I have a (perhaps) more incendiary take on this kind of thing. I have no problem with promo codes for new customers. Zero. None. As a business owner, I know damn well there are some products or services that need a little "taster" offered to a potential customer to get them even modestly interested.
Existing paying customers? Why would you spend money to acquire customers that you've already acquired. You had your reasons for signing up for DO, and apparently, the lack of a $10 credit wasn't one of them. And we all know this is a flimsy firewall to breech anyway - a different e-mail address that - if you're really feeling saucy - you could have delivered to an SMTP daemon on your existing droplet.
Promotions are by definition a form of publicity or advertisement, and if you're already a customer, you're already a customer, know what I mean? Why advertise "hey, check us out" if you've already checked them out and signed on the dotted line.
If you feel really, really, really burned by this, do what other cost-conscious consumers do, and whenever you see a box "promo code" on a signup form, Google "example.com promo code" (substituting the actual domain name, obviously) and see what you can find.
I do not understand, even a little bit, the amount of outrage over the fact that you want a company to spend advertising money (that's what a promotion is budgeted to) to advertise to an existing customer. Not unless you feel that DO isn't worth it already, that is, and in that case, what the hell is $10 going to do to change your mind?
FYI, the above response was related to the below comments about existing DO customers getting screwed out of a $10 promotion, one that wasn't even featured prominently on the Gitlab site. I wanted to show my support for DO and Gitlab here, and thought it best to do so as a new top level comment. I honestly didn't consider that my comment would end up above the others.
I'm a little confused... you say "I have no problem with promo codes for new customers. Zero. None." but that's exactly what they are doing... the $10 credit is only for new customers to DO
> Existing paying customers? Why would you spend money to acquire customers that you've already acquired.
I don't know about this, plenty of companies are continuously hassling me to expand my services in exchange for 1-2 month discounts, or offering trials on new services.
> *Note: Promotion code available for new DigitalOcean customers only.
This type of promotion really aggravates me. I'm not just saying this only about the announced GitLab/DigitialOcean partnership, but rather as a general comment as I see this customer acquisition ruse quite a lot elsewhere too.
I spend money with DigitalOcean. I don't feel particularly rewarded for my loyalty when I can't enjoy the same promotion as some new customer, who may never spend another cent with DO.
Two years ago the GitHub Student Developer Pack gave me $100, which I have been using to maintain a tiny droplet (literally changed my life, thank you). Last month Digital Ocean sent me this message:
We’re truly sorry if this came as a surprise.
As of March 2015, we revised our Terms of Service
announcing that we’re no longer able to offer credits
that do not expire, and any unused credit added to your
account more than 12 months ago will expire.
I still have over $80 of credit left, expiring this month. I understand why they are doing this, but it left a bad taste because of the small values involved, retroactive action and lack of communication (I didn't get this March 2015 email or any reminders since).
This also creates a perverse incentive to burn the credits in a blaze of glory. I'm restraining myself, but I can only image the headache this will create across all users.
Hi! If you have never applied a promo code to your DigitalOcean account in the past, this code will still work for you. It's really just meant to give new users a chance to try out DO, and we've provided similar opportunities many times in the past.
Just to be clear, we are powering free CI runners for all GitLab.com users. In all honesty, the promo code was a bit of an afterthought.
"$10 credit on sign up" vs "$10 credit for all existing customers" is a significantly different story in terms of the cost to the business. This is offered as an incentive to start using the service, not to keep using it.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Existing customers are left in the dark, which is definitely not a great feeling as a paying user of DO.
My company paid for their instance of gitlab, I'm not a paying user though ( yet - too small), so this hasn't got anything to do with gitlab ( referencing the answer of gitlab themselves :) )
I think while understandable, it's a bit irrelevant. DO is either worth it at the price you pay, or not worth it. It's like when I buy something at the checkout and then the next week it's on sale at a discount. Either that item was worth it to me at the mark up (in which case I bought it) or it wasn't (in which case I would have passed). I think that's the same here. Sure, I'll feel "hey, I could have saved "X" and true, I could have, but I obviously found value at the price it was being offered.
Kind of off-topic, but the work GitLab is putting in and the things they come up with every other day is crazily impressive. We moved from Github to GitLab sometime ago and we believed that to be a trade-off for moving to our own infrastructure. It always seemed like GitLab wasn't "quite there". Today, however it is a whole different story. We pretty much cannot go back to Github at all because of how well-integrated, stable and beautiful this product is.
Seriously, we evaluated it, what, two months ago, and it was missing some features. I check now, and it has the missing features and then some. I wonder if we were just evaluating Community edition and it didn't have merge requests or something...
I am super impressed with Gitlab, though. I am moving projects there right now.
I have a question regarding the difference between the "concurrent" and "limit" parameters seen here [1].
I understand that if I'm running a managing runner in machine mode with limit=10 then it can start a maximum of 10 machines. What does "concurrent" affect in this context. I don't want the managing runner to do any builds locally -- just to send to runners managed by machine.
