Yeah, I'm in favor of axing the free plan in favor of a beefed up basic tier that's cheaper than premium. A lot of free users would probably be livid though.
Does it matter? GitHub are the inevitable winners of any race to the bottom. GitLab would be better off trying to retain actual paying customers like me, instead of encouraging me to read https://docs.github.com/en/actions/learn-github-actions/migr....
Gitlab only established a foothold thanks to free users, when Github did not have free private repos. Free users sooner or later upgrade to paid plans, when they really want this or that feature.
Gitlab in many ways stays relevant by being “the nicer github” - if they become all about the money, they’ll die like bitbucket.
I’m not sure how pulling the rug out from under paying customers is helping retain paying customers.
And a race to bottom is creating an open source product “GitLab”, funding it with donations, creating a separate company “GitLab.com” which makes money by supporting GitLab, and at some point creating an entirely new product that isn’t open source but making that GitLab while letting the original open source version basically languish into something that is not useful at all.
I’m constantly surprised by why they don’t get more flak. I understand the developers are very active in the HN community and that is appreciated, but GitLab has been among the worse companies in how they’ve treated their open source, and now paying, users.
I'd encourage you to take a fresh look at the Free tier. 89% of the features in Bronze/Starter are available in the Free tier - including the more than 450 new features that were added to Free in the last year.
Replying to my own comment: I see that GitLab are actually offering a pretty generous transition deal for existing Bronze customers with less than 25 customers ($6/$9/$15 in yr 1/2/3).
Honestly that is enough to retain me. I hope they open it up more widely as an intro offer.
