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We recently spent a couple weeks going over pricing with a GitLab regional Account Leader. We already use GitLab for all our source repos, CI/CD pipelines, and
by dak1 6y ago
We recently spent a couple weeks going over pricing with a GitLab regional Account Leader.
We already use GitLab for all our source repos, CI/CD pipelines, and had been using it for issue management as well — all fully self-hosted. The hope was to drop Jira, which was also being used for project planning, and fully adopt GitLab, but the costs were simply unjustifiable.
Basically GitLab ended up being a full order of magnitude more expensive. Even with discounts, which got things closer (but not all the way there), the fear was after a period of time, the discounts would be ended/phased out and we'd be stuck.
I'd love to see those features that compete directly with Jira (like roadmaps and multi-level epics) come down to the Premium level, which is more price/feature competitive.
We love GitLab, but find ourselves stuck using the free tier and paying for services we don't love, rather than supporting GitLab. I'd suspect we're not alone there, either.
- john_cogs 6y agoGitLab team member here. Thanks for the thoughtful feedback. Will share with our team.
- Achshar 6y agoI also have a small dev team of 25 that wants to move to gitlab paid model but the upfront cost is too much. We need a monthly payment plan even if it costs more than annual one because I can't justify a high upfront cost to my ceo. We're rapidly expanding and expect to be 100 within 2021.
- john_cogs 6y agoThanks. I will share this, too. Edit - we share why we prioritize annual pricing over monthly in our handbook: https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/pricing/#annual-pricing-is-prioritized-over-monthly-pricing https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/pricing/#annual-pricin...
- Redsquare 6y agoDo you pay google yearly upfront for hosting?
- bombcar 6y agoMonthly is huge for our SaaS subscriptions. We usually go yearly later.
- marcinzm 6y agoMany of these points come back to "it's easier or cheaper for gitlab this way" which isn't a great way to convince a customer. Some of which seem to actually be "due to our inability to onboard, manage and retain customers in an automated hands off way it's cheaper or easier this way" which is a terrible way to convince customers.
- apple4ever 6y agoNone of these is convincing, mostly because "its better for Gitlab". I don't care. I want what's better for our company. And right now, that is not paying for GitLab. It sucks because I am an evangelist for GitLab, but I'm fighting a losing battle and we will be switching paid Github over free GitLab because of things like this.
- crb002 6y agoHow much are 25 individual paid accounts?
- threeseed 6y agoYou can solve a lot of the pricing issues by offering add-ons. Buy the Premium tier and add Kubernetes or Security for an additional $4 / month.
- crb002 6y agoDoes GitLab have an option to pick the major cloud data center it hosts in? Cross data center network transfer is a no-go.
- Aeolun 6y agoThis is not a new issue. There is an issue somewhere on the Gitlab repo that I’ve been subscribed to for more than two years. At this point it seems unlikely to change.
- tentacleuno 6y agoHow was your experience with Jira?
- zeusk 6y agoI had to deal with JIRA during an internship, it screams management bloat.
- marcinzm 6y agoIt's what you make of it. Most companies make it into a mess. And the UI is slow and bloated like a dead whale. It is however not that expensive which matters especially when most of the company needs accounts and not just engineers. $7/user/month for basic or $14 for everything you reasonably care about. Gitlab is $19 or $99/user/month.
- time0ut 6y agoI use a couple dozen tools on a regular basis. JIRA is by far the worst. The functionality is ok. Maybe it is a bit bloated. Maybe our process is a little over complicated. That's not a big deal. The thing that really gets me is performance. The performance is absolute dog shit. Every interaction with it painfully slow. For example, the page to view a single issue is almost 20MB fetched over 100 HTTP requests and takes 10 seconds to load. This is without cache. With assets cached, it is still 4 seconds to render. This is the fastest interaction by the way. Everything else is worse. Maybe some of this is my organization's fault. I really don't know. What I do know is that it is so slow that I dread every interaction with it.
- 6y ago
- Freak_NL 6y agoDefinitely not alone. We use the self-hosted GitLab that comes with MatterMost out of the box: great! Now offer something to kill of Jira at a reasonable price and you've got another customer. The functionality is all there, it's just distributed awkwardly across tiers for many small outfits.
- tinco 6y agoSame, we ended up pushing back our subscription for almost a year, in which we really could've used their service. Just because the upfront cost was so high. And when we finally got a subscription it was a silver subscription, which is great but doesn't let us drop Jira. The gold subscription cost is just insane. It might make sense if you're used to paying SV wages.
- dataminded 6y agoSame situation here.
- xtracto 6y agoWe are are in a similar situation: We were using Github Team, paying I think $4 a month per account (between 10 and 15 users). I (head of the Eng group) love Gitlab and had used it for some time in personal/open-source projects. I managed to convince the team about Gitlab and we migrated, initially in the Free tier. My first surprise was that Gitlab does not allow for Monthly payments...if I wanted to go into the Bronze tier, I would have had to pay a whole year in full. My startup doesn't do whole-year payments (quarterly or monthly) so that stopped me on my tracks. I guess with the full weight of Microsoft, Github will out-price Gitlab. It's kind of sad because I prefer Gitlab CI/CD to Github actions (I just couldn't make sense of them).
- dkarlovi 6y agoInvest time in GH actions, they are actually really good once you get over the initial hump.
- Twixes 6y agoI love GH Actions so much, though would love dive into GitLab's CI/CD too if anyone has good resources on that.
