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

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/13/gitlab-gtlb-earnings-q4-2023.html

by YourCupOTea • 3 years ago

221 200 3 years ago

arsome• 3 years ago

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/

lmiller1990• 3 years ago

To be fair, a lot of enterprise sales is based on "ticking boxes".

liketochill• 3 years ago

Which is great until the users blame the tool because they can’t finish their work

fletchowns• 3 years ago

I've had a good experience using GitLab for source code repositories, pipelines, and code reviews. I don't have much experience using it for issue tracking and document management since we use Jira & Confluence for that. For my own hobby projects outside of work the free tier has been great, and it was easy to host my own gitlab runner so that I don't have to pay for CI/CD minutes.

epolanski4• 3 years ago

Same here I only had good experience with it and I just can't get used to other PR review UIs.

That being said if I were a CTO I would not buy their services, I think they are too expensive.

gscho• 3 years ago

Even though features are half-baked I still think the future is bright for them, especially if GitHub slips up or gets complacent. Intel showed us that it is possible.

mekster2• 3 years ago

I hate to see GitLab becoming mainstream if GitHub fails. We need a better alternative than a bloated one out of control.

paulddraper2• 3 years ago

I just think it's too ambitious.

Everything and the kitchen sink just will never be as good as best of breed.

mekster2• 3 years ago

Anyone can be ambitious. Without the right skill, it's just a failure.

hypothesis• 3 years ago

That seems to account for layoff and upcoming pricing changes.

c2h5oh2• 3 years ago

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.

maccard2• 3 years ago

It's hard to blame them for every specific bug. It might be incredibly important to you, but not to others, and there's probably another showstopper bug for someone else that isn't important for you in return.

c2h5oh2• 3 years ago

True, but at the same time built-in CI with your own agents was an area where they had a significant advantage over Github the fact it would routinely fail during evaluation has killed any prospect of Github to Gitlab migrations at at least 2 orgs I was involved with.

yjftsjthsd-h• 3 years ago

It might be incredibly important to you, but not to others, and there's probably another showstopper bug for someone else that isn't important for you in return.

Yes, but that's not a good thing; IMO they've hit the point where they're dying by papercuts. If one user in a million has a completely awful show stopper bug, the product/business will probably be fine. If one in ten users has a fairly serious bug, they're in a bad spot. Obviously they're not at either of those extremes.... but I think they're closer to the latter than the former.

xeromal• 3 years ago

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

mkl952• 3 years ago

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.

aynyc2• 3 years ago

When was GitLab ahead of GitHub? I've been using both for as long as I remember, I always thought GitLab is more marketing than GitHub. Believe or not, I prefer BitBucket because I don't care much for CI integrations.

mkl952• 3 years ago

I remember Gitlab having some features that Github lacked and subsequently ripped off, such as merge queues.

agumonkey• 3 years ago

There was a tiny period where github was a bit stagnant and gitlab felt more capable. Felt a bit like mysql vs postgres. Now I think github got the lead back (slightly simpler UI/workflow). But i don't know much.

IlPeach• 3 years ago

Yeah that was before Microsoft bought GitHub. GH had been constantly exceeding expectations and GitLab trying to play catch up (which smells of bad product strategy).

rossmohax• 3 years ago

Gitlab CI pipelines are miles ahead from Github Actions or Circle CI.

sophiabits• 3 years ago

While you might not value it, GitLab’s CI story was for a long time way better than GitHub and even a number of dedicated CI/CD providers. If you want to build and deploy microservices from a monorepo independently based on what changed in a PR, for instance, then GitLab supports that out of the box whereas you need to hack something together yourself on Buildkite.

GitHub actions has significantly reduced the gap, and at least for me that was GitLab’s killer feature.

samspenc• 3 years ago

GitLab increased their prices significantly in the past two years, which resulted in them being less competitive on price than GitHub and others https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2023/03/02/gitlab-premium-upda...

As others have pointed out in comments, their features seem to be incomplete but I think it's their higher price points that pushed users away.

epolanski4• 3 years ago

You made me curious and I checked their financial report.

