[throwaway472919]

Rarely do you pay based on actual cost, everything has price discrimination, loss leaders etc.

Look at BMW's heated seat subscription, those who want them are subsidising the cost of fitting the unused parts for those who don't. But if that cost is low enough relative to their income, they don't care.

It would cost Tinder next to nothing to give everyone unlimited super-likes, but they make a lot more money charging for them than they would charging everyone a flat fee (network effect++ / ladies' night for the 21st century).

I'm not sure I like where all this will end up but - GitLab are hardly the worst offenders.

[mdaniel]

Those comparisons are not apples-apples since BMW and Tinder do not publish their source code under MIT licenses and invite contributions from their users. There is no self-hosted Tinder that serves as the competing "if you don't like our pricing, then start your own MyGitLabHosting.com"

I hear you about "not the actual cost," but in software engineering -- to say nothing of SaaS offerings -- pinning down the actual cost per byte served or committed is incredibly hard

Maybe GitLab is trying to see how much they can tighten the thumb screws before LONG STANDING advocates like me jump ship, and I'm sure the switching cost of a lot of their customers makes it akin to ransom, but for others they have deep enough pockets that they'd eat the switching cost out of spite and those fish may be big enough to swing their stock price the other way