from Hacker News

Gitlab has introduced a five-user limit for free groups

by MattIPv4 on 6/20/23, 5:14 PM with 156 comments

• by MattIPv4 on 6/20/23, 5:15 PM

  Just got an email from GitLab about a group I'm part of that has more than five users. The docs linked says "For existing namespaces, this limit is being rolled out gradually. Impacted users are notified in GitLab.com at least 60 days before the limit is applied.", however upon checking the group in GitLab, we are greeted by a big red box stating "Your top-level group [group] is over the 5 user limit and has been placed in a read-only state."

• by pierat on 6/20/23, 5:57 PM

  This applies to the SaaS Gitlab ONLINE. This doesn't apply to Gitlab you install on your hardware.

  I mean, online resources on other peoples' servers cost money.

  A better law would be to forbid "free" offerings by companies. They all are fraudulent "free", since you pay a commercial entity with either money or data. And, corporate "free" rarely stays free.

  (This also doesn't have to be a new law, but application of false and deceptive advertising relating to the FTC, around the term of "free".)

  Edit: Found the rule, already in FTC's federal regs: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-B...

• by mirzap on 6/20/23, 5:38 PM

  I'm incredibly pleased about Microsoft's acquisition of Github, as I notice visible improvements every passing month. Considering Gitlab's pricing, I wonder why anyone would abandon GitHub Team or Enterprise plan in favor of Gitlab. Gitlab's costs are exorbitant, and they resemble Atlassian products, with an overwhelming number of features that are rarely used, cluttering the interface and diminishing the overall user experience.

• by derN3rd on 6/20/23, 5:33 PM

  Their pricing update end of last year was one of the reasons we switched over to Github. Other reasons were, that most external services had integration with Github but not with Gitlab, or that we didn't use many of the features Gitlab provided but charged for. If they would provide some lite plans with custom feature addons, we might have kept it, but all in all there was not much difference between Gitlab and Github except for the pricing then

• by dijit on 6/20/23, 6:23 PM

  ok. so;

  it used to be:

  $0 - for as many users as you wanted

  $4 - per user, with some important additional features, including SSO and merge request approvals

  $19 - for nearly all the features except very enterprise/security ones

  €99 - for all festures.

  —-

  over the last 2 years they have dropped the $4 option and increased the $19 option.

  so now there is a cliff; free for 5: $29 for everything.

  Not sure why I would use gitlab over github if thats the up-front hill I will have to climb: for what its worth Perforce also has almost exactly this pricing model and has the games industry by the balls, but perforce has no real competitor.

  fwiw I am a gitlab user for 10 years and have advocated for its use, the only reason I haven't migrated off at this point is the switching cost

• by retrocryptid on 6/20/23, 5:34 PM

  I'm currently hosting a git repo on my home machine and it's used by me when I'm on the road and a few people I trust enough to have logins on my DMZ machine.

  It seems there should be an easy way to use gitlab or github as a public read-only proxy to changes that are released on the private repo. And then going the other way, sucks up PRs from public sites and lovingly integrates them into the "real" repo on my home machine.

  Yes. There are security ramifications. There are availability ramifications. I seems slightly to be trying to skirt GitLab's policies they're probably putting into effect to avoid going bankrupt. But the flip-side is I really don't need a wiki or a bug tracker or whatever else GitLab is working on. I would pay a small amount of cash to just get a public repo mirror.

  And we all have different ideas about how to make this "easy". I don't mind running scripts on my local host, but would like to avoid polling the public repo to see if someone's posted a PR. I also don't want to have to run a script in a container on the public repo. So would love it if you could set the public repo to proxy PRs to a remote repo.

  Just curious if anyone else has similar requirements. Maybe you have a corporate repo and want to mirror it to a public site like GitLab, GitHub or SourceHut. Maybe, like me, *you* just want a remote repo to stash your code but a public location so your home server doesn't melt down that one time someone slashdots your project.

• by bhauer on 6/20/23, 5:58 PM

  The key mitigating factor here when comparing to GitHub: GitLab is self-hostable, and in the self-hosted version has no user limits.

  The limit discussed here only applied to the instance hosted by GitLab.

• by abeppu on 6/20/23, 5:45 PM

  I find their use of the word "subgroup" here to be annoying, because a subgroup under their semantics "inherits" members from the group it's included in, i.e. the cardinality of a subgroup is _larger_ than the cardinality of its parent.

• by mardifoufs on 6/20/23, 5:47 PM

  At least it does not seem to affect the self hosted community version... That could've been a lot scarier.

