from Hacker News

Gitlab loses one-third of its value after company issues weak forecast

by YourCupOTea on 3/13/23, 9:14 PM with 207 comments

• by gregwebs on 3/13/23, 11:44 PM

  Gitlab pricing used to be something like $4/mo and they saw incredible growth. They raised their rates to $19/mo and now are seeing slow growth. In April they are raising to $29/mo- not sure what they think is going to happen. Also, for anyone that actively watches, they have to wonder if there will be another price hike once you are on their platform.

  Github Enterprise is only $21/mo and for most users it has all the same features of Gitlab.

  Gitlab's main differentiator for a long time was CI, but now Github has its own equivalent (Actions).

  It seems that Gitlab is only going to be left with 1) existing Gitlab users 2) users that want some enterprise feature set that doesn't exist on Github, and want it in a single platform without a third party

• by siliconc0w on 3/14/23, 12:30 AM

  The problem with these SaaS companies is that they all eventually become seduced into whale hunting (big enterprise) and the product ultimately suffers as they are forced to adopt whale pricing and focus on endless enterprise reqs that the whales say they want (and most of the time don't actually use). The product drifts or stagnates for their core use case and then another startup comes along to 'disrupt' the market and they do until the process repeats.

• by viraptor on 3/13/23, 11:05 PM

  I'm annoyed that they don't want my money. I'm a really basic user and try to keep my private and public stuff there instead of GitHub. I fit in a free tier and would happily pay maybe $5 for it. But I wasn't going to spend $20 and definitely won't spend $30.

  Come on GitLab, I want to keep using you and see you succeed. Let me pay $5 for some token feature like extra GB of space and to vote with my money to keep you going. I'll even do it for a "supporter" badge on my profile.

• by arsome on 3/13/23, 10:06 PM

  Too many things in Gitlab feel half-baked, like their requirements feature which is essentially just their issue tracker, no document management, just toss some issues in the bin. And they expect enterprises to pay for it because they checked the feature box.

  https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/requirements/

• by erlkonig on 3/14/23, 3:50 AM

  Gitlab has been cursed by a marketing team that seemingly just can't imagine having mixed licensing levels. At a side effect, organizations that would adopt them at the low (free) tier (or just above) for the whole company, a higher tier for devs, and max tier for project management, etc, just can't. Instead they have to have separate gitlabs to cover the whole organization, which has a whole set of associated annoyances.

  I speak from direct experience, at a company that had the mid level, liked the features, but was forced to eventually jettison them for the free tier to cut costs while broadening internal support.

  And we reported this problem to them, this basic lack of a mixed tier system, something many customers want. But Gitlab can't seem to get it through marketing's head that being nearly everywhere is better than just running for few large companies. Running everywhere means that many devs would just bring along an expectation of having gitlab as a matter of course, spreading adoption like a beneficial contagion. Instead, any useful level is being priced into irrelevance from a smaller organization's perspective, something many devs will see at prohibitively expensive, and be the fomites for that perspective instead as they move between companies.

  The result is terrible. Our company switched to Git on Microsoft Azure. Good job, Gitlab sales (heavy sarcasm). Hey, Gitlab management, have you checked to make sure your sales team isn't secretly taking kickbacks from Microsoft? (yes, I'm probably kidding, right?)...

• by swyx on 3/13/23, 10:58 PM

  in their earnings call @sytses also announced that he has cancer but is powering thru it working full time even while he receives chemotherapy.

  snippet: https://twitter.com/OnodaCapital/status/1635379330498060289

  wishing him the best of health. he inspires me constantly.

• by activitypea on 3/13/23, 10:49 PM

  As much as I love the product, I've really come to dislike Gitlab as a company. The constant price hikes and the gutting of the free tier aren't exactly developer-friendly.

• by stavros on 3/13/23, 10:41 PM

  As a user who really liked GitLab, there are a few things that made me consider to move back to GitHub:

  1. They had a generous organization free tier, which was handy for stealthily moving companies to it (move a few repos, get people used to it, then move more repos, then when everyone recognizes the value, start paying). They ruined that as soon as they put a limit on the number of people that can be in an org for free. Moving stealthily was good because...

  2. GitLab CI was best-of-breed, but GitHub Actions is really good too now (maybe better? I haven't used it enough to answer that).

  3. The price is really high now, so it doesn't really make sense to even move a company over to it.

  4. The community is (and has always been) on GitHub, so there was always a big reason to be there. Now that the rest of the GitLab offerings aren't as competitive, this wins.

• by Havoc on 3/14/23, 12:48 AM

  I like the product - been selfhosting it for years...but frankly the complete absence of a hobby level tier between 0 and 29 makes it a non-starter for me as a managed solution

  It just doesn't produce 29 worth value for me pm. Probably does for a corporate user though so i can see why they're doing it

• by mkl95 on 3/13/23, 10:23 PM

  What happened to Gitlab? They used to be one step ahead of Github in some areas, then seemed to go full enterprisey and lost their competitive edge. I smell some sales oriented strategies.

• by janee on 3/14/23, 4:16 AM

  Sad to see. We really loved gitlab, but the pricing was so horrendous for what we were using and couldn't be scaled to non-tech employees (e.g. wiki or just reading MRs), so moved to github and haven't looked back.

  Interestingly gitlab pricing influenced us to rethink our own pricing and we spent a month building out granular permission controls to allow sales to craft licenses bespoke to a client needs and charge less.

