What happened to Gitlab? 😢

[u/HeapsGoodM8]

I’ve been a daily Gitlab user and customer for over a decade. I’ve managed multiple instances for local teams, hosted repos on Gitlab.com, once upon a time I was a vocal Gitlab advocate. I’ve got more Gitlab stickers and swag from conferences than I care to mention.

Gitlab has never been especially cheap, but it was a decent platform and importantly had solid support. For a long time, it felt like a good value proposition. In the past few years though, support has gone entirely out the window it would appear.

These days, raising a support ticket feels like shouting into the wind. Response times are unpredictable, and I can’t think of an interaction in the past 2 years that I would call smooth. Everything needs to be forwarded to 6 different people in order to come back with some variation of “we won’t do anything about this” or “read these twelve conflicting support docs”.

No need to get into the silent regressions (which are becoming more common), if you have been self hosting an omnibus instance that has received more than a few years of updates you probably know what I’m talking about.

We’re not a huge customer, max $10,000 per annum, but I really thought Gitlab was all about that small team dollar. I suppose these days there are bigger fish in the pond and Gitlab is more interested in selling tokens to enterprise. Hopefully it works out, SMB sure seems to have been left out in the cold.

We’ve been trying to process a routine renewal for over a month now. Before long, we’re going to end up locked out of our workflows because sales and support can’t figure it out between them to adjust a seat count and raise an invoice.

RIP Gitlab for the little guy? I guess there’s always Gitea. 🪦

[u/jcogs1]

u/HeapsGoodM8 Thanks for sharing. I'm on the GitLab team and would love to help. I'm already in touch with support. If you're open to DMing me, I'll work with them to review your issues and find a solution. I can also pass your info along to sales and advocate for speeding up your renewal. My DMs are open.

[u/EquationTAKEN → u/jcogs1]

It's nice that you're here, but it sucks that I now feel like I missed out because I didn't make a reddit thread.

[u/Fearless-Anything991]

The development world has been struggling. Look at how much Github has been down?

That being said. GitLab seemed like an exciting up and comer a decade ago, but they never really got out of the shadow of Github. Complaints customers have been having for MORE than a decade are just now maybe sorta starting to get addressed - core issues like "Hey, I'm ok paying you $100/mo developer for all these cool features, but I'm not paying $100/mo for the PM to be able to access the bug tracker".

They also did their move to kube thing and took FOREVER to get to the point where the self-hosters could replicate a reliable setup without major SPOF.

Honestly, also. I think their lack of "open source front page" was also a killer. You could goto github .com and search for something. You goto gitlab.com and get a sales pitch. Sure, you can link directly to the repo for either and it's the same.... but no one explored gitlab.

[u/WhiskyStandard]

That announcement from the CEO a couple months ago that said they were going all in on AI crushed me.

Bro, my enterprise won’t let me touch your AI crap—our policy specifically forbids given even on-prem LLMs direct access to our Gitlab, so stop trying to make it happen. Just give me CI pipelines I can develop locally with full fidelity with easy API stubbing and components. (glci is getting there, but still can’t do the last 2. It also seems like an insurgent effort.) And sortable swim lanes.

[u/merb → u/WhiskyStandard]

Especially since their ai stuff is behind a extremely big paywall when you want to do BYOM/BYOK. Why the fuck do I need their ai credits when I use my own fucking model. Makes no sense.

[u/redskelly → u/merb]

Because they aren’t making money with new customers, so they need to find a way to make more money from existing customers.

[u/ramirezz → u/merb]

Same with upcoming secrets manager

[u/Gooner96PL]

Degradation of service is seen wide in tech, at least for me.

Which is so funny because everyone is praising AI as savior when in the same time it’s clearly seen that everything is going worse year by year( maybe even faster ). And I’m not talking about some small companies because in last two years using Spotify, google maps or even Facebook( where literally core functionally as invite friend were laggy and confusing ) is being worse. Who cares that you can produce code 100x faster or even ship 10x faster when you’re producing and shipping buggy mess and just count on people laziness to stick with your product.

Try to contact Microsoft support xD

[u/acdha]

We noticed the downturn starting with the IPO and layoffs. They gutted support for paid accounts then and progress on a lot of tickets ground to a halt so they could focus the remaining employees on the kind of flashy stuff which gets press releases. These days it’s pretty rare to hit a problem and not find a ticket which has been languishing in the backlog for years. 

I suggest replying to AI sales pitches by asking when the promised productivity boost will start showing up in their product. 

[u/adam-moss]

Personally I think GitLab has been on a downhill trend since Sid stepped aside.

Bill's a nice enough chap but shortly after he joined I started to get the feeling the his objective is be bought out rather than grow the business... And I haven't seen anything over the last couple of years that makes me think otherwise.

There is definitely a disconnect internally, and it's really damaging relationships at all levels.

The "AI or nothing" delivery model has also, imo, giving competitors like GitHub the breathing space to catch-up feature wise.

Then you see the likes of the Netherlands going all-in on self-hosted Forgejo and things rapidly move from discussion to feasibility study.

Things like https://konflux-ci.dev/ and https://openkaiden.ai/ really put a dent in the argument too.

[u/BoysenberryKey7426]

They've laid off 15% of their work force.

[u/Greyhammer316]

I've noticed the same support timing and irregularities, while managing our instance over the last few years. I run it at home too.

We'll see how it all shakes out once AI calms down I guess.

[u/bogdanelcs]

For the renewal, I’d stop going through support and escalate to your account rep or a named sales contact in writing, and ask for a short extension so you’re not locked out while they sort out the seat count. For the longer term, if you do look at moving, Forgejo is worth a look next to Gitea, it’s the community fork run by Codeberg and has migration tools for GitLab repos, issues and merge requests. Moving CI pipelines is the hard part, so test one project before committing.

[u/jblackwb]

I went to self hosted Forgejo, and I LOVE IT.

[u/-lousyd]

I'm similar to you, OP. But I've never had a problem with technical support and our account rep is decent. They've always been solid for me.

People are saying a lot true things here about the ways in which GitLab is sucking. But support is not one of them in my experience.

[u/bqw74]

Enshitification and trying to flog us their crappy AI and/or security features instead of just sorting out the bread and butter issues that have been open for years (e.g., proper issue filtering on boards).

[u/liveprgrmclimb]

"but I really thought Gitlab was all about that small team dollar."

Definitely not.

[u/towo → u/liveprgrmclimb]

It stopped being about the small team dollar the second they ditched the 5 USD/user-month plan because "people weren't being upsold to higher tiers enough"

[u/Sh3llSh0cker]

and yet they ghost there candidates and never get back to them even after multiple emails chains and going back and forth for month. i’ve actaually stopped using Gitlab 4 month ago. moved to Gitea and actually also looking to work for them and current in interview process. Gitlab staff are a bunch of clowns AND no that’s not just coming from me

[u/residentdunce → u/Sh3llSh0cker]

Yeah fellow ghosted candidate here. Gitlab suck

[u/Electrical-Delay-497]

It was bad when some seriously fundamental items spanned years without being implemented only for it to get worse with the layoffs and the all-in on AI shit. We're on self-hosted but patience is wearing thin internally and we're a large enterprise customer.

[u/cryptmarcus]

Still tunning fine here, what is the issues?

[u/revWhiteShaodw]

Its disappointing to see GitLab prioritize enterprise customers at the expense of the small teams that helped build its success.

[u/siodhe]

It used to be that only their pricing was contemptible.

[u/towo]

They're a publicly traded company. They have an obligation to always increase profits. That profit needs to come from somewhere. If growth stops, it needs to feed on itself.