I have a (perhaps) more incendiary take on this kind of thing. I have no problem with promo codes for new customers. Zero. None. As a business owner, I know damn well there are some products or services that need a little "taster" offered to a potential customer to get them even modestly interested.
Existing paying customers? Why would you spend money to acquire customers that you've already acquired. You had your reasons for signing up for DO, and apparently, the lack of a $10 credit wasn't one of them. And we all know this is a flimsy firewall to breech anyway - a different e-mail address that - if you're really feeling saucy - you could have delivered to an SMTP daemon on your existing droplet.
Promotions are by definition a form of publicity or advertisement, and if you're already a customer, you're already a customer, know what I mean? Why advertise "hey, check us out" if you've already checked them out and signed on the dotted line.
If you feel really, really, really burned by this, do what other cost-conscious consumers do, and whenever you see a box "promo code" on a signup form, Google "example.com promo code" (substituting the actual domain name, obviously) and see what you can find.
I do not understand, even a little bit, the amount of outrage over the fact that you want a company to spend advertising money (that's what a promotion is budgeted to) to advertise to an existing customer. Not unless you feel that DO isn't worth it already, that is, and in that case, what the hell is $10 going to do to change your mind?
FYI, the above response was related to the below comments about existing DO customers getting screwed out of a $10 promotion, one that wasn't even featured prominently on the Gitlab site. I wanted to show my support for DO and Gitlab here, and thought it best to do so as a new top level comment. I honestly didn't consider that my comment would end up above the others.
i love DO and I have just started using gitlab. they're both great. it even makes sense to offer existing customers a credit in this industry because with redundancy and just private/personal deployments ect people often have accounts at DO, AWS, Azure and Google, maybe even rackspace or an IaaS provider like heroku or engineyard.
I know your comment was in favor of DO, and mine is as well in a dif light. Winning a primary customer or "engagement" is big.
Digital Ocean retired a bunch of credit I had. I emailed support and asked for ot back amd they gave it to me. Sort of a hassle, but you know what? Digital Ocean is going against the biggest providers and provides simplicity and community and I love them for it.
They help new devs learn. They're acquisition strategy was hiring a content creator as a 1st hire to write tutorials and build a community.
Another credit and better integration reminds customers why they stay with them (and gitlabs why they are a great offering).
I like gitlabs and digital ocean. As an intermediate dev, it is a perfect ecosystem. I jave heard there are some security or package issues, but for me, I can get what I need done.
Simple API.
Simple Pricing.
Amazing Support.
Great Community.
So i use them. They're credits keep me saying great things about them because I rarely have money so this goes an extra bit.
Its prob worth $10 to them that I tell every beginner to use DO and regularly tweet thanks to then
I'm a little confused... you say "I have no problem with promo codes for new customers. Zero. None." but that's exactly what they are doing... the $10 credit is only for new customers to DO
Everything announced by a company on their website, every feature list, every display video, every write up by the press, every review, is promotional activity. Anyone that is pissed at this particular instance because it's disguised as "normal" when it's actually dirty "marketing" should have a good hard think about how they believe the incentives behind information sharing work.
> Existing paying customers? Why would you spend money to acquire customers that you've already acquired.
I don't know about this, plenty of companies are continuously hassling me to expand my services in exchange for 1-2 month discounts, or offering trials on new services.
SMTP does both the sending and receiving for the server side. Email clients only use SMTP for sending, though, which is probably why you were confused.
> *Note: Promotion code available for new DigitalOcean customers only.
This type of promotion really aggravates me. I'm not just saying this only about the announced GitLab/DigitialOcean partnership, but rather as a general comment as I see this customer acquisition ruse quite a lot elsewhere too.
I spend money with DigitalOcean. I don't feel particularly rewarded for my loyalty when I can't enjoy the same promotion as some new customer, who may never spend another cent with DO.
Two years ago the GitHub Student Developer Pack gave me $100, which I have been using to maintain a tiny droplet (literally changed my life, thank you). Last month Digital Ocean sent me this message:
We’re truly sorry if this came as a surprise.
