With every release I wonder why our team is even paying for Gitlab Bronze. It seems to offer no value at all, might as well go for the free tier and save a thousand dollars a year.
Gitlab needs to be able to mix licenses on a single system, its current model requires all accounts in an org to operate at the same level, try selling a 1000 seat ultimate license at 99/user/month to tbe average sme. In all companies there are seats that need different levels of capabilities, gitlab is just way to expensive to use at anything above starter, the premium level works out at 2x more expensive than jira/bb/confluence with considerably less capability. I want to be able to buy 200 starter, 50 premium and 5 ultimate licenses and mix them on the same system.
They explicitly said they don't want to do that, for reasons that really aren't clear. There are a LOT of companies that want to be able to mix developers and reporters, but can't because the price is astronomical for zero benefit. So they live with a lower tier (likely free).
Yes, this update basically reduced the value of Bronze significantly as there were no relevant new features coming to Bronze and those that we were paying for are now in the free tier.
In general our "Why Starter" page has some great rationale for why we encourage small teams to utilize GitLab Starter/Bronze. https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/starter/
Same boat, although with GitHub pricing changes it’s more advantageous to switch. The fact that the security and dependency management is locked at gold when they are free on Github is annoying.
