
Introducing paid subscriptions on GitLab.com - razer6
https://about.gitlab.com/2017/04/11/introducing-subscriptions-on-gitlab-dot-com/
======
tssva
Legal at my current and I think any company I have worked at would never
approve use because of the terms of service. Issues include but may not be
limited to unrestricted use of name and logo for promotional purposes, changes
to the terms including material ones are without notice or any time period
before they take effect, and binding arbitration in The Netherlands. I would
have expected the terms to more closely resemble those of the githost.io
service.

Besides the legal issues there is the issue of no availability or performance
SLAs. Given Gitlab's performance and availability track record this is a non
starter. Especially when combined with the annual billing.

------
Vinnl
I was already starting to resign having to restrict my CI jobs to skip certain
long-running but less-important tasks. But:

> The CI usage cap only applies to private projects on GitLab.com. As part of
> our commitment to the open source community, our goal is to continue to
> offer unlimited minutes on public projects.

Awesome :)

------
Fremis
One HUGE drawback is that now free plan is basically Community Edition, and
you should pay for Enterprise features such as autosquash commits etc. I
thought that Gitlab.com is a showcase of full edition, and you buy it for self
hosting if needed.

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nik736
GitLab benefits a lot from Azure and DO credits / free usage. Since they will
stay in the cloud the costs will be huge looking into the future and I think
it's only a matter of time until the private repos won't be free anymore. No
company likes to lose money.

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Touche
How do you know how many CI minutes you have used?

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andoon
The only reason I use GitLab is that they allow me to host private repos for
free. Otherwise I'd be using another service, one that's more reliable and has
actual users... its name begins with GitHu and ends with b

~~~
elkos
Seems like this will not change though

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jd007
Will paid accounts get faster and more responsive service on the website? One
of the biggest issues we have with GitLab right now is the speed and
reliability of the website and service. Very often (for a service
used/depended on daily by our team) the website would be extremely slow to
load, and sometimes our CI/CD pipeline would hang.

~~~
connorshea
We've been improving performance for all users over the last year, in the last
few weeks we introduced a custom load balancer among other things.

One thing these changes _should_ do is decrease the strain on the shared
runners so you don't need to wait as long for the CI/CD pipelines to run.
Right now we have some people/projects using a lot more resources than others,
which was causing some of the back-up.

We can't really make the site faster only for specific users, and even if we
could I don't think we would.

That said, with a proper revenue stream we'll be able to focus more resources
toward performance on GitLab.com, so you should see continued improvement.

You can look through our issues labeled performance for GitLab CE[1], the
infrastructure issue tracker[2], or our Gitaly project[3] for some examples of
progress.

[1]: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues?scope=all&utf...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-
ce/issues?scope=all&utf8=%E2%9C%93&state=opened&label_name\[\]=performance)

[2]: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
com/infrastructure/issues](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
com/infrastructure/issues)

[3]: [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitaly](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
org/gitaly)

~~~
sytse
I wanted to add that the problem of the performance of GitLab.com was not
because of the revenue but because of our focus and the fast growth. The
revenue will help with paying the hosting bills as we keep growing.

And we'll make GitLab.com fast for everyone, including the free users.

------
mizzao
I've experienced so much downtime and other random outages with GitLab that I
would probably just go to GitHub if I was going to pay for something.

~~~
mydigitalself
We've been doing a huge amount of work on performance and availability over
the last number of releases [1] and are continuing to make big advancements in
our infrastructure [2] to host millions of projects on GitLab.com. Expect this
to be a lot better now and in the future, especially as this marks a big step
in GitLab.com's maturity.

[1] [https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-
org/issues?label_name%5B%5D...](https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-
org/issues?label_name%5B%5D=performance&scope=all&state=closed) [2]
[https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
com/infrastructure/issues?scope=al...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
com/infrastructure/issues?scope=all&state=closed)

------
overcast
Is there an online document, with the current working
backup/recovery/verification procedures? I need some type of guarantee that my
data is actually safe, and being backed up properly, before I put money into
GitLab.

~~~
jacquesm
You should ask those questions for any SaaS offering, as well as how easy it
is to export all your data.