I love both GitLab and DigitalOcean, but why do I feel so devalued by IT deflation? The longer I'm part of something and the more effort I put into promoting a platform, the less perks I get. Why? I understand the importance of new customers, but why do you alienate the loyal user-base that made you what you are today? Are we rewarding ignorance now?
At GitLab we try to cherish our contributors. Every month we celebrate a most valuable contributor https://about.gitlab.com/mvp/
We try to ship great new features in our open source version every month that you can use for free on your server and on GitLab.com
EDIT I can't comment for DigitalOcean, what follows is my personal opinion.
I think it is great that DigitalOcean is willing to both sponsor the Runners for GitLab.com and offer promotion codes. Although I understand with your wish for promotion codes for existing customers I also understand their decision to only apply this to new customers in order to make this cost effective.
I hope that as an existing DigitalOcean customer you enjoy the benefits of their cost-effective servers, quick boot time, great UX, and the templates and tutorials that they keep updating.
You're getting free CI runners where you had none. Is that not enough benefit? It's not as if there is a scale where newbies get EVERYTHING and vets of 10+ years get nothing.
New? Here is a small incentive.
Not new? Thanks for using the product, check out these fresh features!
"GitLab Runners do not offer secure isolation between projects that they do builds for. You are TRUSTING all GitLab users who can push code to project A, B or C to run shell scripts on the machine hosting runner X."
Seems like a very strong reason to use one's own paid DigitalOcean instances for runners instead of using the free shared runners, at least for commercial projects. I was wondering if anyone from GitLab could expand further on this?
This warning is outdated for the shared runners on GitLab.com since we do not reuse runners there at all. All runners are destroyed after a since build. Please see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/14732 for more background and our effort to update this message.
Speaking on a more meta level here,this is an interesting phase of Product offerings.
We have a single giant whose products are used by the masses(Google/Uber/Github-in this sense) which had customer-focussed /domain-oriented paths but seem to have lost it midway, and then we have smaller/modular companies who are more focused to the domain improvement in itself (DDG,Lyft,Gitlab) who partner up with other specialised companies(Yandex/Didi Kaudi/DO) to remain customer-focussed /domain-oriented.
In the meantime the consumers get to choose between what the world chose and what could be a more sensible decision.
I use self-hosted gitlab as my primary CI and love it. Setting up CI runners is still too complicated (maybe because I use the gitlab docker image and there's no compose support). drone.io seems to have better support for deploying & cleaning up images, but I'm sure gitlab will get there.
More affordable than free? Not sure I get this. Is CI really so hard that we need to pay someone else to do this? I have a perfectly good server doing nothing and I installed TeamCity on that. Works great and is essentially free.
You're only paying for the server time, Gitlab CI is free. Many companies don't have nor want to have servers lying around, they'd rather outsource it.
As of today DO remains to be my experimental playground for testing new ideas, linode is my official site, it seems DO keeps its innovative momentum and I begin to wonder when or should I switch over fully, Gitlab adds one more point on DO side certainly.
Install `gitlab-ci-multi-runner` on your existing droplet and enjoy (relatively) free CI with high priority. GitLab already made it incredibly simple to setup.
Came here to post it, but too late! Good job @fweespee_ch!
The importance of this announcement is that DigitalOcean is all over Fortune 500, and GitLab partnership means that Git is not only mainstream - it's THE stream.
Do you have any reference for that? I was under the impression that DigitalOcean was mostly used by developers and startups. I was also under the impression that Git became the mainstream VCS a while ago...
[+] [-] spdustin|10 years ago|reply
Existing paying customers? Why would you spend money to acquire customers that you've already acquired. You had your reasons for signing up for DO, and apparently, the lack of a $10 credit wasn't one of them. And we all know this is a flimsy firewall to breech anyway - a different e-mail address that - if you're really feeling saucy - you could have delivered to an SMTP daemon on your existing droplet.
Promotions are by definition a form of publicity or advertisement, and if you're already a customer, you're already a customer, know what I mean? Why advertise "hey, check us out" if you've already checked them out and signed on the dotted line.
If you feel really, really, really burned by this, do what other cost-conscious consumers do, and whenever you see a box "promo code" on a signup form, Google "example.com promo code" (substituting the actual domain name, obviously) and see what you can find.
I do not understand, even a little bit, the amount of outrage over the fact that you want a company to spend advertising money (that's what a promotion is budgeted to) to advertise to an existing customer. Not unless you feel that DO isn't worth it already, that is, and in that case, what the hell is $10 going to do to change your mind?
[+] [-] spdustin|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] vertoc|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] choward|10 years ago|reply
There it is. People are pissed off that an ad is being disguised as normal Hacker News post.
[+] [-] true_religion|10 years ago|reply
I don't know about this, plenty of companies are continuously hassling me to expand my services in exchange for 1-2 month discounts, or offering trials on new services.
