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Comment by mydigitalself | Hacker News Reader

GitLab as a company has had paying customers for a long time. If you take a look at our web site (https://about.gitlab.com/) you can see some amazing companies who license GitLab EE including IBM, NASA, Nasdaq, Sony and Uber to name just a few.

GitLab.com has become increasingly popular over time and we want to continue to not only provide a great self-hosted product, but also an amazing hosted (SaaS) solution.

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There is a difference between having paying customers and being a profitable business. Now, you have access to the gitlab books and I don't but from where I'm sitting the more revenue streams you have the better I feel (because I really like gitlab...), on the off chance that you weren't profitable yet.

Not always. Often a revenue stream costs more time (money) than you get from it.

Note that the above is tricky. There are revenue streams that lose money by the books, but are worth having because they help something else. An example is a store sells milk at (or below) cost because people come for the cheap milk and buy lots of other things.

Yes, there is probably a contrived counter example for every action a company does that allows you to construe that action as a net negative. But on the whole companies are quite smart at allocating their resources, especially scrappy start-ups and given that bit of data you can make the (safe) assumption that they thought this through to make sure that it would not be a negative. For instance, by first asking their customers whether or not they would pay for such a product.

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