Almost all the comments in this thread can be summarised as:
GitLab: your product is great; your pricing is madness.
This removal of Starter doesn’t seem to have helped anyone except GitLab. You really need to look at how you’re pricing your service and seriously consider much stronger user role management.
GitLab pricing is unworkable for many smaller teams, so we stay on Free and give you nothing at all. The pricing actively discourages whole-org adoption - no way are we paying $19/mo for a non-dev user who would rarely use the system. So we pay nothing at all and keep everyone on free, because that user does still need some access, so you get nothing at all.
To be clear - I love GitLab and I want to pay for more features. I don’t want Premium for nothing but the way it’s billed is completely impractical and hard to get value from for small dev teams, as we have to think very carefully about who gets an account.
I would love it if you’d think about allowing different users on an instance to have a different plan - like with Microsoft 365, where some users have the full works and others just have an email inbox. I need 5 Premium users, 3 Starter users and 2 Free users, for example. You’d now be getting payment for 8 users instead of 0 in my scenario!
Not all my users need Premium; some do. Consequently, we all stay on Free, because I can only justify/afford the pricing for the handful of Premium licenses I actually need.
I really hope this makes sense - there is money waiting for you, and I know many other small dev shop owners feel the same way, but you’re not doing anything to claim it!
You need to look within yourself and work out how you can sell your product to smaller teams in a way that makes sense for everyone. It kinda feels like you just don’t care about your roots anymore and that you only want Ultimate users on your service; I hope you don’t make the mistake of turning your back on the users who started you off and who vocally endorse and support your product.
Speaks so out of my heart: We really love Gitlab. But as small, pure development company the pricing of the commercial offerings is (and was) unfeasible for us.
We'd LOVE to have a cheap/free basic Git-Service for all our 100 developer & project participant and have on-demand additional, advanced features like full DevOps for the developers in smaller teams/projects (5~10).
Convincing management to pay $1200/yr – or even $230/yr for just everybody won't work.
BTW that seems to be a recurrent issue with Salas products, I often like something but can't transition to giving paid plans due terrible pricing models.
GitLab: your product is great; your pricing is madness.
This removal of Starter doesn’t seem to have helped anyone except GitLab. You really need to look at how you’re pricing your service and seriously consider much stronger user role management.
GitLab pricing is unworkable for many smaller teams, so we stay on Free and give you nothing at all. The pricing actively discourages whole-org adoption - no way are we paying $19/mo for a non-dev user who would rarely use the system. So we pay nothing at all and keep everyone on free, because that user does still need some access, so you get nothing at all.
To be clear - I love GitLab and I want to pay for more features. I don’t want Premium for nothing but the way it’s billed is completely impractical and hard to get value from for small dev teams, as we have to think very carefully about who gets an account.
I would love it if you’d think about allowing different users on an instance to have a different plan - like with Microsoft 365, where some users have the full works and others just have an email inbox. I need 5 Premium users, 3 Starter users and 2 Free users, for example. You’d now be getting payment for 8 users instead of 0 in my scenario!
Not all my users need Premium; some do. Consequently, we all stay on Free, because I can only justify/afford the pricing for the handful of Premium licenses I actually need.
I really hope this makes sense - there is money waiting for you, and I know many other small dev shop owners feel the same way, but you’re not doing anything to claim it!
You need to look within yourself and work out how you can sell your product to smaller teams in a way that makes sense for everyone. It kinda feels like you just don’t care about your roots anymore and that you only want Ultimate users on your service; I hope you don’t make the mistake of turning your back on the users who started you off and who vocally endorse and support your product.