As of March 2015, we revised our Terms of Service
announcing that we’re no longer able to offer credits
that do not expire, and any unused credit added to your
account more than 12 months ago will expire.
I still have over $80 of credit left, expiring this month. I understand why they are doing this, but it left a bad taste because of the small values involved, retroactive action and lack of communication (I didn't get this March 2015 email or any reminders since).
This also creates a perverse incentive to burn the credits in a blaze of glory. I'm restraining myself, but I can only image the headache this will create across all users.
If people are looking for a way to use up credit and want to support something useful, run an Archiveteam Warrior. Helps to archive (soon-to-be) dead websites and and isn't too resource-intensive on the provider.
What does archiveteam do differently than The Internet Archive? It wasn't clear to me reading their about page, as well as some odd main projects with IRC channels being a main goal.
They try to do complete crawls of sites (mostly of user-generated content) that are known to go offline soon or at high risk of doing so, vs the Internet Archive crawler which as far as I know crawls everything every now and then.
If a siteowner is willing to hand over a data export to archive.org or another archival site they don't have to do that, but not many do.
I got the mail in early april, and it, in fact, even violates German law (promotional coupons and promotional credit, if not otherwise specified, is valid for 3 years, and can not be revoked via ToS changes).
But I do not wish to sue, as it would just cause me a lot of trouble, and I’d rather spend the money on a hoster I can actually trust. Instead of a hoster violating laws and frauding customers out of their legal credit.
I tried, they told me I’d have to sue, as they couldn’t easily determine if the law would apply to them just by Googling.
Worst of all, I had to pay 5€ actual money to activate the 100€ of promotional credit.
I made a purchase, which contained at the moment that I'd get 100€ of promotional credit for an unspecified time (therefore 3 years), and instead I wasted 5€ on nothing.
EDIT: I should probably just to a chargeback via PayPal.
If they have German customers, they are bound to German laws because they are doing business in Germany. Sure it will not apply to American DO customers, but if they to have German customers, they are bound by their local laws and those laws apply to protect citizens of that nation.
>If they have German customers, they are bound to German laws because they are doing business in Germany.
that is simply not true... Now for DO it might be because they have EU possibly even German Data centers but simply because a Citizen of Germany visits a web site and signs up for a online service does not automatically make german laws apply to that business.
Now it possible you could sue in Germany, the American business would ignore you, and any judgment you got from a German Court would likely be unenforceable in the US
> DO it might be because they have EU possibly even German Data centers but simply because a Citizen of Germany visits a web site and signs up for a online service does not automatically make german laws apply to that business.
Are you saying this because you are extrapolating from American law regarding whether a company has a 'nexus' within a given state, or perhaps thinking about taxation?
In those specific cases, what you are saying is true, but in general national-level governments do not care that foreign companies are not actually headquartered within their borders. They demand (arrogantly one might say) that all companies doing business with their citizens follow X,Y,Z rules or else they'll try to sanction the company.
Granted if a company is truly foreign then any sanction would be pretty limited in scope.
However, easy sanction is to stop credit card processors and banking agencies from dealing with a foreign company thus stopping your citizens from easily giving them money.
I am not extrapolating from American tax law at all
I as an American citizen am in no way bound by German law
For example If I put a website selling digital Nazi Merchandise, and a german citizen buys it, I am in no way violating the German ban on those things because I am not bound by german law, any attempt to enforce germen law upon me would quickly be squashed by American Courts as a violation of my free speech
Now Germany can forbid it citzens from going to my site, it can attempt to have that site blocked from Germany, it can even prevent other german businesses from doing being with me (including credit card company as your example) but it can never compel me directly as I am not under their authority at all
They could just instruct banks to sending payments to DO. I don't think DO would want to lose all German start ups and customers because of a few stupid coupons.
Germany probably could not stop people from visiting their website, but stop payments would be just as worse for DO.
They have data centers in Germany, ran ads in Germany, did business with German banks, and so on.
Yes, I’m pretty sure if they interact with a German customer, they are bound by German laws.
Would be a shame if their data centers were seized if they wouldn’t comply...
