Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

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I was a huge Gitlab fan until their pricing change. I don't remember the pricing specifics, but the tier breakdown was such that you could introduce GitLab for free to a company that used Github, use it alongside Github, and slowly switch repo by repo, which was a very effective strategy (I used it in a few companies I joined).

After the pricing change, you had to start paying immediately (from the 6th user onwards or something), which made it a nonstarter because no company would start immediately paying for a Github replacement they didn't even know they wanted.

Together with Github being priced very cheaply, plus having free private repos, plus having the entire OSS world on it (for my OSS projects), I switched to it and never looked back.

This affected my company. Thet got rid of the "starter" tier at $6 / user / month. That meant going up to the premium tier at $19. Just a couple years later that has gone up to $29. For a company that already has other tools for all of the "extra value add" that they're bringing, it hurts. Gitlab really has a great feature set for the core git server + ci experience, it's not worth so much. I've asked several different folks to bring back a starter license to no avail. We want to pay, but we don't use any of the "premium" add-ons.

Same. That pricing change was one of the dumbest moves I can remember from a tech company. It should be the textbook example of a short-term profit grab at the complete sacrifice of long-term strategy.

I was a huge gitlab fan and would not have thought much of anything else, but the pricing made that impossible. The product has also suffered greatly as a result of the years of poor decision making at the top. It's one of the most unfortunate outcomes I can recall.

> short-term profit grab

They still don't make a profit. So much more a "try to become profitable in a changing financial landscape that will give us much less runway to do so" than "short-term profit grab"

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