Gitlab spent 310M of their total 580M$ of operational costs in sales in 2022.

Those seem crazy numbers, I see similar ratios in other financial reports (such as Cloudflare's).

On one side it means that those companies are essentially cash positive the moment they cut sales expenses, on the other hand GitLab imho does not provide enough over some competitors such as GitHub to make me bet on them 10 years from now.

aeyes• 3 years ago

Without knowing anything my guess is that they give big discounts to large accounts and write that off as sales/marketing cost. Only that it doesn't work because if you don't give me that price again I'll just pull the plug.

This only works if you have no competition.

mindwok• 3 years ago

I think it's a consequence of going public. Enterprise is where the money is at, and public companies have huge amounts of pressure to chase the money. I have a lot of love for GitLab, so I hope the strategy works and they can reinvest profits into making the product better for all developers, not just enterprise, but at this stage of their lifecycle it seems this is the strategy they have to play.

Analemma_• 3 years ago

TBF, I don't think Gitlab was ever ahead of, or even close to, GitHub. They got a lot of hype here a couple years ago when everyone decided they hated GitHub now because boo Microsoft, but that didn't mean GL was an actual competitor. People who migrated on hype got burned.

eeasss• 3 years ago

The fully remote approach may have hit its limits.

epolanski4• 3 years ago

Nobody I know self manages their git and integrations regardless of where they physically work.

karaterobot• 3 years ago

I assume that commenter is referring to Gitlab's famous advocacy for remote-only work. But, it's still completely irrelevant to their earnings forecast or stock price.

mmcclure• 3 years ago

I think GP was referring to Gitlab itself being very vocal about fully remote. Without commenting on anything else in this thread, their company handbook[1] and the culture around it are something I find pretty interesting.

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/company/culture/all-remote/guide/

t3rmi• 3 years ago

I wonder if we can compare remote vs in person companies across industries and see stock price deltas across the last 2 years.

nativecoinc• 3 years ago

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

Git forges should be expendable.

Spivak• 3 years ago

The moat is CI, or more accurately that Gitlab CI is really good and using it requires hosting your code there.

jamesfinlayson3• 3 years ago

This - I had to move to GitLab from GitHub recently and getting all the tests to run with the new agents was 99% of my time. Pushing a git repo to a new remote is nothing.

nimbius• 3 years ago

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.

stavros3• 3 years ago

This comment strikes me as fundamentally misunderstanding the purpose of GitHub. I don't care that I can set up Gitea (and I already have an instance), I want GitHub because it makes it trivial for people to issue PRs to my code.

Then, because everyone has a GitHub account and knows how to use it, and everyone is already on it, everyone else goes on it too.

Not to mention that I don't need to maintain CI/container registries/asset hosts/pages myself.

vorpalhex• 3 years ago

There was an attempt to bring a distributed forge architecture to gitea and co. The idea being the project could be hosted on one instance but you could fork to your own to do your work before PRing back to the project.

Github but bring your own.

I believe the project died out but it was a good idea. All the benefits of Github without the lock in and single point of failure.

zht• 3 years ago

this is the dropbox comment for GitHub lol

yamtaddle• 3 years ago

If you champion self-hosting gitea or gitlab CE, get your way, and something bad happens, you may, personally, be in trouble.

If you just go with Github or Gitlab, and something bad happens, nobody will blame you.

shrimpx• 3 years ago

it costs virtually nothing to ...

Yeah but what's the cost of a global developer social network?

vlunkr• 3 years ago

This is important, but also, “virtually nothing” is a lie. I think self hosting can work, but you have to be honest about the costs. Deployment, maintenance, rotating logs, training others on all this.

activitypea2• 3 years ago

BrandonM, is that you?

imron• 3 years ago

How much does it cost to pay someone to administer? Including backups, BCP, integration with SSO etc?

