I agree with the folks upthread who suggested different user roles. It would also be good if GitLab considered how to handle large existing implementations that combine GitLab with other tools. We have 3000 users on Starter, mostly because we have a large Jira instance for issue tracking, company-wide Artifactory, etc. So that means that even if we wanted everyone to use GitLab as an all-in-one solution, in practice you’re talking about 2-3 years of migrations. I would love to be able to have:
2500 SCM/build users
300 users with that plus issue tracking
200 users with all that plus portfolio management and SAST
In our situation the upgrade to premium is free for only 3 weeks. Someone with a license started January 25 has more advantage. Why not everybody just 1 year premium license for bronze cost until January 26 in 2022?
These are exactly the features we need. Basically nothing more - we use GitLab to do SCM, CI and issue tracking - not LDAP integration or fancy DevOps things. We, too, are very unhappy about this change as Starter exactly offered these “SCM but not DevOps” features
Also, this exact thing is what we were looking at. Getting management approval for Starter in these times was something we were very thankful for. Now, that we wanted to start, there is no way that we can justify the steep 5x increase in pricing. We only need the issue management features like linked issues, multi-assignees, etc.
We have built our complete development ecosystem around our self-hosted instance. Having to pay $19 for something we host ourselves and don’t use most features of (no plans to use the DevOps part, as it doesn’t fit our product) is very painful.
I recently moved my not for profit over to Gitlab because I wanted to support a remote OSS organization that would be more democratic in its decision making than Github and Microsoft. I really hope the sentiment turns around regarding this because a lot of the comments I see here seem like genuine pleas.
@kernelpanek thanks for your post, and sorry for the troubles! There was some out of sync data related to your account which was causing the unexpected behavior. I’ve just cleared that and you should now be able to checkout the free upgrade to Premium for the remainder of your current subscription. Just select the Upgrade button once more.
For other community members experiencing this issue, please open a support ticket and the team can assist!
I whole-heartedly agree that this is a bad move, and done poorly. I understand the desire to simplify the pricing model. I also understand that small users of the Bronze/Starter plans don’t bring any significant revenue.
But rather than forcing those users to upgrade, why not move all the previous Bronze/Starter features to Core? In my case, I’m only paying a Starter license for access to one or two features beyond what Core offers. They absolutely don’t justify the cost of Premium, even with the discounts.
What small amount of revenue you’d lose would be more than made up for in goodwill and having more happy users recommend your more expensive products. As it stands, I’m exploring other options, like Gitea/Drone which more and more seems like a good replacement.
My company of about 35 developers wanted to migrate to GitLab’s Bronze offer from Bitbucket for the great integration of CI and SCM. However, with the steep price hike this is hard to justify. Most of the additional features from Bronze to Silver are about project management, something that we - and presumably also other companies - are using JIRA for and do not have any immediate plans to change. For this scenario you’re billing customers 5 times the existing price without any value added that will be used by them.
In our specific case, we’re currently using a setup with 2 users on GitLab for some automation while we evaluate the platform to switch completely, meaning we - according to my understanding - don’t qualify for the discounted upgrade pricing either because we’d have needed to have all user accounts before you announced the change of the pricing model.
Subjectively, I love your product, but convincing management that a 5 times increase in price is justified for things you don’t use is uh… not trivial.
I think by offering users with reduced capabilities, as previously suggested in this thread, you could reduce that issue.
Alternatively I could see you keeping the 4$ tier and dropping the included customer support if this was what created the additional burden.
The company I work for has a 22 user starter license and we’re 1 user over the license currently.
To take advantage of the free upgrade to premium and future discounts do we need to add an additional premium license and pay for it at full retail price during the free upgrade of the 22 user license?
For self-managed instances the free upgraded license will need to be for enough users to cover your current usage.
However, when you select the upgrade button in our Customers Portal, you will be able to add the additional user during that checkout process. We’ll charge $0.00 for the existing 22 users and a transition offer price of $6/user/month (list is $19) for the additional user. Noting that you’ll only be charged for the remaining term and not a full 12 months of that user.
So for example, if you upgrade today and pay for an additional user and your subscription expiration date is 30 days from now, we’ll only charge $6 total for the additional user for the remaining contract period.
So for example, if you upgrade today and pay for an additional user and your subscription expiration date is 30 days from now, we’ll only charge $6 total for the additional user for the remaining contract period.
That makes sense, but unfortunately the price per extra license I’m seeing is $35.04:
@jcslevine Actually that looks pretty close to my expectation since that total is the prorated annual price.
If you have 12 months of a subscription left, $6/user/mo would equal = $72.00.
However, based on your screenshot, it looks like your subscription has 66.4% left so 66.4% of $72.00 is $47.80.
Now, why is it displaying $35.04 for you and not $47.80? I’d have to look into this further but since it’s less than what I expect, you may want to check out while the offer is there.
We’re currently on Bronze starter. We need to add users. Our current account renewal date is next January. What are our choices? Can we add users at our current rate and then upgrade, or do we have to pay the new rate for the new users?
I appreciate what you are trying to do with the simplification of your pricing tiers and also appreciate the transition pricing from Starter/Bronze to Premium/Silver. However what I don’t understand is why you won’t offer the same transition pricing discount to customers with > 25 users? Yes we’re getting more features but most will argue that they will not use these features for a while and thus the transition pricing is a good strategy as people become more exposed to the new features. Also you’re not losing any revenue if there is a slow transition and thus I’m struggling to reconcile why you cannot apply the same transition discount to customers with > 25 users?
I’d have to look into this further but since it’s less than what I expect, you may want to check out while the offer is there. 