GitLab Changes its Pricing Plan; Drops Starter Tier

Feb. 9, 2021, 1:36 p.m.

TL;DR

Gitlab, the Cloud DevOps company, has dropped its Bronze/Starter tier giving users the choice to choose between the Premium Plan or downgrade to the free tier and lose out on some features.

Gitlab now offers three subscription plans- Free, Premium, and Ultimate

Key Facts

1
GitLab is doing away with its Bronze/Starter package priced at $4 per month. Users would need to either upgrade to the Premium tier priced at $19 per month or downgrade to the Free tier.
2
Existing GitLab customers who have up to 25 users would be able to renew their subscription at the current price of $4 for another year. They can also opt for a free upgrade to Premium along with a stage-wise discount at the next renewal: $6.00 on the first year, $9.00 on the second year, and $15.00 for the third year.
3
The free tier would still be available, and according to GitLab, the free tier contains 89% of all the features included in the Bronze/Starter package.
4
The decision to do away with the Bronze/Starter pack was taken as the $4 price was not enough to cover the infrastructure and support costs.
5
The now-discontinued Started package was for single team usage and included free features like requiring approvals on merge requests, pipeline code coverage rates, iterations, assigning multiple people to issues, iterations, assigning weights to issues, repository mirroring, code quality reports, code review analytics and more.

Details

GitLab founder and CEO Sid Sijbrandij said that the decision was a difficult one and accepted that it was a big change for those on the Bronze plan. To help with the transition, existing Bronze users would be able to renew their plan before 26th January 2022, for another year at the same price. They can also opt to move to the Premium tier at heavily discounted rates.

The Bronze plan is no longer available for new users.

GitLab now offers three subscription plans- Free, Premium, and Ultimate. It has also made name changes, and these plans would no longer be called Silver/Premium and Gold/Ultimate. Existing subscribers of the Silver and Gold tier need not expect any other change except the name change.

The Bronze/Starter tier does not meet the hurdle rate that GitLab expects from a tier and is limiting us from investing to improve GitLab for all customers.
Sid Sijbrandij
CEO and Co-founder of GitLab