[erlkonig]

Gitlab has been cursed by a marketing team that seemingly just can't imagine having mixed licensing levels. At a side effect, organizations that would adopt them at the low (free) tier (or just above) for the whole company, a higher tier for devs, and max tier for project management, etc, just can't. Instead they have to have separate gitlabs to cover the whole organization, which has a whole set of associated annoyances.

I speak from direct experience, at a company that had the mid level, liked the features, but was forced to eventually jettison them for the free tier to cut costs while broadening internal support.

And we reported this problem to them, this basic lack of a mixed tier system, something many customers want. But Gitlab can't seem to get it through marketing's head that being nearly everywhere is better than just running for few large companies. Running everywhere means that many devs would just bring along an expectation of having gitlab as a matter of course, spreading adoption like a beneficial contagion. Instead, any useful level is being priced into irrelevance from a smaller organization's perspective, something many devs will see at prohibitively expensive, and be the fomites for that perspective instead as they move between companies.

The result is terrible. Our company switched to Git on Microsoft Azure. Good job, Gitlab sales (heavy sarcasm). Hey, Gitlab management, have you checked to make sure your sales team isn't secretly taking kickbacks from Microsoft? (yes, I'm probably kidding, right?)...