(I’m not sure if German courts use this technique, but it’s commonly used by US courts to force German companies to adhere to US laws, like in the many "Germans can’t sell Cuban cigarettes to Danes in Germany due to US embargo of Cuba" cases, so precedent exists.)
> Would be a shame if their data centers were seized if they wouldn’t comply...
> (I’m not sure if German courts use this technique, but it’s commonly used by US courts to force German companies to adhere to US laws, like in the many "Germans can’t sell Cuban cigarettes to Danes in Germany due to US embargo of Cuba" cases, so precedent exists.)
Could happen, but not easily. If they got sued, lost and had to pay, ignored that as well, then a gerichtsvollzieher would try to force giving over existing assets. In the most extreme cases that would include a data center, it happened for example that they tired to size an airplane when an airline did not pay a (comparably small) fee.
Of course it won't happen as no one will sue (I could've, but had way too small an amount in credits and asked for a prolongation of the deadline instead), and I'm sure DO would react in such a case.
Still: To have promotional credits run out after some time is not customer friendly, and this discussion shows that the dollars they save pales in comparison to the amount of goodwill and thus business they lose. I told them so.
I won't sue either, but as I had to pay actual money to be able to use the promotional key — and now lost the ability to use it — I'll do a chargeback via PayPal.
I thought about going to the Verbraucherzentrale, I mean, it's their job to do this.
Prolongation of the deadline wouldn't help me much either, though, because I'd need at least half a year — which they definitely won't give me, I've already asked.
And I was actually planning to switch a new hoster with my servers this month. Won't be DO now.
> Prolongation of the deadline wouldn't help me much either, though, because I'd need at least half a year — which they definitely won't give me, I've already asked.
I am now going through PayPal’s resolution center, asking for the 2 extra years I was promised, or a refund.
(As I don’t have a credit card I had to pay the 5€ activation fee through PayPal)
EDIT: I also sent a message to GitHub’s student contact mail, warning them that they might be on the hook for promising free $100 DO credit for unlimited time, and they might want to ask DO to fix it, or change their advertisement.
Yeah, but I don't have the use for 8VMs. Give me notice and I will try to use it up. But don't give me a month, I can't effectively use that in time. I can waste it, sure. But that's not the point of the credit in the first place.
I received this email as well and a friend recommended I donate the server uptime to boinc[1] which can make better use of it than trying to find something to use it on.
Hi! If you have never applied a promo code to your DigitalOcean account in the past, this code will still work for you. It's really just meant to give new users a chance to try out DO, and we've provided similar opportunities many times in the past.
Just to be clear, we are powering free CI runners for all GitLab.com users. In all honesty, the promo code was a bit of an afterthought.
The solution to me is to not provide free credit, but to credit the creation of a new droplet for existing users. Many will scale up and not scale back down. If im on the edge if i need to throw another droplet behind the loadbalancer and your like DO IT, you've been a great customer so we'll give you a month free for the new capacity, am i going to risk removing it.... not if my product is doing well. its a WIN WIN. an offer like this would be awesome to roll out to loyal customers with semi-produciton work loads (2-4) medium+ droplets already. It solves the problem of incentivizing loyal exisiting customers, along with driving business needs of not burning money without a return. Also HMU if your looking for a SVP of Product or something like that, I clearly have some good ideas for you.
This is an awesome thing to do, and I think if people knew that was the case they wouldn't be upset by not being able to use another promo. I started using DO with a $10 credit years ago, and still love the service. Thanks guys!
Hi! I think when people use openings like that in comments, emails, etc., it comes off as pretentious because you are in fact not excited to talk to me and are doing so out of pure necessity.
"$10 credit on sign up" vs "$10 credit for all existing customers" is a significantly different story in terms of the cost to the business. This is offered as an incentive to start using the service, not to keep using it.
Yeah, I know what you mean. Existing customers are left in the dark, which is definitely not a great feeling as a paying user of DO.
My company paid for their instance of gitlab, I'm not a paying user though ( yet - too small), so this hasn't got anything to do with gitlab ( referencing the answer of gitlab themselves :) )
> Yeah, I know what you mean. Existing customers are left in the dark, which is definitely not a great feeling as a paying user of DO.
