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Comment by lazypenguin | Hacker News Reader

Interesting announcement, didn't expect it. I respect the decision but it will force me to consider another git host provider. I've always been willing to pay for Gitlab but the prices have always been aggressive and discouraged me from doing it:

- $20/per user for most basic tier when I don't really need any of the features offered (except maybe "approval before merge required")

- $5/month for 10GB of storage ($0.50/GB) is steep. This stopped me from importing my large Git LFS project

- No way to have "view only" members for a repo or issue board without it contributing to your user number count and having to pay full price for them.

It's clear that I'm not that target market for them which is fine but its a bit of a shame as I do like gitlab.

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The changes they made (I guess a couple years now) to their pricing model really bit us in the ass. We had a 130 user licence on the old 5$ tier, and had to aggressively cut user counts to afford the new licence.

There really needs to be something like a "view only" or a role based cost per user. Most of our clients are just there for commenting, and only a handful of developers actually use the product to its full extent.

I know there was an issue open for discussion on their payment models, so I hope it is something they are continuing to look at. At 4x the cost of competitors that offer similar features, it is a very hard sell.

This is a problem at every org scale as well. We have this issue with a 1000+ developer org where we still can't give our PMs and other non-developers read-only access to the gitlab issues because it would be another 200 headcount worth of full-price licenses. It's basically the sole reason we can't utilize most of their jira/confluence alternative product line and still keep issue tracking and docs mostly outside of gitlab.

If you are just using the .git hosting part, it would be really easy to setup an open-ssh server yourself... Could you explain why you are not hosting your own ssh server already ?

They didn't say they're only using the git hosting, they're just not using the issue trackers because that would require adding non-devs. For all you know they could be using GitLab for CI, merge requests, package management, and deployments, none of which require adding new people to the team.

Exactly this, we use it for all of those things. None of which provide value to PMs, designers, and other non-engineer roles within teams that still need to collaborate on issue tracking and documentation.

Same, we have 50 people who access some (private) documentation and 10 people who use the repos. We're going to be moving away tomorrow.

We're light users of Gitlab, just use it for Merge Requests and the CI interface (while we use our own runners)

The cheapest plan is 19$ month and it doesn't give us any extra benefits

and it's billed annually! Take it or leave it. For me it's 3 months timeline to leave Gitlab :)

I still like it, but not worthwhile for my professional projects and Github is a better homepage with all my OSS contributions displayed.

beside there's always a couple of people (non tech) who get added to the repo and barely login (but they want to keep the access), not worth paying 19$ for that

Considering that GitHub is priced at $4 per user/month, I really cannot justify paying 5x of that amount, especially without even using any of the features in the paid tier. I really like the product, but I am going to have to look for other options.

Github can be free for teams: https://github.com/pricing.html

I also found LFS pricing too steep, so I just spun up a gitea and grabbed 150GB block storage for $10/month. Kinda funny actually, since doing this I've slowly migrated all my personal projects off github and gitlab and i no longer have private repos on either site because I don't need them. I pay $5/mo for the server running gitea, which grants me as many private repos as i want with 50GB base storage. Much more cost effective, and I'll honestly probably never use 150GB so a lot of peace of mind there. Backups are managed by my cloud service for $1/mo.

But I guess I don't use a lot of the features a business would need, so I'm only speaking for personal projects. I dunno, I've never actually looked at collaboration features for gitea.

$20/user/m is ridiculous. We are looking at paying a tiny bit more than this to have Github Enterprise hosted on our own hardware.

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