  After a year our revenue has 2x and there's a nice upsell flow towards enterprise.

• by awill on 3/14/23, 12:16 AM

  Instead of Gitlab actually attracting more customers, they're trying to extract more money from their existing customers. This never ever goes well. Why can CEOs not see this.

  I'm moving to GitHub. I've always championed the small guy, but the last couple of years have been terrible for Gitlab users.

• by c2h5oh on 3/13/23, 10:18 PM

  The fact they can leave things as serious as this https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/344919 unfixed for almost a year and a half basically makes them not suitable for serious use in my opinion.

  And since my opinion often matters they continue to lose business.

• by Lorin on 3/14/23, 3:47 AM

  Gitlab fell off once they went public, now it's shareholder value instead of ... developer value? They are also laughably slow at implementing features that have been readily available in competing products if you look at their issues page.

• by nimbius on 3/13/23, 10:36 PM

  things like github and gitlab always struck me as oddities. it costs virtually nothing to deploy a containerized gitea and jenkins, or gitlab CE, and you have direct control over its performance and options without any spend.

  call me old fashioned but these online git-o-matic sites just seem more like rent-seeking during a recession.

• by nativecoinc on 3/13/23, 10:28 PM

  We use Bitbucket at work. If we switched to some other forge next week I would not care.

  Git forges should be expendable.

• by xeromal on 3/13/23, 10:21 PM

  I made a garbage tool to pull repositories from gitlab to github or vice versa. I used it just to explore Go so it's not really prod ready but handy if you're just looking to move your code over.

  It most likely will explode.

  https://github.com/tylerjgarland/git2git

• by intellix on 3/15/23, 5:58 AM

  We were allured to Gitlab as a total offering: code repo, issue and project management, auto devops.

  We were developers trying to do everything then we hired project managers who wanted JIRA.

  Then we outgrew autodevops and lately it just feels like Gitlab aren't aligned with our requirements at all.

  We're paying $19/user/mo for 36 users and just to get status checks for screenshot regression testing we need to upgrade to $99/user/mo?

  To get that with github and much more we can pay $24/user/mo.

  It's always felt like they're trying to spread themselves too thin and add a billion half features. Like monitoring our GKE cluster from within Gitlab... Why wouldn't I just look at GCP when it's a billion times better and actually works

• by TheChaplain on 3/14/23, 5:45 AM

  Dear GitLab, please introduce a $5 "Pro" tier for small time developer/enthusiasts us who can't justify $29 a month.

  Should be enough to just double the free tier, and perhaps make purchasable extras available such as buy extra CI minutes or transfer.

  Otherwise there is no way we can support you.

• by jacooper on 3/14/23, 1:01 AM

  Personally I only care about GitLab because its open source with a good CI and because of Copilot.

  If the supreme court says the copilot is fully legal, I would probably just revert to using Github for personal projects(their free tier is just unbeatable), i still use it more than anything else, because everything is on Github.

  I am excited about Gitea Actions[1], as I feel gitea is generally only missing a decent CI system, and codeberg is growing fast.

  1. https://blog.gitea.io/2022/12/feature-preview-gitea-actions/

• by EspadaV9 on 3/14/23, 7:02 AM

  I really like GitLab the product, and am part of their Hero and Core teams, however, the recent changes and changes pricing adjustments have me doubting if I can continue supporting them.

  At work we use their hosted ultimate plan and we were looking to move to their premium but might instead go straight to a self hosted CE instance instead since there is nothing between free and $29/user/month (which is actually $348/user/year because they don't support monthly payments) and the free hosted plan is so crazy restricted.

• by animitronix on 3/15/23, 12:30 AM

  Here's how you fix gitlab:

  * Fire the monetization team (yes this is a thing they have) and most of the sales team to reduce cost and hyperfocus on revenue * Go back to implementing user requests * Fixed the missed up pricing model, including guest accounts * Stop releasing half-baked features like the recent subtask debacle

  Hopefully it's not too late.

• by neom on 3/14/23, 5:57 AM

  Fingers crossed someone buys them, I'm embarrassed that I'm so underwater in this stock, really regret buying it, one of my emotional purchases. :\

• by karmakaze on 3/14/23, 1:24 AM

  Funny how the headline says value rather than valuation or stock price. The value of the company to users and potential users is about the same.

• by zmmmmm on 3/14/23, 12:34 AM

  We would be giving them tens of thousands a year but they don't want our money. So we use the free version.

• by hypothesis on 3/13/23, 10:15 PM

  That seems to account for layoff and upcoming pricing changes.

• by mikercampbell on 3/14/23, 2:01 AM

  I get “how this all works” but valuation seems like magic

• by shanth on 3/14/23, 1:50 AM

  nginx-proxy-manager + gitea + drone CI + terraform

• by maxdo on 3/14/23, 4:13 AM

  why not use gitlab free version + runners on your kube?

• by lopkeny12ko on 3/14/23, 5:01 AM

  Contrary to the common opinion here, I've really enjoyed using GitLab and don't see many problems with it.

  Lot of the comments here complaining about pricing. Please remember that GitLab's core is open source. If you think the managed offering is too expensive, just host an instance yourself. This is what I have been doing at home for years, and my company at work for even longer.

• by eeasss on 3/13/23, 10:27 PM

  The fully remote approach may have hit its limits.