• by neilv on 6/20/23, 6:28 PM

  > A five-user limit applies to newly created top-level namespaces with private visibility on GitLab SaaS

  Any idea whether they'll eventually chip away at public-visibility open source projects?

  "We're not Microsoft" might be GitLab's biggest remaining selling point. And the more savvy open source developers might care disproportionately about that. I'd think GitLab might be trying to lure open source, now that GitHub isn't the warm-fuzzy company that originally landed a lot of it, yet GitHub continues to be the de facto official provider for most major open source projects and ecosystems. Plus that has network effects for landing paying customers. Has GitLab given up on that?

  BTW, I'm fine with GitLab charging for non-open-source commercial projects. If your startup has more than 5 users, you probably already have salaries in your burn rate, and GitLab is a relatively small cost, for a critical service. (See: TLC's "No Scrubs".) I've happily paid for GitLab in earlier-stage startups.

• by zachruss92 on 6/20/23, 6:46 PM

  This bait-and-switch along with real uptime issues is why I left GitLab years ago. I have a personal rule of; "if there is a reasonable OSS alternative to a proprietary software, use it." Unfortunately they are not reasonable. I was even a a paying customer but they changed their pricing structure so many times and moved features around for different tiers I couldn't justify it as a business.

  I've been happy moving back to GitHub post Microsoft acquisition. If I ever got fed up with GitHub I find Gitea to be refreshingly simple and does basically everything I need.

  I do wish the best for GitLab though and am rooting for them. Any company that makes an OSS model work is one worth having hope for.

• by Brian_K_White on 6/20/23, 8:56 PM

  Question for Gitlab: Why did you collect an email address from the user in the first place? Why does it exist in your db?

  Now explain why it was not used for it's only legitimate reason for existing in your posession, first, let alone followed up with a few updates as the deadline got closer.

  You have a communication channel that not only is good for this, but exists for this exact sole purpose in the first place. If you aren't going to use it for that, then you have no legitimate reason to have it and I want you to delete it.

• by joduplessis on 6/20/23, 6:22 PM

  Surprisingly GitLab feels very dated. Their drive has been toward enterprise sales instead of product IMO. Nothing bad about that - but focus on product development at least as well.

• by aussiedude on 6/21/23, 12:24 AM

  Is anyone happy with Gitlab public runners?

  I've found them extremely unreliable both in my free account (every failure takes 1-2 mins away from my 50 minutes!) and in my employers paid subscription so we self run but run into issues with not being able to scale runners enough to meet developers demands.

  Its also super annoying that you can't use your own docker containers hosted on ECR on public runners (no way to provide auth)

• by ygouzerh on 6/20/23, 6:39 PM

  Why downgrading the pricing when Github have a much better pricing and just rollout some crazy new GPT-powered features?

  We had in our backlog to explore a PoC to try out Github, since the announcement of Copilot X.

  Now, with this pricing announcement, this PoC will be transformed into a full migration from Gitlab to Github.

• by rhaway84773 on 6/20/23, 10:45 PM

  I don’t understand why anyone uses Gitlab anymore. In stark contrast to GitHub, it’s been an exercise in promising features which are then taken away from you, for years.

  Gitlab is almost certainly the most unethical company I’ve ever seen.

• by iFire on 6/20/23, 10:51 PM

  Does this means introducing a gradual rolloff of Gitlab? Gitlab does have a monopoly on opensource hosting.

  Personally, I'd leave all my existing gitlab archived as readonly, open, and move on.

• by dataminded on 6/20/23, 5:55 PM

  IT tried to get us to migrate to Gitlab in a past life, it went absolutely nowhere. Gitlab is stupidly expensive and complicated for value that never realized.

• by timetraveller26 on 6/20/23, 6:36 PM

  We migrated to Github many months ago for this reason, we really didn't want to but the price was hard to justify for our small team.

• by revskill on 6/20/23, 5:48 PM

  There's no mention on "Why changes", it's a red flag to me.

• by pyeri on 6/20/23, 6:03 PM

  Why have technology companies become so greedy all over the world these days? Is it because recession is putting pressure on their revenues or have they collectively decided that time to cash in has come now?

• by slicktux on 6/20/23, 7:31 PM

  When will people just host their own GIT?? It’s open source and web hosting services are cheap enough now a days that all you need is a domain and an internet facing server (raspberry pi)with SELinux…

• by sschueller on 6/20/23, 5:30 PM

  If gitlab keeps up with this hostility even towards paying customer a fork will be incoming sooner than later.