We are a small company and have been paying for GitLab's Bronze plan for about two years now.
We have about 5 devs, but the bulk of our GitLab users are non-technical (sales, customer support, etc.) who probably do not even know what git is. Those users are lurkers, but their input can be valuable and if possible I'd like them to be able to login onto GitLab.
Getting billed $228/users/year upfront is a harsh blow. I don't think I will ever be able to justify such cost to our CEO.
The way I see it now, we will renew our Bronze plan during the one-year grace period, while we are preparing the transition to another tool. Hopefully, we never really integrated our processes too much with GitLab, so we can transition whenever we need to.
If the "per user" subscription is to be that expensive, then I would suggest GitLab to provide a monthly subscription and/or a "per committer" subscription instead of a "per user" subscription.
I'm currently just using a single-user Bronze subscription for consulting work. I was previously thinking of adding customers and other end users to the plan, but it already gets far too expensive. None of these users would be developers; it would primarily be so they could download sources, read and comment on issues, and generally observe what was going on.
The one-size-fits-all fixed-tier subscription makes no sense from the point of view of an end user. I would love to have users/projects with differing access levels. Likewise, GitLab is too bloated; I might want one or two features from the higher tiers but I can't justify paying for them. Why not let people pay for the features they actually need selectively?
I've also not been too impressed by the inflexibility of GitLab's billing practices. Not only is it fixed annual subscription, if you don't pay by auto-renewal you have to renew the subscription on a specific week. You can't even pay them in advance! I was effectively forced into the auto-renewal due to not being around on that specific week, and in the following year when I was winding up the company and finalising the accounts, I got a surprise bill due to that coerced auto-renewal. I was not happy with that. They really need to get their billing system sorted out.
Per comitter would be ideal, viewing source and interacting via tickets is something that is usually a secondary stakeholder community that is larger than the score development group (in every org I see adoptjng forge style tools)
We have about 5 devs, but the bulk of our GitLab users are non-technical (sales, customer support, etc.) who probably do not even know what git is. Those users are lurkers, but their input can be valuable and if possible I'd like them to be able to login onto GitLab.
Getting billed $228/users/year upfront is a harsh blow. I don't think I will ever be able to justify such cost to our CEO.
The way I see it now, we will renew our Bronze plan during the one-year grace period, while we are preparing the transition to another tool. Hopefully, we never really integrated our processes too much with GitLab, so we can transition whenever we need to.
If the "per user" subscription is to be that expensive, then I would suggest GitLab to provide a monthly subscription and/or a "per committer" subscription instead of a "per user" subscription.