[+] [-] nathancahill|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j_mcnally|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phillc73|10 years ago|reply
This type of promotion really aggravates me. I'm not just saying this only about the announced GitLab/DigitialOcean partnership, but rather as a general comment as I see this customer acquisition ruse quite a lot elsewhere too.
I spend money with DigitalOcean. I don't feel particularly rewarded for my loyalty when I can't enjoy the same promotion as some new customer, who may never spend another cent with DO.
[+] [-] BoppreH|10 years ago|reply
This also creates a perverse incentive to burn the credits in a blaze of glory. I'm restraining myself, but I can only image the headache this will create across all users.
[+] [-] andrewsomething|10 years ago|reply
Just to be clear, we are powering free CI runners for all GitLab.com users. In all honesty, the promo code was a bit of an afterthought.
[+] [-] stanmancan|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oridecon|10 years ago|reply
http://pastebin.com/enmCYWbH
[+] [-] NicoJuicy|10 years ago|reply
My company paid for their instance of gitlab, I'm not a paying user though ( yet - too small), so this hasn't got anything to do with gitlab ( referencing the answer of gitlab themselves :) )
[+] [-] mc32|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jobvandervoort|10 years ago|reply
Here's our point of view: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11529780
[+] [-] rohanprabhu|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jobvandervoort|10 years ago|reply
Although we still have ways to go, we recently made large strides in terms of performance and UX. Two areas we know we were lacking in, in the past.
I'd love to hear what we can improve further.
[+] [-] StavrosK|10 years ago|reply
I am super impressed with Gitlab, though. I am moving projects there right now.
[+] [-] sytse|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sfilipov|10 years ago|reply
I understand that if I'm running a managing runner in machine mode with limit=10 then it can start a maximum of 10 machines. What does "concurrent" affect in this context. I don't want the managing runner to do any builds locally -- just to send to runners managed by machine.
[1] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci-multi-runner/blob/ma...
Edit:
Ignore me. I found the answer on the same page [2]:
[2] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ci-multi-runner/blob/ma...
[+] [-] abpavel|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sytse|10 years ago|reply
We try to ship great new features in our open source version every month that you can use for free on your server and on GitLab.com
EDIT I can't comment for DigitalOcean, what follows is my personal opinion.
I think it is great that DigitalOcean is willing to both sponsor the Runners for GitLab.com and offer promotion codes. Although I understand with your wish for promotion codes for existing customers I also understand their decision to only apply this to new customers in order to make this cost effective.
I hope that as an existing DigitalOcean customer you enjoy the benefits of their cost-effective servers, quick boot time, great UX, and the templates and tutorials that they keep updating.
[+] [-] unethical_ban|10 years ago|reply
New? Here is a small incentive.
Not new? Thanks for using the product, check out these fresh features!
[+] [-] toomuchtodo|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] explosion|10 years ago|reply
"GitLab Runners do not offer secure isolation between projects that they do builds for. You are TRUSTING all GitLab users who can push code to project A, B or C to run shell scripts on the machine hosting runner X."
Seems like a very strong reason to use one's own paid DigitalOcean instances for runners instead of using the free shared runners, at least for commercial projects. I was wondering if anyone from GitLab could expand further on this?
[+] [-] sytse|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mordocai|10 years ago|reply
It is possible that this issue is fixed with the new ones?
[+] [-] shade23|10 years ago|reply
We have a single giant whose products are used by the masses(Google/Uber/Github-in this sense) which had customer-focussed /domain-oriented paths but seem to have lost it midway, and then we have smaller/modular companies who are more focused to the domain improvement in itself (DDG,Lyft,Gitlab) who partner up with other specialised companies(Yandex/Didi Kaudi/DO) to remain customer-focussed /domain-oriented.
In the meantime the consumers get to choose between what the world chose and what could be a more sensible decision.
[+] [-] fweespee_ch|10 years ago|reply
Wow, I hope that doesn't get abused and taken away.
[+] [-] sytse|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sfilipov|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|10 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] kawsper|10 years ago|reply
Prior to this we were with CircleCI, and before that Travis CI.
[+] [-] sytse|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] awinter-py|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jobvandervoort|10 years ago|reply
We're working on making deploy [0] and working with Docker images [1] easier. That should also include cleanup in time.
I owe you a reply regarding Docker Compose support.
[0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/3286
[1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/634274
[+] [-] brokenwren|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] icebraining|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ausjke|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deckar01|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sytse|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] neom|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sytse|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] abpavel|10 years ago|reply
[+] [-] olalonde|10 years ago|reply
Do you have any reference for that? I was under the impression that DigitalOcean was mostly used by developers and startups. I was also under the impression that Git became the mainstream VCS a while ago...
[+] [-] fweespee_ch|10 years ago|reply
GitLab & Gogs are my two favorite Git collaboration platforms.