It seems like every SaaS out there is targeting only the very occasional users and large enterprise users, but nothing in between. If this announcement read "we're limiting Free Tier, but creating a new 10$/month plan that gives you what you had before" I'd be signing up immediately. But per-user pricing, especially with the lowest plan being 20$/u/m, is absolutely insane for anyone but big corporations and startups drowning in VC money.

Some practical examples: - if I participate in a 48h game jam with my usual team, it would cost us 120$ to host our code on GitLab. For 2 days!! - the non-profit I develop for would need to pay 1680$ a year, despite all but 2 of our repos being FOSS. That is literally 3/4 of the budget we had last year!

Server load, bandwidth and disk space are the things that cost money and they are barely correlated with the number of users in all but a handful of textbook scenarios. Why does everyone insist on putting customers into price brackets based on such a useless metric?

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?

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.

I abhor the "This only impacts 1% of our users" line. Putting the obvious "then why do it" aside, it's just coming out and saying "we are okay with screwing individual users over, as long as there's not so many of them that we get in trouble".

This is really disappointing.

I've always encouraged small non-commercial hobby projects to use GitLab. It just seemed like the right thing to do.

If you're familiar with Paradox Interactive Studios games (Crusader Kings, Hearts of Iron, Stellaris):

- Star Trek: New Horizons (127,000 current subscribers)

- SW:Fallen Republic (97,000 current subscribers)

- Kaiserreich (774,000 current subscribers)

are (/were) all hosted on GitLab.

A lot of the people who contribute to these projects only do so intermittently (so high member count to work done ratio) and are usually doing this in their formative years so would be likely to continue to use GitLab when they enter the working world.

There is absolutely no money available as game publishers prohibit it. And even if they tried to sneak in some Patreon donations there's no way that's going to cover $19/m/user!

Honestly, GitLab really seems to be falling far behind in their outreach. Their Open source programme is behind GitHub's and they don't have anything for Non-profits.

I'm grateful for the service Gitlab has provided to date, but this seems ludicrous.

My use-case for Gitlab is to support the internal tools and some bespoke development for a fan-run non-profit event. In a typical year we might have about $8,000 to run the whole event (ticket sales, less venue hire and other costs). Non-profit pricing is only available to registered charities in my country, so we're forced into paying full price for most of the SaaS services. That puts most of them out of our budget -- and it seems like Gitlab is joining that list.

So Gitlab are asking us to pony up $19 per user *per month* -- which is a cool $2300 a year. That's five times our current total IT spend (which benefits everyone), for a service which serves ten users. It's nearly a quarter of what we have to run the event.

Fair enough it unlocks extra features, but the only one I can see us using is Epics.

To compare prices -- Github is currently charging $48 per user, per year. That's $480 for the whole 10-person team. It's still going to be a tough sell for our Finance guy, but not as bad as $2300 (he'd ask if I hit my head if I asked for that).

The team picked Gitlab over Github because of the really good feature set on the free tier, and the availability of the bronze/starter tier for when we needed more. With Bronze going away last year, and now a 5-user cap, the message I'm getting from Gitlab is "we're a premium provider and we don't want your custom".

As @eslaught said -- it really feels like they're killing the golden goose.

If they added the option of buying more user seats for the Free tier and threw in a premium feature or two (Epics would win me over), I'd absolutely pitch that to my finance guy -- especially if the price was the same as Github.

Heck, I wouldn't even care if they cut the number of CI minutes... I can spin up a VPS if I need that.

Reminder that Gitlab's stock is down more than 50% of their all time high post IPO. I'd expect more pricing/feature changes as they try to improve revenue/EPS.

Can an open core company survive a recession AND maintain their community/developer mind share?

These changes will make it harder to use GitLab for many open source projects. Five acknowledged "users" (i.e. committers, reviewers, moderators etc.) over the sum total of projects in a single group/organization is not that much. They have a pre-existing Community Program for Open Source but the application process is overly complex and admittance is explicitly said to be at GitLab's discretion, not guaranteed (it also looks like the 'Community' status has to be periodically renewed), so it doesn't seem to be suitable as-is for many users who might otherwise want to host FLOSS code there.

Interesting that Github has been getting slammed by people upset with the outages, but it doesn't seem like there's much movement towards Gitlab as an alternative.

I use both near-daily for different clients and I have grown to prefer Gitlabs... the price is higher, but it might be worth it to some of the people in the daily HN github issue threads (eg https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30790593 )

Just fuels my cynicism about "free" offerings. Sooner or later, companies decide they want to monetize as much as possible.

I'm not saying it's unfair. But it makes me less interested in trying things just because they are "free".

I wanted to pay GitLab for my personal project space (I prefer to be a customer!) but their prices are too steep for such flippant use. I otherwise like their product, it’s just that the pricing model doesn’t well fit my use case.

JetBrains, the company behind Android Studio and many other IDEs, has "Spaces", basically MS Team clone with free unlimited Git and other developer-centric stuff (https://www.jetbrains.com/space/).

