the payer needs to be using a GL seat.
I can go on and on about the idiotic pricing model and why I feel I am doing business with a cash-grabbing company or you can read all the posts above in a forum post that is very hard to find, but here is the point:
Unless I feel that GitLab is not a cash-grabbing monster and is not going to screw me over in the coming years, I will change to a different git provider because I want to have some trust in the companies that I work with.
Putting my feedback here, in addition to the feedback I’ve already left on the GitLab issue tracker.
I have a namespace with 440 users - 439 of those are customer accounts who only need read-only access to issues and source code. But the Guest permission role doesn’t grant any access to source code, so I have to use the Reporter permission instead.
I have been waiting over a year for Ultimate guest access to include read-only source code access. The issue for this has been open for 4 years; I even sent a merge request to fix guest access in Ultimate and it’s effectively been ignored by the development team. So for the time being, I’ve stuck with the Free tier while waiting for Ultimate to be fixed.
I now find out that the Free tier is going to be capped to 5 users. But I can’t upgrade because of an issue GitLab hasn’t fixed in over 4 years! And upgrading to even the Premium tier will send my costs from something reasonable to over $100320/yr, because all those customers will count as seats.
So now, instead of upgrading to Ultimate when that permission issue is fixed and paying GitLab money for the Ultimate plan that I actually want to be using in the first place, I have to spend my time moving to another provider because of this arbitrary change.
There’s probably a non-zero number of Free customers who don’t even realize that the user count is about to be imposed, since there was no email communication and the only warning banner refers only to the runner minute count:
Hi @lchen.harc thanks for bringing your feedback here. We do have a program for Educational institutions here and Open Source programs. Have you considered this option?
We are planning in-app notification and broader email communication to users as we get closer to enforcement of the User Limits. Enforcement is planned for June 22nd 2022.
Ok, but you understand that 4-8 weeks is nowhere near enough notice to migrate every project, build configuration, issue, merge request, container repository, all the GitLab pages URLs and 400 customers, right? Like, in no practical way is that enough notice.
As I have explained, you’re changing the cost of using GitLab SaaS from “affordable” to over $100k/yr for a 1 person company. I have to move my entire infrastructure somewhere else with less than 8 weeks notice. It’s insane.
Damn - I self host GL-ee (free), so I’m not directly impacted by this, but I’m really, and I can not emphasize enough, really surprised and even more disappointed.
I’m currently in UNI (computer science, ofc) and been helping my classmates with getting familiar with Git and GitLab. These people will, hopefully, in the next few years start some projects on their own, mostly in smaller groups - and some of them will have more than 5 members. And when they’ll try to use GitLab for their new project, and hit the limitation of 5 members, they’ll just move to GitHub.
Most students are already using GitHub (fancier UI, de-facto platform for most OS projects, etc…), in some classes (where Git was discussed/used) we had to use GitHub.
GitHub already has the majority of possible future developers and engineers - future paying customers.
And now you’re making it even harder for them to start using your product - for now as a free user, and later on as a paid one.
And while I recognize that this move may bring more income on the short term, I really doubt it will on the long term.
And again, Microsoft is winning the long-game - as much as I dislike them, I can respect the approach they’re taking, because it sure seems like it’s paying off well for them.
This is an unsurprising but disappointing turn of events from a company I loved. I already self-host, though, so it doesn’t hit me directly. I’m just speaking from my experience managing my instance for years.
You’re giving these teams an unfortunate choice:
pay a price that is often unreasonable for nonprofit, education, and small/medium business use cases (even the old starter tier, may it rest in pieces, is a lot to ask)
pay another price to learn how to self-host & maintain it on their servers. I can testify this sucks a lot of time and effort out of their primary job. And if they don’t have servers, get ready to pay another $50-100/mo for a bit of the cloud because they can’t buy it at the scale that GitLab does. I suppose it beats paying the thousands or hundreds of thousands a year that GitLab wants.
Strengthening the documentation around migrating to a free self-hosted instance may soften the blow. But it’s still a big ask for people unprepared to deal with the additional workload.
I know that delivering the stuff costs money. I had figured GitLab would treat that as the cost of doing business–perhaps quid pro quo for benefitting financially off contributions by the FOSS community. (No, the “program” doesn’t count, a.k.a. adding yearly paperwork to get back the features you’re taking away)
I am one of said video game modders. I run a mid-sized modding team (~20 members), and while not all of us are programmers, about half the team needs persistent access to our code repository on GitLab at any given time for various reasons relating to their role.
