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by tomxor 1377 days ago
For teams that only need git hosting the recent price hikes are complete nuts... changed from 0$ to 20$ per user / per month, i.e $240 per user / per year - this represents about a 120x difference in price compared to self hosting for my team. I get that their business model was based upon CI and ancillary integrations (which I have no need for), but I would have been happy to pay a reasonable base rate for git hosting... to me this price is just a "go away" signal for anyone not interested in CI and containers.

I'm switching to self hosting, at the cost of 0.25 users in gitlab world - with a lot more resources (I noticed they throttle cloning). Thankfully gitea exists because it sounds like gitlab is a nightmare to self host anyway.
1 comments
arinlen 1377 days ago
> For teams that only need git hosting the recent price hikes are complete nuts... changed from 0$ to 20$ per user / per month, i.e $240 per user / per year - this represents about a 120x difference in price compared to self hosting for my team.

That's like complaining that AWS is expensive because you can self-host your apps. I mean, it's true but it still misrepresents the whole problem and misses the whole point of subscribing to a service.

I'm not going to play the role of GitLab salesperson, specially as I'm seeing this change as an invitation to start hosting my projects elsewhere, but there is no professional devteam on earth that can hire anyone for 200€/month to reliably develop, manage and operate their self-hosting ticketing, services, CICD pipeline, team management software, etc. Claiming otherwise is just like claiming that you can maintain your used car as well as any professional mechanic provided that it never breaks down.

And if all you need is to host git somewhere, a SSH connection will cover all your needs. But you use a bit more than that, don't you?

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tomxor 1377 days ago
> That's like complaining that AWS is expensive because you can self-host your apps

I appreciate the one less job in maintaining self hosting... I have other things to maintain and would have happily paid with a reasonable markup. However the difference is not marginal, it's > 100x, and my team is small, the difference will be even larger for medium to large sized teams because the price is artificially proportional to number of users, it's not scalable and adds resistance to growth... If we derived more value than merely avoiding basic git self hosting that might be reasonable, but we don't.

> but there is no professional devteam on earth that can hire anyone for 200€/month to reliably develop, manage and operate their self-hosting ticketing, services, CICD pipeline, team management software, etc. Claiming otherwise is just like claiming that you can maintain your used car as well as any professional mechanic provided that it never breaks down.

This is disingenuous, It doesn't take the entirety of someone's role to maintain a basic git hosting server without the complexity of CI/CD. I already run a fleet of servers with far more requirements than gitea. Also I said basic git hosting... I have no need for any of CICD pipline, or issue tracking features, this significantly reduces the requirements.

> if all you need is to host git somewhere, a SSH connection will cover all your needs. But you use a bit more than that, don't you?

I don't think you read my post fully, I said basic git hosting without CI/CD... I was actually tempted by a basic SSH only git server but I don't want to manage SSH keys or force people to use the CLI to create repos, so I will be using Gitea to provide a simple web UI.

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arinlen 1377 days ago
> I said basic git hosting... I have no need for any of CICD pipline, or issue tracking features.

My point is that it makes no sense to adopt any third-party git hosting service is all you want to do is have a git repo somewhere, thus it makes no sense to complain about how a service is expensive when you do not have any reason to use the service to begin with. Services like GitHub or GitLab or BitBucket or AWS CodeCommit are pointless if all you need is a remote repo somewhere. Complaining that GitLab is expensive when you only need a git repo is like complaining that Netflix is expensive when you only need a screen saver.

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tomxor 1377 days ago
I'm not sure why you are so selectively reading my post.

I'll paste the first sentence of my first paragraph here again, it provides a good reason:

> I appreciate the one less job in maintaining self hosting... I have other things to maintain and would have happily paid with a reasonable markup.

Also you can't simultaneously argue that I have no right to use a service with which I can compete with against cost price and that I cannot possibly compete with their price. I get the sense that you have an axe to grind.

My argument is merely that the price change is excessively unreasonable for those who only wanted git hosting... and at it's core, it's a git hosting service.

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