The changes they made (I guess a couple years now) to their pricing model really bit us in the ass. We had a 130 user licence on the old 5$ tier, and had to aggressively cut user counts to afford the new licence.
There really needs to be something like a "view only" or a role based cost per user. Most of our clients are just there for commenting, and only a handful of developers actually use the product to its full extent.
I know there was an issue open for discussion on their payment models, so I hope it is something they are continuing to look at. At 4x the cost of competitors that offer similar features, it is a very hard sell.
This is a problem at every org scale as well. We have this issue with a 1000+ developer org where we still can't give our PMs and other non-developers read-only access to the gitlab issues because it would be another 200 headcount worth of full-price licenses. It's basically the sole reason we can't utilize most of their jira/confluence alternative product line and still keep issue tracking and docs mostly outside of gitlab.
If you are just using the .git hosting part, it would be really easy to setup an open-ssh server yourself... Could you explain why you are not hosting your own ssh server already ?
They didn't say they're only using the git hosting, they're just not using the issue trackers because that would require adding non-devs. For all you know they could be using GitLab for CI, merge requests, package management, and deployments, none of which require adding new people to the team.
Exactly this, we use it for all of those things. None of which provide value to PMs, designers, and other non-engineer roles within teams that still need to collaborate on issue tracking and documentation.
There really needs to be something like a "view only" or a role based cost per user. Most of our clients are just there for commenting, and only a handful of developers actually use the product to its full extent.
I know there was an issue open for discussion on their payment models, so I hope it is something they are continuing to look at. At 4x the cost of competitors that offer similar features, it is a very hard sell.