GitLab Reshuffles Its Paid Subscription Plans, Drops Its Bronze/Starter Tier

An anonymous reader writes: GitLab, the increasingly popular DevOps platform, today announced a major update to its subscription model. The company is doing away with its $4/month Bronze/Starter package. Current users will be able to renew one more time at the existing price or move to a higher tier (and receive a significant discount for the first three years after they do so). The company's free tier, it is worth noting, is not going away and GitLab argues that it includes "89% of the features in Bronze/Starter."

To ease the pain, Bronze users will be able to renew their existing subscription before January 26, 2022 for an additional year at the existing price. They can also opt to move to the Premium tier at a discounted price for the next three years, starting at $6/user/month in Year 1, but that price then goes up to $9/user/month and $15/user/month in Year 2 and 3 respectively. For new users, the Bronze package is no longer available, starting now. With this change, GitLab now offers three tiers: Free, Premium and Ultimate (it's also doing away with the "Silver/Premium" and "Gold/Ultimate" naming). "The Bronze tier, we were selling at a loss," GitLab founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij told TechCrunch. "We were just losing money every time we sold it -- just on hosting and support. To be a sustainable business, this was a move we had to make. It's a big transition for our customers but we want to make sure we're a sustainable company and we can keep investing."

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Drug dealer announces price increase. Pay or go through withdrawal symptoms.

The numbers sound funny here

[Krishnoid]

The company's free tier, it is worth noting, is not going away and GitLab argues that it includes "89% of the features in Bronze/Starter." ...
"The Bronze tier, we were selling at a loss," GitLab founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij told TechCrunch. "We were just losing money every time we sold it -- just on hosting and support.

So they lose money on hosting (albeit plus support) for a paid service , but don't on the free tier? Do they sell advertising or analytics or something?

Re:The numbers sound funny here

[vux984]

Of course they lose money on the free tier, but the free tier exists as loss leader to paid customers; get them hooked, build goodwill with small teams before they grow, etc.

If that's your business model, great, but if you actually convert free customers to paid customers and are STILL losing money on them you have a serious problem.

Plus don't underestimate the cost of decent support.

Re:The numbers sound funny here

[AleRunner]

Plus don't underestimate the cost of decent support.

It's this bit. They probably lose more on the bronze users than on the free users. Bronze users will be smaller, have less experience (if not individually, as a group) and so may even ask more questions per user than the bigger users. If they move to free usage they will probably start to use forums more and may actually end up improving those forums making things better for all GitLab users. If, on the other hand, they really need the support and decide to pay for it, then GitLab will be making more money from them.

Re:

[Entrope]

Or those users switch to Github, which has, apparently recently, reduced the price for their competing level to $4/user/month. Driving customers to a competitor is a good way to lose revenue (effectively) forever.

Re:

[derplord]

You mean CensorHub that requires a massive community backlash before they reinstate software like Youtube-DL? FYI, GitLab hosted it all through the controversy and did at no point remove repositories unlike GitHub.

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

They treat their employees badly anyway, so no matter how good the product is I'm not using them

Anyway their diff/merge tool is terrible.

Re:

[AlexHilbertRyan]

Why would anybody use an online diff tool in the first place rather than doing it locally ?

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

Convenience. The idea is you can link to it in bug reports and discussions, even commit messages.

Re:

[AlexHilbertRyan]

Convenience may be a valid reason, but it also means you could be making a breaking change. If the goal is quality then one should make the change locally and run all your tests locally. Sure this can be done using gitlab but the better and quicker way is to do it locally.

Re:The numbers sound funny here

[Koen Lefever]

Why would anybody use an online diff tool in the first place rather than doing it locally?

I use GitLab (among other things) to write academic papers using LaTeX and TikZ.

Not all my co-authors are very computer-savvy, having a web interface is for them the only way they can participate.

Re:

[AlexHilbertRyan]

Not being computer saavy is more reason to do it locally. I dont know the details of latex but i would think using another tool that validates and displays latex shoudl be used to make changes and visually verify etc rather than enter and hope for the best.

git is distributed version control

[OrangeTide]

I can host it anywhere, I can even run it hostless. For CI/CD there are lots of free and paid alternatives. Travis-CI, Jenkins, a shell script around Terraform and a git-hook, etc.