I’m a developer and I contract with a few different companies. I’ve helped them upgrade their processes and implement Gitlab. Within Gitlab.com, I’m part of several namespaces. I’m wanting to upgrade to Ultimate and encouraging my teams to do the same. But what happens when we start doing that? Am I going to be charged $100/month for every team that I’m on? I can’t find the answer to this question online, and no one from Gitlab support seems to be able to help me—they instructed me to ask my question here.
Just to make sure we’re, clear, here’s the scenario:
Group A has their own set of developers and private projects.
Group B has their own set of developers and private projects.
… same for Groups C through S… (19 groups in all)
In all cases, each Group wants to share a few projects with me so that I can collaborate and review their code.
After an upgrade to Ultimate, is Gitlab.com going to start charging me $100/month for each group that I’m a part of? Surely this can’t be the case, but I can’t get a straight answer out of anyone. It’s been a very weird and suspicious set of replies from Gitlab.com support.
Thanks!
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When you opened a support ticket what category did you choose? If you were asked to come here chances are you chose the wrong category when opening the ticket.
Choosing billing or sales.
The most of us here are community members so are unlikely to be able to tell you how much you would pay. Gitlab have to do that since it is their product and they know their billing process better than anyone else.
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Hi @parleer
yes, you will need to pay for every seat in each namespace.
Example:
I have a user my-developer. I have 3 first-level groups in GitLab.com, /group-1, /group-2 and /group-3. Each group has Ultimate plan. My user needs access to projects in each group.
Result:
GitLab will charge 3x Ultimate seat.
This is because billing is per users in namespace (first-level group).
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@balonik Thanks for clarifying. Based on the OP situation that kind of pricing sounds seriously exorbitant.
That said if someone is a pro developer earning loads then maybe it’s not too bad.
Ultimate plans have Free Guests users and there is this Feature request which kind of helps. But not much to external contract developers like OP. 
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@balonik, thanks for answering my question. I had been talking directly with a Gitlab.com support person but they kept side-stepping my question, saying at first, “you’ll have to read the docs” and then “you’ll have to ask in the community forums”
I had laid out my question as clear as I did here, but I think that they simply didn’t want to admit what they were doing the development community. Unfortunately, Gitlab has failed to monetize their platform in a way that encourages the collaboration they once claimed to promote.
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@iwalker Yes this pricing is extremely exorbitant no matter how you look at it.
The real concern here is that Gitlab couldn’t figure out a better way to monetize their platform. How could the board or whomever is responsible for this change make such a grave and dangerous mistake? They could have, and should have, found a better way. I love Gitlab and have long been a promoter of it over other platforms, but this is a sign that Gitlab has lost touch with their community, especially the community most responsible for their success.
Gitlab should be encouraging collaboration among adhoc teams of disparate developers. This could be easily accomplished with a “bring your own license” scheme that recognizes a developer’s status on whatever groups they are apart of. After all, a developer is a human with limitations — they can’t be in two places at once not can they be working on two projects simultaneously. If a developer spends Monday in Group A, Tuesday in Group B, etc., they are still one person and should be treated as such from a licensing perspective.
This makes sense to from a resource perspective too — if all projects were to reside in Group A they would take no less resources than they do spread out over multiple groups.
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