~~~
overcast
Particularly ones who only recently learned about proper backup procedures.

------
ubercow
On the page it shows the plan has "All Enterprise Starter features" but
there's no obvious link to what the "Enterprise Starter features" are. Had to
dig around the site to find it [1].

1: [https://about.gitlab.com/products/](https://about.gitlab.com/products/)

~~~
connorshea
This section specifically has the comparisons:
[https://about.gitlab.com/products/#compare-
options](https://about.gitlab.com/products/#compare-options)

~~~
sytse
Add we'll add a link to that from the page in [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-
com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-
gitlab-com/merge_requests/5645)

Update: It is live

------
newsat13
Interesting. I would be curious to see how this works out. My understanding
was that people went to GitLab for the same reason they went to bitbucket -
unlimited private repos.

~~~
daenney
But that's not changing. The free plan retains unlimited private repositories.
The only thing that's changing for free is the amount of time they can run CI
for free.

As noted in both the article you're commenting on and their (linked in that
same article) product[1] site that lists the different plans:

    
    
      FREE
      2,000 CI pipeline minutes per month
      Unlimited private projects and collaborators
    

[1]: [https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/](https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-
com/)

~~~
newsat13
I should have been more clear. (In my mind) The primary reason why people go
to gitlab.com was for "free" tier. This is basically for free everything. Now
that CI is paid, I am wondering how this will work out.

For me, this is great news. I generally tend to steer away from free (as in
beer) products from startups since it is a sure shot sign of things to come
(again, personal opinion).

~~~
razer6
CI is still free. For public repos nothing changes related to CI. For private
repos, the build time is limited. However, you always can use a custom runner
for your private repo to have unlimited minutes.

------
ishitatsuyuki
I doubt their infrastructure would scale well, even with more income. They
still haven't adopt WebSocket/Rails 5, and this would attract more CI runners
to DDoS their database.

~~~
narrowtux
This sounds like you threw in a few buzzwords. Why would a CI runner DDoS
their database? How would WebSockets help them scale?

~~~
ishitatsuyuki
They doesn't use any long polling method but periodical fetching method for
getting pending CI jobs. This causes massive lock on their database, and once
it bring down the server entirely.

~~~
cmatija
Heya,

Just wanted to let you know that we introduced long pooling with GitLab Runner
version 1.9.0 (~ three months ago).

Also you might want to take a gander at
[https://about.gitlab.com/2017/04/10/upcoming-runner-
changes-...](https://about.gitlab.com/2017/04/10/upcoming-runner-changes-for-
gitlab-dot-com/) We're throttling older runners.

------
smarx007
Plans don't seem to have a monthly payment instead of annual:
[https://customers.gitlab.com/subscriptions/new?plan_id=2c92a...](https://customers.gitlab.com/subscriptions/new?plan_id=2c92a0ff5a840412015aa3cde86f2ba6)

P.S. Why do I need to enter my login again after signing in via Gitlab API?

P.P.S. Group pricing seems unfair. I will be paying 4x for 4 users with the
same amount of CI minutes split across 4 users?

~~~
mydigitalself
We're currently only doing annual billing, we may look into monthly billing in
the future.

The billing application is a separate app and effectively oAuths with GitLab -
you should just be able to click on the login button and if you are already
authenticated, grant permission to the billing app.

Interestingly, we've found little to no correlation between the number of
users in a group and CI usage. Moving forward, the plans are going to be much
more feature-centric than just CI minutes, hence the per user per month
pricing model.

~~~
jacquesm
I think if you bill your customers per year it would be fair to list the
prices per year as well rather than 'per user per month'. You're setting up an
expectation of a monthly billing cycle with the option to cancel monthly as
well. Principle of least surprise and all that.

~~~
connorshea
Fair criticism, I've brought it up with the team. Thanks :)

~~~
sytse
We will fix it in [https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-
com/merge_requests/...](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-
com/merge_requests/5645)

~~~
jacquesm
Super. That's a pretty quick turn around :)

~~~
mydigitalself
That's live now, thanks for your help.

