Hi, Same concern here. we clearly will leave gitlab.com for our open source projects. Furthermore I already applied to the open source program and have no news for more than a month. I can’t see how Gitlab will deal with yearly the amount of bureaucratic work they raise, so it looks like a gentle pushup to leave gitlab.com.
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Sorry for the long waiting time. I’ve asked our teams to check based on your forum profile but there was no application found. I’d suggest that you reapply and kindly let us know (in a DM or here) the namespace you applied for the OSS program. Thanks!
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Does anyone from the GitLab team on this forum have feedback about the concerns raised above with the GitLab for Open Source legal agreement terms & the liability they put on individual open source contributors ?
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Hi,
can you check the three following repositories all hosted by the french local chapter of the OSGEO ( https://www.osgeo.org/)
I don’t rember which one of the three I applied for. I was waiting some feedback from you before doing the demand for the two others.
BTW, the request form as it is currently would gain a lot to just be a simple issue (even private if you want to) so that we can chat around it and keept track of it. It looks more like throwing a bottle to the see currently.
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I’m getting the feeling that this move hasn’t been thought through.
Essentially what set Gitlab apart from Github in regards to private repositories is that you could have an unlimited amount of collaborators even on Gitlab.com . For small projects such as modding this was great, because there are issues around making the project completely public and sometimes self-hosting isn’t an option.
What this move does is it actually makes Gitlab worse than Github for Public Repositories and only marginally better for private ones.
On Github you have a limit of 3 collaborators for private projects (which are unlimited in number, thanks gitlab for forcing their hand on this) so a total of 4 users.
While public projects no matter the license are always free up to an unlimited amount of users.
Considering especially the use case of open-source software you’ve really just made it much more interesting to go back to github for that as you have much less bureaucracy there.
I’ve personally been a big advocate of Gitlab even though I could never bring myself to recommend your paid tiers as they are so ridiculously expensive especially since you reduced it down to only the Premium and Ultimate tiers.
I’ve looked into how you see yourself looking at the pricing and how Gitlab Premium is just Github Enterprise feature wise and Gitlab Ultimate aims to replace some obscure enterprise only vulnerability scanner and compliance platforms.
This makes it clear that your target customers for any paid tiers are enterprise customers and individual developers or small teams that don’t need enterprise features are simply better served with the free tier.
Notwithstanding the fact that for the price of Gitlab Premium on the scale of a large enterprise you could probably pay a couple of developers to just reimplement the key missing features in an internal fork of gitlab.
In general you should definitely make this upcoming reduction in users clearer.
The only communication you get is that you are losing benefits of the ultimate edition and runner minutes are reduced. This is the first time I’ve heard of this upcoming change (for which the original deadline would have already passed).
I’m hoping this isn’t as much of a PR disaster for you as I think it is, but I’m personally not recommending Gitlab.com as a solution for public OR private projects anymore as its now more limited than github. Self hosting is a different story.
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I’m very disappointed in this change. There are many small not for profit but still closed groups of people creating software with no or very limited budgets, or hobbyists learning with friends. The change to the CI minutes makes perfect sense - servers cost money - and GitLab does have to pay bills, that I understand, but the change to the number of users does not.
Those projects with infrequent users or a large number of users submitting issues but not coding will be impacted hard by this change. A user does not take a significant amount of money to serve.
GitLab is wonderful software, but the only impact of the users element of this change is going to be to push people over to competitors. Maybe that’s your desire, because of course they aren’t paying anything for the free service, but there are thousands of people contributing to the world through small contributions to open source and nonprofit projects who aren’t going to go through the complicated certification process when they can import an entire project overnight.
Thank you for giving us what you have and supporting untold numbers of devs, hobbyists and programmers in learning the craft. I hope that you don’t end up pushing them all away with a poorly-thought through user limit.
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Seeing this now, roughly half a year after it has been published for the first time, and this is totally by accident. So much for your plans of properly communicating these changes 
I’ve been a long time free GitLab user, and it’s always been because as a solo developer attached to tons of small scale projects - some of them non-profit, some even open source but so small that even filling out an online form is not worth the hassle - none of the paid plans made any sense to me. None. I’d gladly be paying my fair share, but anything GitLab has been offering so far is beyond acceptable. And it’s getting worse by the year.
And I always wonder: when will the day come that the community has had enough, just forks GitLab CE and starts over, providing the features developers actually need on an open source basis? Does your wise board of decision makers understand that part of internet developer culture? Do they realize that all that forcing people to use self hosted instances over peanuts will just make it a hundred times easier for them to move a true community edition later on when that fork has finally happened? And that in their wake you will lose tons of currently paying customers, having opened up a market for reasonably priced hosting?
You don’t think this can happen? Remember MySQL/MariaDB? Remember OpenOffice/LibreOffice? Remember ownCloud/Nextcloud? Perhaps remember Gogs/Gitea? Of course you don’t remember them, because those of you deciding on those issues don’t care about open source culture. Let me remind you: it only takes one large client who has had enough with the pricing model and decides to invest in 1 or 2 full time gitlab-fork developers instead of throwing money at GitLab. Combine that with a bunch of experienced developers wanting to invest their free time and knowledge without getting held back by made-up corporate decisions and you have a movement. And every time you tell us BS fairy tales about your user studies while ignoring years of actual user feedback you get one step closer to that day.