- john_cogs 6y agoHere are some options depending on your learning preference: Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5705U8s_nQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l5705U8s_nQ Docs: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/quick_start/ https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/ci/quick_start/ Slides and a demo exercise: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-de/swiss-meetup-2021-jan https://gitlab.com/gitlab-de/swiss-meetup-2021-jan
- sjburt 6y agoGitlab's CI/CD a minefield of bad design decisions piled upon each other. Not worth it unless you're stuck with it.
- leesalminen 6y ago
- pc86 6y agoThis is not an uncommon complaint, but it is surprising, especially given their well below-market pay for employees. Where's all this money going?
- Maarten88 6y agoThe free tier users? I'm amazed actually at what the free tier offers to small startups. We have hundreds of gigabytes worth of docker images in the gitlab package registry that we can't even delete/cleanup properly (just keeping the last two would do for us), and Gitlab is keeping all that data for free.
- addicted 6y agoIn my unfortunate experience, having evangelized Gitlab in my company from the days when they made money through support and subscriptions, as expensive as Gitlab already is, it will only get more expensive a few years later. It's nice that they keep adding these features, but in reality, we have already integrated most of the functionality they've added well before they get around to buying the company making the features they want to add. So the actual practical effect on us is that we simply have to pay additional costs for those features that we don't use (or pay in time and money to migrate to those new features, with no real benefit and a massive downside of further increasing dependence).
- tyingq 6y agoVariation of the same here. We did try to show, for example, that we could roll off some contractors if we shut down all of the various jenkins instances. But that wasn't enough to justify the "ultimate" tier, we went with "premium". And the business case still had to include fluff to make it sound at all like a good idea. Note that it IS a good idea in this case, but for reasons that are hard to show as dollars. It seems like they need something (low base + ala cart add ons?) to have a better pitch for Jira/Bitbucket self-hosted customers to switch. One thing they could do is reduce the cost for non-developer seats. Lots of people need access to the issues, or builds/deploys, etc, without needing to commit code.
- keitsi 6y ago"One thing they could do is reduce the cost for non-developer seats. Lots of people need access to the issues, or builds/deploys, etc, without needing to commit code." Exactly! Lower tier users would solve many of the issues.
- aussiedude 6y agoThis is what I like about azure devops. Stakeholder licences are available for free with access to boards and wiki but not code repos.
- ShakataGaNai 6y agoYea. Love gitlab but the pricing does add up quickly. Even if with all the features, it's really hard to get value out of Gold/Ultimate. When I add up all the major SaaS apps an average user has: SSO, Email, Chat, Storage, Zoom, Support. Combined, GitLab Ultimate costs 2-3x that. And I promise you that as much as we all hate a messy inbox, email is more broadly useful than GitLab. The other problem with ultimate is that it strongly incentives you to NOT let anyone else on the platform. At $1200/year there is no way in heck I'm letting the artists use Git, they can stick to their terribly Dropbox hacks. Marketing team working on assets with developers? Use email, no way you're getting access to GitLab. The $100/user/month model makes sense if they are a core developer (still too expensive, but makes sense) using every single feature in the system, but nothing else.
- prepend 6y ago> The other problem with ultimate is that it strongly incentives you to NOT let anyone else on the platform. This is my biggest problem as their pricing model discourages collaborative development. We use GitLab to generate docs that are read by hundreds of internal users. On the free tier, if a user wants to suggest a change it’s no problem. Even though that is a very rare user and might only create one issue a year. Or maybe they add a tutorial or something to a project. They aren’t developers, but having them involved in the git lifecycle is really helpful. Also data scientists who just want to archive their pipelines. But with the ultimate tier those users suddenly cost $1200/year for minimal features. We can’t upgrade for free for the developers because we’ll disconnect all those “casual users.” The suggestion to run two instances is stupid and confusing to users who now have to learn about mirroring, etc. It’s weird that they don’t allow individual users to have tiers, we would buy more GitLab. As of now, we will likely have to switch off of GitLab because there’s not a clear dividing line between software developers who need GitLab features and staff who write software who just need git, issue tracking, wikis and pages.
- viraptor 6y ago> The $100/user/month model It's not a high number of accounts before you can have a person dedicated 50% of the time to just running a local gitlab setup with any options you want. Including infra costs + on-demand CI/CD.
- CMCDragonkai 6y agoThe only price tier that is worth it is the silver. The gold/ultimate is just way too expensive. It's a shame that the jump is so crazy for a team of 10, from paying 3K a year to paying over 14K a year.
- hinkley 6y agoIn theory we have this x,y coordinate system that shows the cost of a feature and the value of the feature. Which is great if you are living in a bubble by yourself, or some similar products. Making someone decide between CI and shared document writing is a terrible choice to have to make. The other way to present this graph is the classic triangle, Cheap, Good, Fast, but the way we typically use that triangle suffers the same failure mode, because 'expensive' is some weird variant on cheap vs fast, as represented by Brook's Law. I think the Discord Team has a different interpretation of this - the maintenance cost of the feature matters more to the user than the initial development cost. I can deliver you a feature now that will cost $X a month to operate, or I can deliver you that feature in a couple of months and it'll cost 1/10th that amount. Which means we can offer it to users at a price point they can afford. It feels like Gitlab has, like so many of us, a bunch of features that create opportunity costs that the customers can't stomach.
- late2part 6y agoWhat on earth is a "regional Account Leader?"
- eyeball 6y agothey lost to azure devops on price at my organization
- ksolanki 6y agoWhat’s the solution if you are Gitlab? It takes revenues to sustain this. Is there a better model?
- apple4ever 6y agoNot surprised. I rail on this all the time. One of my major problems is only the Ultimate allows free guest users. Its a big reason we haven't paid for GitLab. And we are also looking to go toward Github for that reason and some others too (and those others might be solved if we paid for support, but see the first reason).