As others have pointed out, $19/user/month is just not an option for many small teams, especially with non-western costs.

I guess we'll start planning the migration but it's really disappointing not to be able to pay a reasonable fee and then be kicked out on a 3-months notice.

I've seen complaints about this business model for a while on HN but never got the chance to understand Gitlab's reasoning for sticking to this pricing.

Just sharing, there's also a few providers selling "Hosted Gitlab" solutions

so you may find a better deal than "pay-per-seat gitlab.com" without the inconvenience of self hosting

Example

https://gitlabhost.com/pricing/single-tenant-gitlab-hosting/

I remember when Microsoft purchased Github and there was a mass exodus to Gitlab because they were so sure “M$” would commercialise and ruin GitHub.

MS ended up moving offerings from their paid tier to the free tier and Gitlab decided to offer this.

For those saying the GitLab for Open Source program will allow open source projects to have more than 5 members: I was involved in a project that was a part of that program. However, it requires yearly renewals and they somehow botched it at their end last time even though we signed all the documents. So bottom line is that we don't have it anymore.

I was reviewing git hosting prices this week and Gitlab pricing really didn't make sense. The cheapest paid plan doesn't provide enough incentive to the majority of people who just want to host small/personal projects.

Two pricing tactics that I wish more SaaS businesses could adopt -

1. Daily subscription and auto-cancel. For example, you can subscribe for 3 days, then it'll automatically cancel your subscription after 3 days.

In Gitlab's case, they would enable hackathon teams to use paid plans for 3 days without overpaying for an entire month.

2. Customers can toggle specific features for very fine-grained pricing.

Essentially, it's to make SaaS pricing more on-demand.

> impact fewer than 2% of Free tier users within 0.3% of namespaces

Sure most of my projects uploaded are small toy projects, but this change completely turns me off to uploading any larger project that I plan to work on long term and hope for additional contributors.

It's a shame to see them price themselves out of several markets. In the "agency" model of work, there will be many users that very rarely connect, while there is a much smaller core group of active developers. Impossible to justify paying the full price per month when all these barely-active users count as full users. For years the free tier was good enough, but while wanting to pay them, the lowest priced paid tier was too pricey to make sense. Feels like they are leaving money on the table, and now they are also pushing away people who previously would be championing and advocating for their product and service.

I can't believe the number of entitled posts here. Do people here think that Gitlab SaaS doesn't have an operation cost (in servers, development, support, etc)?

Perhaps people need to start re-evaluating what "free" means in the context of a cloud offering. "Free" is a marketing strategy, not a charitable act.

In the case of Gitlab there's nothing preventing you from using the self-managed free tier which will effectively remove this limit, but guess what? Running it on your own will also have a cost for you. The same way it does for Gitlab when they give it for free through Gitlab.com

How many more SaaS price increases before folks realize its better to self host?

We are currently exactly at the threshold of 5 devs. As soon as we hire another dev we'll have to move to github. I like gitlab but there is no way to justify paying 5x per user.

Tale as old as time. Give a free tier to get people to store their data with you and then pull the rug when they’re too committed to leave. Should be illegal.

This will bite our startup. Regardless of the percentage affected, this seems to run counter to their previously-stated strategy of charging based on who wants a feature, and looks more like an attempt to purge large/unusually active projects similar to Vimeo's recent actions.

Message received, I guess?

They keep changing this, can they make up their minds?

I'd rather self-host anyway. I use Gitea but it is kind of limited. Gitlab (self hosted) otoh is a horrendous resource pig

Is there something suitable for self hosting that's not such bloat? What does Gitlab bring that's difficult to self-host?

I don't really have a big problem with this, but in a weird coincidence, I just decided this morning to spin up a self-hosted instance of GitLab and migrate all of my GitHub and GitLab repositories to it.

This just adds a little impetus to that decision.

While its sad to see gitlab go this path (I've converted two orgs to paid accounts on them) I always look at the silver linings. I've been meaning to move my personal stuff to sourcehut and this is the little shove I needed.

Surprised they’re not also shipping a major version that deprecates a bunch of shit. Gitlab is so nice to use, but then they decide to release a bunch of new crap, change everything, and then jack up the price.

Gitlab continues to validate my decision to move away from them.

After being one of their most enthusiastic early adopters, Gitlab has by far been the most bait and switch SAAS product I have ever used.

Don't worry, just switch to a paid. With Gitlab's atrocious uptime and reliability, you'll be getting your entire monthly payment back in SLA credit.

Do they count only users registered on the whole namespace/group or all users registered in each sub git project inside the namespace / group ?

They had a price-hike last year and we actually migrated to GitHub because of that. Really shows me that this was the right decision. The system is better and the prices are lower.

Gitlab is probably the single enterprise software product I actually enjoy and advocate paying for. Decisions like this worry me about where they are headed.

Since GitLab for Open Source isn't affected, who will actually be affected by this in practice?