
The future of SaaS hosted Git repository pricing - samber
https://about.gitlab.com/2016/05/11/git-repository-pricing/
======
rdtsc
Good timing. This is what good marketing and agility looks like.

I've been impressed by GitLab. They moved very fast and made good progress
recently. It is great to see competition, to what many (at least in start up
land) considered a done deal in terms of a winner as far as hosted code is
concerned. Remember someone was telling me "if your code is not on GitHub, it
doesn't exist".

But then remember getting a sticker shock when we got a quote for GitHub
Enterprise a few years back. Ended up picking Atlassian instead, besides the
price it was the better ticket workflow, or maybe it was the wiki, I forgot.
Anyway, I would have liked to have more choices at that point to look at. Now
GitLab is a choice as well.

~~~
kriro
I have mixed feelings. Gitlab always reacts to Github stuff. It's a bit "too
much" for my taste actually.

The Gitlab team seems awesome but these posts always read a bit forced-
friendly. Yay we are all friends in this space and we see this and that trend
and here are some benefits of gitlab over the competition in a thinly vailed
"switch already" piece. I wish they'd just write "these price changes could
suck for you, it's a good time to switch to us now". I got a similar vibe from
the posts in reaction to the "this is wrong with github" posts.

~~~
hashkb
Yeah, it is transparently desperate.

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hirose31
I really have to tip my hat to GitLab marketing the past few months as they've
done a phenomenal job. I do wonder what will happen to their pricing once they
raise additional rounds of financing? What happens to their pricing once their
investors want to see a return on investment? I like the carpe diem business
strategy, and of course I like free, but I'm a bit skeptical at the long term
viability of a business and market that seems to be racing to the bottom.

~~~
sytse
Thanks for asking, I tried to explain this better on our website after reading
your questions: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-
com/commit/836c494f...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-
com/commit/836c494fff2b95f39ed0b29945af525e571125c1)

------
zer00eyz
>With such tangible business benefits, it is no wonder why Google, Amazon, and
Facebook have been using microservice development practices for over a decade.

At one point Google and FB were trunk based monolithic repositories, and I
haven't heard that has changed. If it has not, this might not be the best
example for micro services leading to many repos.

~~~
slowmovintarget
Better examples are NetFlix and Twitter.

~~~
zer00eyz
Are netflix and twitter trunk/monoliths? If so do you have links?

~~~
ndm
[https://blog.twitter.com/2016/the-release-of-
pants-10](https://blog.twitter.com/2016/the-release-of-pants-10)

> Today, Twitter is excited to announce participation in the first major
> release of the Pants open source project: 1.0.0, an open source build tool
> for monorepo-style source repositories.

They (for the most part) had two repos as of 11/2014\. They certainly were
moving towards one. Here's a public thread mentioning the two repos: science
(mostly jobs, shared code) and birdcage (mostly services).
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/pants-
devel/60Vzkole...](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/pants-
devel/60VzkoleMxc)

------
nzoschke
I see this as an upcoming trend in all SaaS. Across the industry, the cost of
resources is headed towards zero.

Blame it on Amazon and Google who are making online compute, memory and
storage ridiculously inexpensive if you know how to use it right.

So SaaS companies should and will have to price on a different dimension.

I think:

Charge to cover the resource prices. But if your resources are small amounts
of storage for code, round down to zero.

Charge per user. It's simple and predictable and a good proxy for budget.

Tier around features.

Sell a totally private on-prem version. Companies will pay big bucks if they
_need_ your product features and compliance.

So yeah, basically exactly what GitLab is doing. They really are doing a great
job at trying to build an open source business.

~~~
sytse
Thanks Noah

------
paulasmuth
>> The rise of microservices, an approach to development in which you
structure your software into smaller individual service-oriented units. Each
microservice then runs its own process and they communicate with each other
through APIs. This software development approach is known to have four primary
benefits: agility, efficiency, resiliency, and revenue

Off-topic, but what?! I understand there is a lot of hype about
"microservices" right now but I don't think the upsides of the propagated
approach are as clear-cut or uncontroversial as the post makes them out to be.

The article defines "microservices" as the act of splitting up an application
into many small, individual programms that talk to each other via RPCs.

How does structuring my code into lots of small programs improve revenue of
all things? Or are you talking about the revenue of code repository hosting
providers and "microservices" consultants?

Also, this approach surely does not improve resiliency and efficiency per se.
It actually does the opposite in my opinion. All the additional RPCs are only
adding _more_ points of failure (unreliable IPC) and overhead as compared to
straight in-process method calls.

And who's saying that "a microservices architecture" improves a dev teams
"agility"? How does one even measure agility? The article is stating this like
it's an established fact. In my [anecdotal] experience, spreading an
application out over lots of individual repositories and binaries makes it
harder to work with, not easier.

>> With such tangible business benefits, it is no wonder why Google, Amazon,
and Facebook have been using microservice development practices for over a
decade.

The fact is that these are a massive software companies with thousands of
engineers. Naturally they run an incredible amount of internal software and
services. I think this is often conflated with the idea that splitting up a
given application into smaller and smaller parts to produce more individual
"services" automatically makes it better somehow.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for having a clear seperation of concerns and well
defined interfaces between individual modules. Doing that has been best
practice since I started to code. But the latest "let's split our codebase up
into 20 different binaries and repos, because microservices" fad is just
bonkers.

~~~
hashkb
It's just a popular reason you might need a lot more repos than you once did.
Insert your own reason, be it organizing docs, static sites, more skunk works,
etc. I doubt the point of the post was to advocate microservices, so making
the discussion here about it is distracting.

~~~
numbsafari
What's interesting is that FB and Google both use a single large repository.
Not sure about Amazon. In fact, I don't know that I've ever read a detailed
article about how Amazon handles things like source control internally.

------
joemaller1
I'd like to see a migration guide for bringing a small organization (company)
from GitHub to GitLab. Not the Git part, but rather how to map organizations
and organize repositories.

GitHub's new pricing seems incompatible with smaller studios and agencies who
encourage collaboration from non-developers or which frequently hire outside
contractors. Make it easier to understand how those migrations might work.

~~~
RomanPushkin
I'd like to see how to transfer all the issues (closed too) + pull requests.

~~~
connorshea
You should be able to just use the importer and it'll automatically take all
the issues and PRs over.

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bhrgunatha
A small factual error - the article states N/A for unlimited users at
bitbucket but according to their pricing page[1] unlimited users is
$200/user/month.

[1]
[https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing](https://bitbucket.org/product/pricing).

~~~
connorshea
A merge request is open to fix that now.

~~~
sytse
We merged it.

------
Mopolo
> That is why it is not surprising that GitHub has announced free private
> repositories

I think this might be an error.

------
dineshp2
> Due to the rapid growth, GitLab.com's performance slowed down.

Not sure why Gitlab is still not able to scale the platform.

I run Gitlab on a 2 CPU 4GB RAM VM and it performs very well(even with fairly
large repos). There is also the known issue with Gitlab CE itself being
resource intensive, but in the case of the version hosted on Gitlab it seems
to be a scaling issue.

~~~
pekk
Should Gitlab allocate a whole 2 CPU 4GB RAM VM to each user for free?

~~~
dineshp2
Where did I mention that Gitlab should allocate a 2 CPU 4gb RAM server for
every user?

The point of the comment was to show that Gitlab performs well when there are
appropriate server resources, hence the reason for Gitlab.com not performing
well is because it has not been scaled up/out or both.

~~~
kiallmacinnes
Like pekk, that's not how I read your comment. It makes sense, once
explained...

