This seems... ambiguous, actually. I for one automatically took "free users" to mean free users of the CI/CD feature, not free users of GitLab. Meaning, the set of people who use > 0 CI/CD minutes. I'm actually surprised if that's not what they mean, given the entire point of the discussion is about how this affects users of the CI/CD feature. It's one thing to state things clearly and let the reader make incorrect inferences just due to natural assumptions, but writing the text itself ambiguously to induce that effect is a little different.

Hi, thanks for your feedback. We will consider making sure to clarify that going forward. Free users refers to users of the free tier of GitLab.

this isn’t a feedback loop for git

More importantly, it's not the same 1.5% each month. So if they're going to stay with with Gitlab, they'll need to switch over to paid, even if they're the 98.5% in other months.

That said, I'm not complaining about free.

Oh, that's even more devious if true! Although I'm not sure about this one, it might not be exactly the same 1.5% of users every month, but I'd guess most users CI/CD user stays relatively constant or increases at a gradual relatively constant rate, it doesn't jump up and down unstably month over month. I'd guess which users are in the 1.5% is relatively constant, right? Although you're right that the % of users in a given year that went over in any month must be somewhat more than 1.5%.

Man, I was expecting some sort of business/budget answer that I woudln't have insight into not being in this kind of business. I was not expecting straight up "misleading statistics, that number probably doesn't mean anything like it seems." :(

This is exactly it. 1.5% of users does not equal to 1.5% of CI/CD minutes. And such messaging isn't always dishonest. If you have 99 users using 100 minutes each and 1 user using 10 million minutes, setting the max limit to say 1000 is a net benefit for the system and its users, at the expense of the one outlier.

Yes, but in this case one user couldn't use 10 million minutes, they were already capped at 2000. Now they are capped at 400 instead. So that limits how extremely disproportionate the high percentile use could be. As I said, that 1.5% of users could have been using at most 1600 more minutes a month than the new max.

If the other 98.5% don't use any minutes, then it's an 80% reduction. That seems pretty good. We can't say more without real numbers though.

They can make infinite repos though!

Oh, that is devious if they meant 1.5% of all free users, not just 1.5% of users using CI at all. But I guess that does seem likely.

Great point.

And I guarantee you that they did the math to optimize for conversion and churn. Behind all product decisions are an army of analysts.

We certainly did the math. And a small percentage of the users generate a large percentage of the CI minutes. Hence the change.