> The problem is that there's nothing between $0/month and $19/month.
A problem with having a smaller account is that once people are paying anything they expect, rightly so, more support than the free account, and the company has to account for this. It might be more trouble than it is worth to take the money for smaller accounts. You or I might never touch that support, maybe the majority won't, but some very much will.
Our apps (in DayJob) service regulated financial industry companies (T&C and compliance side, not dealing with the money) and we have paying clients who are essentially paying costs because of how much time they drain (one of my regular tasks: proving that bad data has once again been sent in a nightly feed from a 3rd party system which is why we rejected the data). Free users are obviously costs too (they use resource) if you ignore the market-share and mind-share aspects, but it may be that low-cost users would be a worse prospect for the business.
Also offering multiple pricing plans can cause confusion for some users who already don't 100% know what they actually want.
No, because they intended to delete inactive repositories of free-tier users. Especially for personal use, that's a big no-no.
They quickly backpedaled after it turned out this generated really bad PR, but it does clearly demonstrate why GitLab's free tier does _not_ cover you.
A problem with having a smaller account is that once people are paying anything they expect, rightly so, more support than the free account, and the company has to account for this. It might be more trouble than it is worth to take the money for smaller accounts. You or I might never touch that support, maybe the majority won't, but some very much will.
Our apps (in DayJob) service regulated financial industry companies (T&C and compliance side, not dealing with the money) and we have paying clients who are essentially paying costs because of how much time they drain (one of my regular tasks: proving that bad data has once again been sent in a nightly feed from a 3rd party system which is why we rejected the data). Free users are obviously costs too (they use resource) if you ignore the market-share and mind-share aspects, but it may be that low-cost users would be a worse prospect for the business.
Also offering multiple pricing plans can cause confusion for some users who already don't 100% know what they actually want.