It’ll work for a 5 person startup, but will get expensive fast for larger organizations.

mac-chaffee• 3 years ago

I always reference this post when the subject of self-hosting "simple" things comes up: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/blog/sysadmin/RunningSer...

plaguepilled• 3 years ago

I might be extremely naive in thinking this, but all the listed concerns on that blog post seem rather straightforward to account for. Is there a hidden complexity that I'm just not seeing?

remram• 3 years ago

It seems that most of those concerns are not alleviated by using GitHub or GitLab SaaS: "figure out the software you want to use" (you still have to choose the platform), "figure out authentication" (you still have to link your SSO with the platform), "continuous integration systems (...) or production servers that pull from your Git repos, you're going to need to figure out how to connect all of this to the Git server" (you still have to do this), "Git version compatibility" (still a concern, unless you only write code from a browser).

What a weird list.

kugelblitz• 3 years ago

There's always opportunity costs. What about regular maintenance and updates? What happens when a bug appears? What if the disk is full?

Working 50% freelance and 50% revenue-generating niche side-project, I always calculate my time costs. Assuming I earn $80 an hour as a freelancer and a hosted git costing $10 a month, if I estimate I will need an additional 15mins a month if I go self-hosted, then I'll pay for the hosted version.

I've seen enough projects, where they decided to self-host gitlab, only to have issues like disk full, updates needed, deployments not initiating.

When suddenly a team of 10 can't push or deploy for a day, there's additional costs there as well.

Eugr• 3 years ago

If you already have people maintaining self-hosted or cloud environments, adding GitLab to the mix would not cost anything extra. We self-hosted GitLab instance for many years at my previous job and after plugging it into monitoring/backup systems it was extremely low maintenance. Even updates were painless.

ajb• 3 years ago

The first startup I joined, which was 12 people 20 years ago, had our own servers and an IT guy who took the alternate backup tapes home personally. When you have that, running as many services as possible locally, instead of paying for them, makes sense as you are increasing the value you get out of your operational capacity.

I now work in a start-up of 40 people, we don't have any servers or dedicated IT or DevOps staff. All admin gets done in the spare time of a couple of engineers, who have no desire to further lose their development time to admin/ops. It makes more sense to pay a subscription and let someone else deal with it. Even for the backend guys running that kind of service is more operationally complex than most of what they do - no-one has the experience of operating 'pets' class servers.

twblalock• 3 years ago

GitHub is not just hosted Git. It is a platform.

imp0cat• 3 years ago

Yes, but having used both, I'd pick Gitlab CI over Jenkins anytime. YMMV, obviously.

maldev• 3 years ago

I think Github knows that and that's why it's turned into more of a "Social Media" site. Jr Dev's grind it and view it as a gateway to a job. Constant memes about "Green boxes". "Only want my Sr Dev's to have full green!111!!". In reality nobody cares, but you can tell that's how the marketing is going. And it's to the point that if I have a public product, I might as well put it on github and get that stuff for free. Even though I do run gitea in a docker container for 99% of my projects offline.

stavros3• 3 years ago

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.

activitypea2• 3 years ago

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.

packetlost• 3 years ago

Same. They forced GitHub to quit resting on their laurels, at least.

Macha• 3 years ago

It feels like they've moved into the extract value phase for sure, maybe a bit forced by github actions removing their USP. I'm still using them for now, but I feel the day I move back to Github for the higher profile or self-hosted gitea/forgejo for the data control is coming.

harrisonjackson• 3 years ago

It is especially annoying because of how transparent they are about it. You can follow along in merge requests and issues as they discuss exactly this.

dcchambers• 3 years ago

Tbf 99% of other companies are still doing that, just not in the open.

It's a business, their goal is to make money. I kind of like that they're willing to let everyone see into the nitty gritty details of how they do that.

medstrom• 3 years ago

Why does transparency annoy you?

rwmj• 3 years ago

I had a strange interaction with one of their sales people a few weeks ago.

We have a free premium open source developer account, plus Red Hat runs all the CentOS infra through gitlab and pays a ton of money to them. I received emails from a salesperson demanding that I book an appointment with them to discuss my account. (It sounded like a meeting which had real this could be done by email energy, or else was going to be a high-pressure sales pitch.)

I asked them which account they were talking about and if we could do this on email, but they literally wouldn't say what account it was related to, and just kept saying I must visit some (non-gitlab) site to book this appointment for a video call.

