GitLab moves to a 3-tier product subscription model
As we recently announced, we are phasing out the Bronze/Starter tier and moving to a three-tier subscription model. Existing customers on Bronze/Starter tier will be unaffected until the end of their subscription period and our transition offers will help them navigate through this change at their own pace. For more details, please refer to this customer FAQ.
Thank you very much for taking the time to provide us with your perspective. In order to publish your feedback regarding this change, please add a reply to this thread. Please allow our Product Team some time to review the input you add here.
I get why the change is made and I’m not mad about it. Mostly I paid my few bucks to support GitLab, not because I needed the features. My main question is: What features am I losing? There is no comparison to what the plans are now versus what they were. Do I need silver? Or is free good enough? Where did all those bronze features go?
Thanks for the thoughtful response! This is really helpful feedback. And welcome to the forum!
To compare features, you can use compare the plans on our pricing page: GitLab Pricing | GitLab. Hopefully that will help you decide what tier will work best for you.
We are currently paying Bronze level because there are some features that we find interesting. These features are now in the premium level. We were not interested in the previous “silver” level.
So also trying to not have a knee-jerk reaction to this news… but here are a couple of things that would would be helpful:
page describing what was Bronze/Starter and will not be available in the Free tier
(the feature matrix linked above does not include the Starter/Bronze tier, and so does not provide the same information)
updated documentation rolled out with this announcement, because now pages like this one have features tagged as “Bronze/Starter”, and I don’t know what that means - is it Bronze only if you’re on a legacy plan? But not Free? And it’s no labeled Premium…?
The Bronze/Starter tier does not meet the hurdle rate that GitLab expects from a tier and is limiting us from investing to improve GitLab for all customers.
raises the concern that, if your “above the hurdle” tiers are not generating enough cash flow, it means that you are investing in product which the relative distribution of users to your “below the hurdle” tier(s) demonstrates lacks value to your market.
you could provide some statistics to reassure, but standing on its own, the statement points to an outcome where your numbers drop and, in the end, you lose.
I understand the changes for hosted Gitlab, however what I don’t understand is the specific justification for on-prem. You’re expecting on-prem customers to pay 5x the amount they’re currently paying for some of the small features they’ve invested time developing processes around, such as issue weights and multiple assignees. I cannot fathom how on-prem licensing can be sold at a loss, which is part of the justification given.
I completely understand the point of aligning hosted and on-prem tiers to be the same, but at a cost of 5x to current starter customers simply doesn’t justify this at all.
The Paid Tiers page has now been updated to remove starter, thanks for flagging. Going forward, we will continue to be using our buyer based pricing model Pricing model | GitLab to guide our decisions on what tier a new feature should be included in.
page describing what was Bronze/Starter and will not be available in the Free tier
Hi @jamesvl - each PM went through the buyer based pricing model referenced above for each feature in Starter to determine whether they should be part of Core or Premium going forward. The issue is not public right now, but the output was that all but one feature will be in Premium. The feature moving to core was Jenkins build stats being present in the MR view.
updated documentation rolled out with this announcement, because now pages like this one have features tagged as “Bronze/Starter”, and I don’t know what that means - is it Bronze only if you’re on a legacy plan?
Thanks for highlighting this, and I apologize for the confusion right now. We are working on updating our documentation, to clearly indicate whether they are Premium or Core. In the interim, anything documented as Starter will be in Premium. The Jenkins feature above will shift to Core.
The features in Bronze are already in Silver. So there is no movement of the features from Bronze to Silver. We’ll continue our efforts to open source features when we see a fit: Pricing model | GitLab
Sorry I guess I was unclear. But what happened to all the features that were previously in Bronze? Did any of them end up in the free tier? Or is the the only option Silver?
At the end of the day I’m trying to figure out “What was previously in Bronze that I had access to, that I no longer have in free tier”
We were in the process of obtaining budget to upgrade our self-managed instance to Bronze, mostly to obtain the issue management, merge request and push rules improvements. The previous princing made sense to us, but the steep curve to Silver/Premium does not really justify the upgrade.
The Premium pricing would make much more sense to us coupled with a migration from our self-managed instance to gitlab.com, taking away some of the management overhead and enabling features like advanced search with no extra effort, but such migration is kind of unthinkable for a company small as us.
There are other problems, external to us. The timing of this price change does not feel right, at least to me. Lots of small companies have been hit really hard by COVID-19 and many software companies are going the other way around and temporarily lowering their prices. Maybe this does not look too bad from the perspective of a US company, but for us in Brazil the price hike comes coupled with an exchange rate devaluation of the BRL of about 30% in the last year, so compared to a year ago Gitlab got 15 times more expensive.
I appreciate the extreme quality of the Gitlab product (this is my third employer where I use it in a row) and understand business models cannot be subject to exchange rates in developing countries, but the timing is, indeed, very bad.
As @joshlambert explained above, each PM went through the buyer based pricing model referenced above for each feature in Starter to determine whether they should be part of Core or Premium going forward. The issue is not public right now, but the output was that all but one feature will be in Premium. The feature moving to core was Jenkins build stats being present in the MR view.
Thank you so much for your understanding and thoughtful feedback!
We indeed put lots of thoughts into this. We understand that this change could be disruptive for our current Starter customers, which is why we are offering one more renewal on Starter, and transition options with deep price discounts to ease the transition to Premium for the next three years. We hope our current customers start to experience additional features that Premium brings, which can help improving efficiency and saving costs overall in the next few years before they pay the Premium price.
Wait, let me get this straight. If I want repository pull mirroring, I would have to now pay $228 USD per year rather than $48 USD per year? Are you serious? That’s nearly a 5x increase, during a pandemic no less. Or, am I misunderstanding something?
So GitLab “reviewed it’s pricing” and somehow failed to add monthly pricing despite this being one of the most requested features by paying users?
Thank you very much for sharing the context! That’s extremely helpful! And we are super appreciative that you’ve been with us along with your career journey.
To be very transparent, we’ve been considering this for a while. We understood the impacts of COVID-19, and we are with you. That’s why we had plans in the beginning of last year and been delaying our plan.
Please do contact our sales if we can be of any help for you to utilize more functionalities and add values to your organiztions in this period.
