Comment by eslaught | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eslaught | Hacker News Reader

First off, I'm really grateful for the service Gitlab has provided to date, both to the open source community and to Git users at large.

Having said that, I think they're killing the golden goose.

At one point, Gitlab's competitive advantage was relatively generous free access to private Git repos. This generated a lot of goodwill in the days when GitHub didn't provide private repos even for personal use. I'm guessing that Gitlab now views its competitive advantage as the CI / DevOps experience. Still, it feels to me like they could limit that feature specifically rather than limiting even public projects to 5 users. Right now, GitHub's offering is suddenly looking attractive again for anyone who doesn't want to fill out a separate application (annually!) for each of their open source namespaces.

I'd think it's to Gitlab's advantage to keep these users. Right now, the current policy effectively chases them away. The only projects I imagine staying are those that really take advantage of the CI, but... is that really who Gitlab wants to limit their userbase to?

> Having said that, I think they're killing the golden goose.

I think it might signal another thing too: "We're big enough, so we don't need that booster anymore".

Trello did that back then. They provided a middle tier called Gold which gave personal users all the goodies, sans the enterprise features. When they got big enough, they moved to strip it out and everybody (incl. me) were up in arms.

We've agreed in a trade-off, and then they still moved us gradually to enterprise. Now we're all using "Team of One" professional accounts with $99/yr. price tags. Trello is an enterprise platform and we're using it expensively just because we are a bunch of people who can use Kanban boards with katana-like precision for our personal projects and/or workflows.

GitLab might be doing this move to position themselves for bigger customers. Knowledgeable people can either pay, or use self-hosted versions they may think. Also, self hosted GitLab has evolved from a simple GitHub clone to a complete pipeline solution with extremely powerful functions. Even GitLab SaaS can talk with your in-house runners, so you can have an on-premise CI/CD pipeline with cloud frontend. It's kinda crazy.

Either like it or not, but you can't burn money like Microsoft + GitHub for free tier.

Which Trello features are you paying for? I use it a lot for personal organization but not the paid tier. Curious what I'm missing or if there's an implication of a feature I didn't understand.

I'm paying for the $10/mo. tier. The features I actively use are:

- Saved searches.

- Single board guests.

- Calendar, Dashboard and (rarely) Timeline views.

- Custom fields

- A lot of butler automations.

- A lot of power-ups, esp. Evernote, Dropbox, GitHub (it was limited before, so looks like they rolled gold into free somewhat).

Thanks for taking the time to type that out.

You're very welcome. I find single board guests esp. useful. Allows collaboration on small projects without extra fees.

If your free tier customers are costing you a lot of money, you're going it wrong.

Gitlab had continuing problems with people using the free CI service for crypto mining. It seems to be the bane of all services that offer any kind of free tier for any compute.

Easy to completely remove free CI minutes from their free tier but allow people to use self hosted runners (very easy to setup)

Oof, I agree. I'm trying to move our repos in my current company from Github to GitLab and was using the free tier to move repos one by one until I could convince enough people that we get enough value out of it to pay and switch over.

Now there's no chance of that happening, as we aren't going to pay for both, and we aren't going to switch wholesale, so it's looking that I'm going to have to move everything to Github...

At a previous company I (Head of Engineering) was pushing to move from Github to Gitlab. However it was exactly at the time when Gitlab removed their lower price tier (I think $5 or $10 per user) and butchered the free version. In addition to that, they do not allow monthly payment (only yearly pre-payment), which was incompatible with our business.

We were actually a Github paying customer and were going to pay to move to Gitlab, but given all those changes and rug-pulls, we decided to stay in Github. GH actions resulted to be enough for the CI/CD stuff we needed.

If your "competitive advantage" costs you money for every customer acquisition is it really an advantage?

It depends on whether that cost is higher or lower than the value you get from paying customers (plus goodwill)---i.e., it's a customer acquisition cost. And whether this particular method of customer acquisition is more or less cost-effective than other methods.

Since they're doing this, I assume they've done the analysis and determined this is no longer cost effective for them. But I'm surprised, because (a) they'll lose goodwill, and (b) what's their alternative plan for customer acquisition? I don't think Gitlab has grown to the point where they can afford to cut their growth, but I don't see how they're going to avoid that on the path they're going down.

Just got off the phone with AWS, they say no they won't take payment in "customer good will"???

I'm not sure what you're saying. AWS literally has a free tier. They're playing the same game as Gitlab, and part of that is paying for potential customers to get access to a baseline level of service to grow their experience with the product and generate goodwill.

I don't have any inside details, but I'd suspect that AWS also pays for PR, either through an internal team or external vendors. So "customer goodwill" is (probably) something they pay money for. Real dollars. This isn't free; you have to pay for it somehow. Whether it's dollars to fund a PR team (and the whole funnel of marketing/sales/etc.), or through free tiers designed to spread by word of mouth... you can't expect to acquire customers for free.

AWS literally gives a lot of startups 1-2 years of free credits.

You can use their CI "system" (the nice interface + config file) without using their CI runners (probably the biggest cost portion in the solution)

Bundling CI minutes on the paid plan doesn't change much, as plenty of customers will keep running their own CI runners for a variety of reasons.

Which means they're essentially very cheap users of Gitlab or would otherwise consider cheaper plans like 5$ a month

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