After several rounds of this and following up with someone who works with gitlab to check it wasn't an actual scam (it wasn't), I just ignored the guy.

Conclusion is they sounded desperate to make the numbers last quarter.

animitronix3• 3 years ago

They were, we experienced the same. Told them to go pound sand.

animitronix3• 3 years ago

Yeah same here. Having to go to an Enterprise level to get free guest users is absurd, they've really stopped listening about product feedback, and the pricing model makes no sense...

swyx• 3 years ago

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.

viraptor2• 3 years ago

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.

mgl4• 3 years ago

Well, $30 mo is just $1 a day. Depending on where you live it can be nothing.

kevingadd2• 3 years ago

This logic is simply not how you get money from ordinary consumers. If someone wants to support you at a level of $X for a service they're already getting for free, saying 'just give us $X*5' is not the right move.

I recently watched a video game community melt down because (due to exchange rate shenanigans) the pricing of a monthly pass was $5.99 instead of $4.99, and people got furious when (a non-employee) moderator said the equivalent of 'you don't have one dollar?'

spartanatreyu• 3 years ago

The problem is that gitlab is just another service that add together to be a lot.

viraptor2• 3 years ago

Those add up unless you can tie them to specific income. I've got enough "just $1 a day" subscriptions already that give me way more value.

nh23423fefe• 3 years ago

if you wouldn't pay 30 in a month why would you pay a dollar a day?

voganmother422• 3 years ago

This really misses the mark. They compete with free also, which is always nothing.

Github by comparison lets me pay like 5$/mo for LFS and 4$/mo for a team of one, bitbucket even lets you do up to 5 users for a total of 15$/mo , gitlab has nothing like that :(

gregwebs• 3 years ago

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

chainwax• 3 years ago

Unless Actions has gotten a lot more fleshed out since I last used it, I don't think it's as robust as Gitlab CI.

stabbles2• 3 years ago

- Github Action's design is much better, just look at [1] for example, there's a lot of low-hanging fruit in Gitlab that's not done for some reason

- I've had tons of issues with their kubernetes runners, hard to debug spurious system failures

- They still don't display the last N bytes of the logs when logs get long, just the first N bytes, which is entirely useless when a build fails

- It's awfully slow to navigate through pipelines, in particular child pipelines

- The `stages` things is just useless noise, I just wanna specify dependencies please, I don't want to be forced to also put each job in a stage, it's weird.

- You can't expose a secret only to a single job step; they don't really have finer granularity for job steps like Github Actions has -- they just generate a script.sh that's executed directly.

- Github has many more reusable actions from the community, I don't think Gitlab has that at all? At least not in a convenient way.

[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/395964

Aeolun• 3 years ago

I used to think this, but after having gotten used to Github Actions I’m moving everything over.

Ultimately I constantly felt like everything was half baked when using Gitlab. I still kind of feel that way with Github, but to a much lesser extend.

More importantly, they allow me to pay my $21/month monthly which means they get my business instead of ‘only pay per year’ Gitlab.

paulddraper2• 3 years ago

GitHub actions are great.

Gitlab CI is a bunch of weird hard to understand bolt on conf, undergirded by a defunct docker-machine project

I tried debugging some problems I was having with a runners. Turns out the default Ubuntu AMI was like 6 years old. Does anyone use this thing?

prepend• 3 years ago

I disagree. Actions is really nice and I don’t have to set up and debug runners. In GitHub, I can have dedicated runners if I want, but99% of the time, I just use vanilla Ubuntu runners.

My fear though is that GitHub will Jack up their prices once I’m running everything. Right now they give 50k minutes per month, but that could change at any point. GitHub enterprise started out at $8/month and now it’s $20+.

megous7• 3 years ago

At $29 * 7 * 12 per year it became way cheaper for us to just piece together functionality we needed from nginx+cgit+homegrown database to store users/repos/acl/push info and a few git hooks written in a few lines of PHP. The cost is now independent of the number of developers using the system.

So far it did cost ~1 month of paying for github in dev time and I can't imagine it costing much more when we'll want to add some automation on top of the list of accepted pushes/ref updates, for which we did not have a need for so far.

