Just saw that gitlab now offers free hosting, you only pay for support (only if you want it). Do enough people really pay for support in order to keep gitlab from going under? Free software is one thing, but free hosting? It just blows my mind how they can offer such a thing.
Hosting basically boils down to the fact that ~98% of your users will use a small portion of your resources. This is why hundreds - even thousands - of users are shoved onto a single shared server (all without ever having a problem). Considering disk and bandwidth is cheap - it's really inexpensive to host users. 2% of your users will attempt to use 50% or more of your resources - and those are the ones that you kick to the curb or arrange some sort of payment.
I used to do free web hosting and now have switch to just free source code hosting.
A perfect example of this is this story [1]. I'm sure a good 90% of people who sign up for the free slack service only use a small blip of usage.
It gives us the possibility to run GitLab on a very large scale. This helps us finding performance and scaling issues that otherwise would go unseen. In short, it allows us to make GitLab even better.
If this is really the case and your business model is aligned with this, there's nothing else to say, except "Congratulations!".
I didn't know that this can go so well for end-users in such a competitive environment. I hope I hear more arguments like these from other tech companies.
How do you call this model? I guess freemium doesn't match with how you make the benefit out of the website.
I guess it is freemium because most larger organizations at some point want to go on-premises (for security, legal, flexibility or other reasons) and opt for GitLab EE at that point.
You might wanna check out the twitter feed before jumping into their free hosting. Looks like they have had a lot of issues with connectivity/stability over the last few weeks at least.
Lots of places do it. Disk space relative to code size is extraordinarily cheap. Just look at the granddaddy, GMail. Google gave away 1 GB per user back in 2004 because they figured the ads would support it.