Like you, I’ve also been a major advocate of GitLab over the years for those who have use cases similar to ours, in the video game modding sphere. It’s simply the product that makes the most sense out there for those like us. But honestly? Now I need to seriously reconsider my position, since the imposition of such a tiny user limit puts us (and, I guarantee, pretty much every other substantially-sized team in the community video game modding community) in a massive bind and I don’t really know what to do about it.
My team is legally obligated, by the license of the SDKs that we use, to not receive any commercial money for our project. This means we cannot sell our project to recoup any losses we incur, and obtaining funding via other means (donations, crowdfunding) is extremely murky waters at best. This means none of us are paid for our work, and we necessarily already hemorrhage money in other ways via software licenses for game development tools, website costs, etc. Adding an additional ~$200/month is simply a deal-breaker. There is simply no world in which we can justify that in any way. And god forbid we dare to try and recruit more programmers, which we already have a major shortage of. Even if we were willing to pay the monthly price, the fact that the cost is tied to team size would put us in the impossible position of having the pressure to not recruit more members, despite desperately needing to recruit more members.
Many of us in the game modding space have good reasons to want private repositories, and @tboby summed those up very well. But even if my team were fully willing to risk open-sourcing our project (and I am indeed seriously considering it), we simply cannot do that throughout the majority of our development cycle, for the simple reason that doing so would mean major public content spoilers for the project prior to its release.
Our only realistic “least-terrible option” out of this is to switch to self-hosted GitLab. I really don’t want to increase our cloud instance costs beyond what they already are, even if it would be a much smaller monthly price (and, critically, not tied to the number of team members). But even if we were willing to eat that additional cost, that means putting even more burden on our already overworked programming team (realistically, it’s a task that is going to fall squarely on me alone, given the rest of our programmers’ inexperience with DevOps and infrastructure) to set that up, migrate all our stuff, and keep it running at all times, 24/7, for the rest of the team to use.
And I reeeeeeeeeeeaally don’t want to use GitHub. Their free tier limitations are simply a deal-breaker for our use cases. Not to mention it’s GitHub.
I have been advocating GitLab for last 3 years to people. We love everything you guys have been doing and contributing into remote culture. This comes as a very sad news for a medium size company like us with many namespaces and 30-40 users distributed across all these namespaces, although not surprising that now you have to maximize the company worth to shareholders, guess now GitLab is mainly working towards that.
Last year when the starter plan was slashed, we thought we can compromise and work with free feature because frankly $19/user/month jump is impossible for us. We are using own pipelines and using GitLab mainly for Git. We will be more than happy to pay for a starter plan if have to go paid for feature set we use. The current pricing structure is just insane considering 2 of the main competitors are offering better plans for the same set of features.
Looks like we are forced to move to GitHub, insane that you are willingly forcing customers to move away.
Free tier namespaces on GitLab SaaS have a 5GB storage limit. This limit is not visible on the storage quota page nor currently enforced for users who exceed the limit.
@kencjohnston Why enforce a user limit before enforcing the storage limit?
We currently have four active developers and then ten staff members that only comment/view issues. Our understanding of this change is that we now need to pay for fourteen subscriptions? We are completely fine paying for the four active developers who use the service extensively, but we find it excessive to bill users that only comment on issues the same.
You understand correctly - our similar use-case (most users involvement being passive) hurts the business case for making the transition. I’ve no doubt that a great deal of thought went into the choices made by gitlab here, at the end of the day I can’t argue with the notion that we (the non-paying masses) are fundamentally a drain on the system and whilst we might have played a part in the growth that enabled an IPO, its better for the business to cut us off now than continue to pay for our presence - certainly gitlab owes us nothing. It was fun whilst it lasted but the value proposition is better elsewhere.
I have a question about users counting for shared projects. If there is a situation that project A is created by group A and it is shared with some individual users. Then how to count users for cooperating project A using namespace definition? Is it the number of members in group A or the number of members in project A?
We count the total number of users within a namespace and this includes the users in the parent namespace (group), subgroups, and projects. If I understand your example correctly, it would be the unique users in both project A and group A. I hope this answers your question!
Hi @mrydzik thanks for sharing your feedback.
We do have the option of free guest users (who can perform a lot more actions in addition to commenting), along with security, compliance and portfolio management, in the higher tier Ultimate. Can I recommend you to talk to our team to see if we can help you out?