Certainly beats installing 1GiB debian package of selfhosted gitlab and having to figure out why some stupid ruby service is eating increasing amounts of hundreds of MiB of RAM on an empty gitlab instance while doing nothing at all.

That's $2.5k/yr that can be put into something else.

When developers do operations... I guess. :D

conanbatt• 3 years ago

2.5k doesn't pay 1 day of a developer in a top-of-market startup.

kiratp3• 3 years ago

A developer costs about 250K a year all up. That doesn’t include opportunity cost.

49, 40 hour weeks a year = $127.55 an hour.

29* 7 * 12 / (127.55) = 19.09 hours

If it takes you more than 2.3 dev days (100% productive) you’re negative ROI doing it yourself.

This math doesn’t even factor in the opportunity cost of doing this.

meghan_rain2• 3 years ago

The classic HN Dropbox comment, never gets old.

mardifoufs5• 3 years ago

I mean I dislike the gitlab pricing increases, and we are kind of regretting sticking with them (especially since everyone on the Gitlab instance has to pay for a seat, even when not using any of the premium features) considering how Github is cheaper and has a higher release velocity at this point... But to be very fair, we never saw what you describe about memory leaks or slow ruby services. Migrations are also usually silent and done in the background. I guess the software itself is pretty heavy, but predictably so (RAM usage rarely spikes, for example).

We have a 400+ seats instance, with a decade worth of code and it just works 99.99% of the time, and upgrades are generally painless. Though our instance is pretty vanilla, and internal to our corporation. The runners are more finnicky and buggier, especially since we have tons of different build targets but that's besides the point if we are just talking about using it as a dumb git repo. And if you only need it for that purpose why even pay instead of using the community edition?

(I'm in the AI team but I sometimes help the devops team that takes care of the instance to customize our AI pipelines, so I'm familiar with gitlab and with my colleagues experience with it)

argella• 3 years ago

Why don’t you just run gitlab community edition or gitea

onion2k• 3 years ago

The problem with a homegrown system is that every developer working within it will see it as a barrier rather than a cost saving. Whenever they can't do something that's trivial on Github/Gitlab it'll be a reminder that the company would rather save $xxx/year than make their job easier.

Ultimately, having a simple, well-integrated, industry standard stack that includes the same tooling every other company uses is a perk of working at a well-funded or profitable company. People leave for less.

memco2• 3 years ago

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

Of those things that I like more in Gitlab, it is deploy tokens: an easy way to be able to dole out permission to clone code where needed without having to bother with key management or user management. As far as I can tell GitHub has something like this but it requires setting up an app to talk to the API and isn’t nearly simple as the button available in Gitlab.

brasic• 3 years ago

Not sure what you mean. Adding a deploy key is about as simple as I can imagine, definitely doesn’t require messing with apps, which I agree is a pain.

https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/connecting-to-gith...

(disclosure, former GH)

HWR_14• 3 years ago

Or (3) Gitlab users that want to self-host. But while those might be users, they are not great customers.

brightball2• 3 years ago

$29 / month as it relates to developer salaries is not impactful.

speedgoose• 3 years ago

It adds up. 29$ for GitHub, 19$ for GitHub Copilot, 20$ for ChatGPT Plus, a few codespaces and runners, perhaps 7.5$ for the sadomasochist project managers who wants Jira, and you may get a nice bill at the end of the month.

And then you have people like GitKrakken who ask 19$ for a git client, or Teleport who ask 36$ for a ssh client.

msm_• 3 years ago

In my previous organisation $19/month (IIRC) was a dealbreaker. That was non-US so salaries are lower, and suddenly I had to explain why we absolutely needed the paid version so much (instead of sticking to the free one). To make it worse, most of the people that had access to gitlab were researchers/managers/non-technical people and not actually developers, so only a few people would benefit from the paid version. So we never bought the paid version.

mschuster91• 3 years ago

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

Add in 3) people who want a reasonable option to self-host that's not charging you to oblivion.

