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Comment by Freak_NL | Hacker News Reader

Gitlab is really great for companies who wish to self-host their tools, and as a source code repository it is great at the free tier. But for small companies who might wish to migrate their issue tracking to Gitlab as well the pricing of the paid tiers is prohibitively expensive.

What would really help me is a self-hosted pricing tier that includes things like epics and roadmap management, for something like $2/user/month. No need for support, just a way to contribute to the product without breaking the bank. After all, we're already self-hosting the software, so without support exceeding that of the free tier it wouldn't cost Gitlab a thing, but it would allow smaller companies to support Gitlab financially.

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You pay your employees thousands per month and rent an office for several hundreds per month. Most people here seem to buy absolutely overpriced Mac Book Pros for $3000. When you cannot pay $4 or $19 per month extra for each employee to be more productive, you have problems beyond that.

This "everything must be free" mentality is driving me crazy. And yes, $2/month/user is still ranging in the "free" region, even $4 is ludicrously cheap when you are even a minute more productive each day. Somebody has to pay Gitlab's employees and VC money wont do this indefinitely.

> When you cannot pay $4 or $19 per month extra for each employee

Not per employee, per user! Letting customers file issues and participate in the process can be impossibly expensive if they're paying $10/month for your product.

Admittedly the $99/seat/month supports free guest users.

My users are not employees but random people contributing to an OS project. There should be a per-project pricing model that the certain situations where that makes sense.

There is. I believe Open Source projects have Golden tier on GL for free and Ultimate on premises. Not sure, you have to check.

edit: just checked:

education: https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/education/

opensource: https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/program/

But these pages are not easy to find, I had to use search. This should be mentioned on the pricing page.

TBH all these features on Gold and Ultimate for free are game changers (specially Gold since you won't need to manage and install so many things that used to be many different systems), GitLab should advertise it more.

Nice:

> Your project must not seek to make a profit from the resulting project software

Maybe Gitlab should also stop seeking profit from their project software.

Is Gitlab asking you to give it something for free?

They are practising hypocrisy.

"Open source is great! We heavily rely on open source! We support open source! So let us maybe give you a key that lifts artificial restrictions from our proprietary code. Only if you're open source. Oh and you mustn't do exactly the thing we do: try to make profit with open source."

If I had made something Gitlab needs, they would not need to ask me to give anything for free because that's what I do by default. I don't build artificial scarcity in my stuff.

I assume you have a day job and in the course of your duties, you charge people for your time while working with open source frameworks. Would it be hypocrisy for you to expect a wage while building solutions based on other people's efforts?

Thanks, this is good but it's not for me.

> Your project must not seek to make a profit from the resulting project software

My project is my job, it's OS but I need to profit from it. I don't mind paying, but just per project. I just don't want to pay for the thousands of people on it who's just making spelling corrections.

You seem to be well aware of the financial resources at my disposal and the salaries paid at my company. Do we have a data leak?

Besides, epics and roadmaps pushes the price to $19/user/month, which we can't afford. $4/user/month might be possible, but the epics and roadmap features are a must have at that point.

Do you guys want to chip in and create something like an open source version of Instagantt for Asana, but "Epics/Roadmaps for Gitlab".

I think something like $3000 one time payment should be enough to clone the feature from scratch.

This exists in Gitlab already.

World is not just US.

It would be nice to have country-dependent pricing, relative to their poverty index or some other quantifier. That way everyone could afford to pay for the service and would "feel" the price in a same way.

I am aware of expenses that are the same for maintainers, no matter where their clients come from. But wouldn't it be nice?

In our company we are going to experiment with such pricing to give everyone equal chance to use our software. Some countries are going to have it for free.

I don't think the poster wants to drive you crazy. I don't think the poster said they wanted everything to be free. What I believe they're asking is a pricing plan that offers a feature without support for a reduced price. It is an idea, and GitLab's staff who are lurking here are smart enough to check if there's a business opportunity there, and a need that can viable be filled.

In many parts of the world, $200 is a salary.

The tiered pricing concept and the upgrade pushed by induced demand and "Parkinson's law" has changed the world as it allows companies to start working using free or low priced tiers instead of needing high initial capital. As these companies grow, they will use more features and pay more.

> In many parts of the world, $200 is a salary.

I'm not sure how to understand this. In American practice, salaries are quoted annually. You pretty much have to look at sub-Saharan Africa to find annual earnings that low. In Chinese practice, they're quoted monthly. That covers a lot more of the world.

Mostly this comment is a note that "is a salary" isn't really a meaningful predicate. It means wildly different things in different places.

I meant $200 after taxes per month. I can see how it can be ambiguous.

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