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Comment by hardwaresofton | Hacker News Reader

Would you mind sharing how you could have changed the price if you could have? There are also options like GitlabHost[0] that might have worked

[0]: https://gitlabhost.com/pricing

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It wasn't so much about the price itself, as we'd pay it if necessary (though having to pay $20/mo for someone to just have access to, say, GitLab pages isn't great). The problem was mostly the removal of free users.

I had added most of the company to a GitLab org I created, and we were using more and more things there, we even have a private CI runner. It was a good way to gradually migrate the organization to GitLab. Now I have to move everything back because there's no way we'll pay thousands of dollars per month for it for the few things we use, and everyone but 5 people will lose access to it in a month.

Basically, the "only 5 free users" thing removes the trojan horse of gradually moving to GitLab until we realize it's worth paying for.

I had the same problem. Probably only 10% of our users were actually devs and they contributed 99.9% of all changes. The other 90% were people reading pages, entering issues, commenting on stuff.

I couldn’t justify paying the same per seat for an every day developer vs someone who might log in once a year (or never).

They should have concurrent users or something for the PM/analyst/browser. Paying for named seats is too much.

Seems like there’s a large opportunity here if the pricing could be just a little more nuanced.

Charging by code committers maybe make more sense…

I talked to them a few years ago but they weren’t able to change their license. I guess there are orgs that pay $1000/user just for PMs to approve merges and stuff.

We went with GitHub over it and it’s kind of a shame because GitLab has so many great features.

I can’t bring myself to pay for 1000 seats so 50 developers can use GitLab. Not to mention for pages viewers where there’s probably 2-5k who view project docs and stuff. Paying for users to log in and view web sites is pretty crazy.

Yeah it's an interesting problem, because those PMs are contributors in some sense, but just on a much lower scale, and single pricing doesn't really reflect that.

As far as running the service goes, they do represent non-zero cost (they're going to be looking through stuff, triggering async jobs maybe, maintaining Gitlab pages setups, etc. They also represent possibly increased security burden (though I don't think anyone is pricing risk like that in the SaaS world just yet).

If you don't mind me asking, what price would you happily pay for non technical contributors? Would you want a percentage of the developer/"full contributor" rate? Or do you have a specific number that would be reasonable in your opinion?

I understand they do something, but it’s probably 1/1000th the time spent as a developer.

I don’t have a specific number, but I’d prefer to just be charged for developers and have non-dev be free since their marginal cost is so low.

Same for “system accounts” and whatnot.

The key metric should be how many developers are using so there’s not much profit in adding more users other than it makes the devs happy.

If it has to be a non-zero amount then maybe $1/year or something. I have 25,000 people in my org so that’s still a lot of money even though there’s maybe only 100-200 actual devs.

Appreciate you taking the time to respond! I have a bunch of stuff going right now but hosting Gitlab has been on my mind for a while (I already run a service that focuses on hosting the runners)...

Wondering if there's more space in this niche simply by listening to what customers here on HN and elsewhere have been saying.

No, they won't listen. People have been asking for it for years.

Its a big reason we don't pay for GitLab. And will be one of the reasons we will switch to GitHub (which is sad)

There absolutely is, but they do not want to hear it. They like their pricing, even if it makes no sense and is worse for them as a company.

Wow, gitlabhost seems also priced quite high if it's just the CE version and not EE. I was thinking some 2-4x multiplier vs just hosting it yourself - not 8x the price.

This seems anectdotal to me. I don't think gitlab could survive at even 2x the price of "equal" setups between companies given they're both perfectly usable with some training. At least not in the long run. I use gitlab for my personal stuff but have no issues with github at work either.

Edit: Dang! I just checked it is roughly 3-4x as much as listed (just going on CI minutes). So I take my "logic" back. I don't see how they can survive at those per user rates vs the competition. The software itself is certainly not 3-4X as good.

GitLab team member here :)

There were recent changes to user limits on the Free tier of GitLab SaaS. We are limiting the number of users per namespace on the Free tier to 5 users per namespace. Details are in this blog post: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2022/03/24/efficient-free-tier.

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