suddenclarity• 3 years ago

I reckon their growth was mostly killed by Microsoft purchasing GitHub and making private repositories free. Most of the open source community seem to be on GitHub anyway so it just removed any incitament for average people to join Gitlab. Once you're invested in one environment it takes something special to move.

nicolaslem• 3 years ago

This. A while ago Gitlab was really the better option: mostly free and more features (CI, project management...). Github caught up on features and price so why bother going against the network effect when the alternative is not even better?

nunez• 3 years ago

GitLab Auto DevOps and (now) GitLab Ultimate are definitely compelling differentiators that Github doesn't currently have, but I can't see Github just _not_ responding to that in a big way.

awill2• 3 years ago

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.

spacebanana7• 3 years ago

I wish that were true but Oracle, Cisco, PayPal etc all seem to have succeeded in pivoting to more extractive business models over growth. At least in terms of earnings.

awill2• 3 years ago

When you are compared to Oracle, it's always, always, always bad.

A lot of companies want and try to move off OracleDB, but it's really, really hard. I don't think that's the case for moving off Gitlab.

siliconc0w• 3 years ago

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.

mdorazio• 3 years ago

Here's their operating margin for the last 4 quarters:

Q1: -49%

Q2: -65%

Q3: -50%

Q4: -38%

So what you want is a business model where the company runs purely on VC money instead of on actual profit. SaaS companies like Gitlab usually can't operate at a profit with only free-tier and cheap-tier users - their overhead is way too high. Those tiers are a gateway drug offered at a loss to get people on board so that eventually the actually-profitable enterprise accounts will stack up enough to make up the loss. It's kind of a standard bait-and-switch pushed by the whole VC model. I'm personally hoping we see less of it now that the money spigot is drying up.

geophph• 3 years ago

“Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

https://culturalgutter.com/2023/01/25/the-enshitification-of...

zmmmmm• 3 years ago

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

Havoc• 3 years ago

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

jacooper2• 3 years ago

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/

mrslave• 3 years ago

What's your preferred CI/CD system to pair with Gitea? I tried Drone once and found the configuration to be nasty, specifically OAuth2 under Docker Compose. Also the Drone UI left a lot to be desired. This was a while ago so grain of salt etc.

jacooper2• 3 years ago

Honestly none of the currently available ones. Tried Drone/woodpecker, but still not good enough, looking forward to gitea actions though!

karmakaze• 3 years ago

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.

shanth• 3 years ago

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

xvilka• 3 years ago

Drone CI is Woodpecker now: https://woodpecker-ci.org/

mikercampbell• 3 years ago

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

Lorin• 3 years ago

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.

erlkonig• 3 years ago

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?)...

maxdo• 3 years ago

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

janee• 3 years ago

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.

lopkeny12ko• 3 years ago

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.

naet• 3 years ago

My small company pays for GitLab and I don't see the bill directly, but I definitely have enjoyed working with GitLab. GitHub actions may be catching up but GitLab ci/cd tools have worked great for a while now for us.

mardifoufs5• 3 years ago

I think the main reason why I dislike the pricing is that there's no way to buy seats with different premium tiers. I'm sure they've done the maths, but it's a very hard sell to just upgrade from the community edition, knowing that you'll have to now restrict the instance knowing that even a casual user (marketing, sys.engineers, mech engineers, etc) will cost the same price...when that limitation just doesn't exist if you don't pay anything at all! It's just counterintuitive.

Good luck trying to get buy in for the Ultimate tier (1200$ per year vs 300$ for the normal paid tier) when only a few users need or use the improved reporting/security featuresEven if it's not a huge cost per se, it makes most premium features a lot less attractive. And remember, you can self host Github Enterprise for a lot less than Gitlab now.

Again, I'm convinced they know how to price their product a lot better than us, but as an enduser, it's a bummer. Because Gitlab is still an amazing product, if just for their open source core alone. So I really hope they figure out a way to be sustainable.

TheChaplain• 3 years ago

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.

neom• 3 years ago

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. :\

EspadaV9• 3 years ago

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.

animitronix3• 3 years ago

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.

intellix• 3 years ago

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

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

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