You were the ones who forced github to introduce proper pricing because theirs was abhorrent. Looks like it’s your turn to be the abhorrently priced one. Fare well!
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Understandable decision but very disappointing and very poorly executed.
Poor execution: I have only known about this with the email that was sent to me only yesterday.
Disappointing: A lot of users will be moving away from GitLab for sure. This will not work for any small businesses that are barely making any money and rely on free services to keep their products running and satisfactory for their few hundreds loyal users.
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I love the way gitlab manage the namespace and my company is ready to buy the subscription plan. However, last year, gitlab changed their pricing plans which started from $19/user/month. It’s ridiculous expensive. Now, with the namespace limit, it’s time to say goodbye.
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In addition, to ensure all users are aware of the upcoming change, email and in-app notifications will be rolled out through June, 2022
@helmuthb: still zero indication of this change in-app (even on Gitlab next), thankfully at least some users (@hzu) are getting email notifications
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There was an update on the blog post as of July 18, 2022:
2022-07-18 UPDATE: We are now moving the enforcement date to 2022-10-19. In addition, to ensure impacted users are aware of the upcoming change, email notifications have begun to roll out on 2022-07-18 and in-app notifications will begin in August.
Emails have already begun to roll out, and you’ll start to see in-app notifications in August 
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Definitely the unreasonable part is that guests and reporters (even inactive developers) count as a seat at the billing level.
This generates very large distortions depending on the use case, giving rise to situations in which teams of two or three people, due to their business model, must pay amounts equivalent to much larger teams.
The reason why many teams surely do not upgrade from the free tier to the premium tier is precisely because of this problem; and directing those small teams to upgrade to the Ultimate tier to get free guests is totally unreasonable. With this change you are simply trying to fix a problem caused by a broken pricing model making the problem even worse.
GitLab should stop this change and completely overhaul the pricing model first.
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For small groups. The mass exit from Gitlab will begin.
I understand it doesn’t have to be Free. I can accept that. However Github is $4/user and GitLab is $19/user per month. This difference is amazing.
I really don’t understand the 5X pricing strategy. I am going from FREE to $8K/year for my small team. We give our clients guest access to their code… so we have 25 clients and 10 part-time devs = $8k/year.
Seriously… this just happened.
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Similar situation here, small team on free tier with some customers with access. We are now expected to pay the equivalent for the Github Enterprise Tier per users to keep working in Gitlab?
How are we expected to justify this? And we only got the notice today…
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@levarberry Exactly same situation here. We are a small business (6 employees) but we address a great number of clients for many little projects. So like you we have many guest user (7 + 22).
We simply can’t afford a 19€ per seat/per month with this model…
As CTO I really advocate for Gitlab for a long time but I can’t continue to follow them on this…
It’s not even this change which bothers me, it’s more the lack of alternative pricing because :
- We were genuinely ready to pay because their service is really good and really a time saver.
- Next to that CI/CD pricing is really fair, it’s again a time saver with their paid servers and offer alternatives, really a good model.
But :
- We have many customers on our group that come once in a while → We need to pay for all of them even if they do one issue per month (and no, make them paid for their account is not acceptable)
- We instantly go from 0$ to more than 500$ per month, our financial margin is extremely low, we are not a VC Startup or a Big Player, we can’t afford this raise !
- We are not really interested in Premium features so we will only pay for the seats…
- You removed Bronze tiers a while ago so we really don’t have an alternative…
- We need SaaS so no, being self-managed is not an option.
That’s just sad for our type of business which I think were a Core of your success…
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@aprecigout . I couldn’t sleep yesterday after hearing the news. Spent the rest of my day working on a solution.
Surprisingly! I installed Gitlab CE on a VPS ($20/month). The setup was easy, took me about 2 hrs to install and move all repos from SaaS over to my VPS.
Haven’t tested any CI/CD but it looks and feels 100% the same, but on my domain and hardware.
So my plan is … put everyone on my self-hosted domain. They will be have to access to all the code 100% no limits. Then leave only myself (or 2 others) on SaaS. Then all my integrations and webhooks will still work.
Difference for me would be having two origins
git pull self main
git pull saas main
self could also be origin
The dangling question would be: How much longer will they support the CE version? Or realize this loophole and start charging by the project instead of by user.
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Hello
I just recieved news of this change, which sounds a disaster for our team.
We do scientific work and we have many many small repositories and developers spread out throughout different universities.
Can someone clarify the 5 user limit per namespace? Is it 5 users per project, sub group or group? I am trying to understand if it will be possible to stay if we reduce the number of users
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@s-luis Hi there. The limit is per top level namespace. I encourage you to apply for GitLab for Education which provides free Ultimate licenses for academic research: Join the GitLab for Education Program
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@johncoghlan Hello, thanks for the tip.
It wont work of us though as we are part of a research institute (not for profit), it is not exactly an academic institution
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