[afandian]

We've just had a bad experience with GitLab annual renewal, to the point where we didn't know if they'd cancelled our account or not.

The billing accounts system seems to be completely disconnected from user accounts. A notification banner was spammed to users in the GitLab.com user interface, saying that our account was going to be cancelled becuase we didn't have auto-renew. The users who got the banner didn't have permission to act on it in the billing system. The billing system said that we _were_ on track to renew, which disagreed with the banner. Eventually it transpired that the end-of-year "truing up" meant that our account was on hold, but we weren't notified of this.

And when we _did_ pay the bill we get a banner saying "you've been downgraded to the free plan" when the gitlab.com interface says we hadn't.

It really undermined confidence in how well these systems are connected.

On the flip side, the fact that everything is open meant that you can see customer support reps raising internal bugs about this stuff. The principle of open-everything makes it more pallatable, but it doesn't make up for lost confidence.

[mkarampalas]

I am a product manager at GitLab and my focus is on making renewals as easy and pain-free as possible for customers. I am very sorry that you had such a confusing and frustrating experience here. We are working on a number of issues that will improve this process, including:

* Making Gitlab.com aware of who the payment owner is so we can more accurately target the renewal banner - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/growth/product/-/issues/1551

* Updating the renewal banner copy for group owners that aren't payment owners so they don't attempt to renew if they do not have the right permissions - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/growth/product/-/issues/1553

* Moving the renewal behavior from the customers portal into Gitlab.com so payment owners can more easily manage their subscription and renewal - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/growth/product/-/issues/1528

* Adjusting how we do "true-ups" so they are done quarterly and pro-rated to the end of the subscription instead of in arrears - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/customers-gitlab-com/-/issues/...

I would love to chat with you to learn more about the challenges you experienced and to review some of our plans to make things better if you're up for it. You can reach me directly at mkarampalas[at]gitlab.com

[afandian]

Thanks, it's great to see that. Incremental true-ups would be very useful. My colleague is talking to an account manager directly, but I'll pass your message on.

[sytse]

Sorry that this happened. We still have a long way to go to improve our billing system. We have allocated more people to it since a few months and are making much faster progress. But it isn’t we’re it should be at the moment.

[afandian]

Thanks. No worries, these things happen. It's just a little alarming to see messages like "we've downgraded you to the free plan". Even a bit of help text in the banner, linking to a page on situations under which the message might be raised / not be 100% accurate, might ease the experience.

[sytse]

For sure. Please also see the response of our product manager in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23167232

[apple4ever]

I'm not surprised. They currently refuse to have a sane policy around licensing people who just want to put in issues and view repos vs actual developers. They make all users count as a full developer, which makes no sense. Their reasoning is basically "its just easier for us" which is not the point. [0][1]

0. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/3320#note_3351... 1. https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/ceo/pricing/#reporter-user...

[afandian]

That's an entirely separate issue, so this seems like an ad-hominem. And possibly a bit off-topic for a thread about their system integration.

But that said, I do wholeheartedly agree! The top-tier account type allows free reporter-level users. But for every other tier (e.g. silver), you have to pay for them. I think that's big mistake, as the cost-benefit of paying 200 USD per year for each member leads to work-arounds, which compromises the user experience.

[volgar1x]

fault confessed is half redressed