I use a SaaS product and they only count users with 10 logins and changes per month as an actual user. This has let us “grow” infrequent users into frequent users.
I think having few barriers between internal user customers and dev is good. Making someone email their ticket in, or not letting someone watch an issue to see when it builds unless they pay $1000/year makes me find products with compatible license models.
A large number of our users on GitLab are Ops, Artists, Marketing or similar groups that can utilize GitLab a little (like leaving comments, or doing straight commits, no ci/cd/security/etc). $20/mo/user means some don't get access and the Ultimate plan at $100/mo/user? Oh hell no. No one would have access to GitLab except for maybe a dozen core devs.
Just to put it in perspective, your lowest non-free tier is 50% more expensive than the standard Office365 Business subscription... for which non-dev does this make any kind of sense?
The fact that you then proceed to launch the new prices regardless of having a solution for this obvious issue is to me a really strong indicator that GitLab is not the way to go once we're moving away from the self-hosted JIRA later this year.
We're an organisation that builds and runs products (mostly in the open but with occasional confidential issues). We are a silver member with about a dozen developers but 3x as non-developers who need to participate on issues.
Although most issues are open, there are occasionally confidential issues that staff need to be able to view and comment on. The entire annual seat license is required for every member, to work on only a handful of tickets. It's very poor value for money.
For the devs the license is reasonable value for money (we use CI, git, docker repos etc).
But for the majority of staff, and therefore the whole org, value for money is very bad. The GitLab pricing model gives us no option.
It's made it a more difficult sell in the organisation. Boasting about dev features leaves a bad taste in the mouth when only the minority of seat licenses actually need to use them.
This price hike in combination with the change of how they count users made it a 1100% price increase for us.
It went from having active devs in the organization being paid users to "anyone with guest access to a subproject" requiring a seat.
It also went from "you can have guests at no cost" to "you must pay seats for guest access".
And it wants payment on bot accounts as well, as they ALSO use a seat.
So, our organization went from 7 active users and 14 in the organization, to suddenly requiring 30+ seats. This includes us paying for people who are ONLY involved in the Open Source projects we have.
And then the price hike on top of that.
Let me just say it leaves a really bad taste in my mouth.
My department of 40 does the vast majority (90% plus of all commits/MRs) of the coding in the company, but we enrolled everyone within operations as well so that they could contribute on occasion.
The rest of those users are never going to be worth spending $19 a month on, but it really sucks having to put up barriers from people who do like to contribute on occasion. Feels like we're going in the wrong direction here, so much for devops :(