I'll leave the marketing talk to less biased people here, but do note that: - yo...

chrishacken · on Aug 5, 2016

"you can use GitLab.com for free"

It seems like that is the main selling point. However, I think that most of us don't want the extra weight of managing yet another tool. Thus why many of us use GitHub to begin with and not something else...

corobo · on Aug 5, 2016

Just to clarify GitLab.com is their hosted version, not the self-hosted option (Which is GitLab CE)

chrishacken · on Aug 5, 2016

Yup, my mistake.

d0100 · on Aug 5, 2016

Isn't GitLab.com managed? It's a bit slow when using the web interface, but it's free.

jobvandervoort · on Aug 5, 2016

What do you mean with managing another tool? GitLab.com is our own instance, that we manage.

chrishacken · on Aug 5, 2016

My fault, I didn't see that there was a free hosted version. I thought it was either free self-hosted or paid hosted.

the_trapper · on Aug 5, 2016

My big concern when I see a company that gives away too much for free is that they are probably unprofitable and will at some point:

a) Start charging for things that I'm used to having for free

and/or

b) Go bankrupt/get bought out by a company and disappear

Do you really sell enough enterprise licenses to give all the rest of this stuff away? From a look at your site, that's the only source of profit for your company that I can find.

jobvandervoort · on Aug 5, 2016

Our main source of income is subscriptions that grant access to Enterprise Edition and support. That has been going very well.

We're not planning to charge for what we give away for free now. Never.

We're thinking about charging for specific Runners for our CI (such as Mac runners) and possibly for extra storage.

_asummers · on Aug 5, 2016

You mentioned Mac runners, and if this includes iOS you'll make a killing. Figure out how to interact with a fast Android emulator and you'll be able to pull in a decent chunk of agencies that don't want to buy in house build machines.

_RPM · on Aug 5, 2016

Nothing is free in life. You should define free because it's border line a buzz word now.

pluma · on Aug 5, 2016

You can use GitLab.com with no charge. It's free in the same sense as GitHub is free, except it also runs on open source software (well, GitLab EE, which is a superset of CE and has a proprietary license but is still developed and supported in the open unlike GitHub).

AFAICT the "cost" is that you're effectively load-testing GitLab EE and help guiding the development of a commercial product. Plus you're giving GitLab free marketing. But to the extent that anything in life can be considered "free" (as in "gratis"), GitLab.com can be used for free.

jobvandervoort · on Aug 5, 2016

This is correct.

We're thinking about charging for specific GitLab Runners in the future (think Mac Runners) or additional storage (we have a soft cap of 10GB per repo).