[https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/](https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/)

~~~
jacquesm
You're more than welcome and I'm super impressed with the speed with which you
take feedback like this and put it to work.

------
btashton
I have been a huge supporter of gitlab the last few years and have brought it
into a few companies. The latest company we opted for their githost.io
offering where you get your own instance to avoid the performance issues that
they have had with gitlab.com Unfortunately this has really painful with
random unannounced outages and the inability to get insight to what is going
on when all of a sudden your disk is filling up. Today I woke up to a bunch of
messages from developers on my team wondering why it was offline. Only option
was to submit a support ticket and hope that I would get a response some time
today. It was acknowledged about 2 hours later, but we are still seeing
instability. Looking at my ticket history I see that I have filed various
tickets every 2-3months for the instance not being available. Not having
access to your company git repositories or the CI flow for a day is really
unacceptable, and they need to do a lot to show me that throwing money at them
will solve it.

~~~
mydigitalself
Sorry to hear about your issues with GitHost - feel free to share any ticket
IDs and we can look into it further on our side.

~~~
btashton
Tickets from the last year excluding application bugs, that resulted in
downtime. I did not get any notification of outages on these. Everything has
been resolved and I am very happy with the product when it is working. I get
that some of these are due to companies you rely on for your infrastructure.

#26561 Server Not Responding (No reponse for over a day)

#24895 500 on Application Settings (17 hour for response 24 for fix)

#29731 Sever Not Responding (disk full with no warning [actually at 67% but
that hangs backups]) Solution expand block storage which failed several times.

#41739 Repositories Unavailable (Githost infrastructure failure moving storage
to block storage)

#45163 DNS failure (DYN Attack)

#22524 Expired SSL Certificate

#72593 Server Not Responding (Data Center Outage)

~~~
sytse
That are a lot of issues, I sorry that you've had all those problems with
GitHost.io.

GitHost.io is a service we've offered because GitLab.com was not usable for
everyone. One of the problems was the latency of GitLab.com. We're making good
progress in fixing that.

Are there other things that keep you on GitHost.io? We've heard that people
want LDAP sync and we're planning to bring this to GitLab.com. Is there
anything else we should focus on?

~~~
btashton
Not to be snarky but our instance is still non-responsive.

~~~
Clownshoesms
Personally, I think there's a lot of Wizard of Oz going on with gitlab. Put up
a decent front so far but utterly incoherent/incompetent behind the scenes.

~~~
orf
I don't agree, their product is awesome and they don't seem any more or less
incoherent/incompetent than any other startup/small company.

------
jacquesm
Paid subscriptions are a really good reason to start using gitlab because it
promises that they'll be around in the long run.

~~~
kbutler
This is a common meme, but unless you are privy to the company's internal
financials, you really can't say whether a paid subscription model is more
sustainable than others. Just ask newspapers and magazines.

There are many products and services I've paid for that are no longer
provided.

Sometimes companies even cancel profitable services that are a distraction
from their core business.

~~~
jacquesm
Having run a couple of companies both with and without an income stream
judging by that experience I strongly believe that companies with an income
stream are generally speaking more solid than those without. Yes, of course
there are odd ducks but as a general rule it is a pretty good one.

And given that this _is_ their core business I don't see them canceling it any
time soon.

~~~
kbutler
But is adding this subscription a sign that their previous subscription and
other revenue efforts are insufficient, and therefore they are flailing for a
viable business model and going under in N months unless this really takes
off?

Or is it a sign that they are being conservative and responsible and taking
the long view on their finances?

You simply cannot tell from the simple fact that they are adding a
subscription option.

Edit: If Google or Facebook added a paid subscription model, would you say:
"Paid subscriptions are a really good reason to start using [google/facebook]
because it promises that they'll be around in the long run."? Would you
interpret that to mean they were likely to be better off in a couple of
months?

Profitability is the critical factor, not revenue. The Pets.com CEO /bragged/
about $45 million in revenue - with a loss of $150 million...

~~~
type0
> Edit: If Google or Facebook added a paid subscription model, would you say:

They both do, they sell the ads and users data