You get the (new) additional services being provided in part by DO. You're literally NOT in the dark. As an analogy my parents have a house alarm system. It was installed 5+ years ago and they pay a monthly fee. You can bet that the newer television ads for this nationwide company (cough ADT *cough) show WiFi enabled controls and whizbang stuff on the master panel -- their alarm master panel is the same panel for the last 5+ years and has never been touched by a technician.
I can give the same example for my Comcast cable box. It's the box I got when i got the initial subscription. Typically promo codes are for new customers, OR new promotional offers wherein you'll migrate your whole account to a new tier of service.
They aren't going to hand you $10 to simply continue to use their (updated) service for them. While you benefit from the new services anyways.
I think while understandable, it's a bit irrelevant. DO is either worth it at the price you pay, or not worth it. It's like when I buy something at the checkout and then the next week it's on sale at a discount. Either that item was worth it to me at the mark up (in which case I bought it) or it wasn't (in which case I would have passed). I think that's the same here. Sure, I'll feel "hey, I could have saved "X" and true, I could have, but I obviously found value at the price it was being offered.
Sorry that's a cop out. The complaint is that promo codes for a brand new, very useful integration are limited to people who statistically are less likely to use them (new users on a new platform). "We hope you continue to enjoy paying for great boot times and UX" is... not a reply worth typing, honestly.
I'm a small DigitalOcean customer. If you want the promo to be cost effective, limit it to the first 250 users or whatever. I don't think anybody here would give you a hard time about protecting the financial integrity of a program. But don't hide behind that if it's really just a way to get a few new users in the door (which is fine!) - just be honest about it.
The terms if the coupons are set by DigitalOcean and not GitLab. But as GitLab CEO I understand that they have these terms in order to make it cost effective for them. We'll certainly mention the feedback that existing customers would also like to enjoy the same coupons.
This does not sound like point of view, just a generic, corporate style message that does not address the issue in any way.
Rewarding only new customers is mobile phone operators style bite that decreases value of the brand and product. In this situation hosting company knows its not easy to move the servers to different host (at most cases) and uses that as an advantage to milk the customers more.
If they ever would actually release promo on their anniversary or something and give $5 to all registered members, they would get more good press than they could have ever dream of.
Kind of off-topic, but the work GitLab is putting in and the things they come up with every other day is crazily impressive. We moved from Github to GitLab sometime ago and we believed that to be a trade-off for moving to our own infrastructure. It always seemed like GitLab wasn't "quite there". Today, however it is a whole different story. We pretty much cannot go back to Github at all because of how well-integrated, stable and beautiful this product is.
This is super nice. After the "Dear Github" letter I moved to gitlab and have not looked back. Its great to see this project grow in a manner that respect the community that adopts it.
Just my 2 cents, but how gitlab has constantly improved over all other features, I would really love to see issues get the same treatment. The current issues system is simple, easy to use and works fine but we really didn't find it to be scalable when moving to bigger teams. Labels as a primitive method of categorization is fine, but it very soon becomes unmanageable. Getting to a feature set like JIRA is too much to ask I guess, but a middle ground would really help keep everything in gitlab.
Stability, it's made leaps and bounds in the last 9 months, but every time you push a new feature make sure it "just works" and doesn't break other things. Thanks!
Good to hear we got more stable of the last 9 months. I'm excited about the upcoming release (the 22nd as usual) that will have many UX improvements and bugfixes. We try to ship new features fast and quickly fix issues that arise. But we're not happy with our testing of core functionality. So today I discussed writing more end-to-end tests as proposed by our new VP of Product, Stan Hu.
Seriously, we evaluated it, what, two months ago, and it was missing some features. I check now, and it has the missing features and then some. I wonder if we were just evaluating Community edition and it didn't have merge requests or something...
I am super impressed with Gitlab, though. I am moving projects there right now.
The Community Edition also has merge requests and all the major and essential features. For the feature differences please see https://about.gitlab.com/features/#compare
I have a question regarding the difference between the "concurrent" and "limit" parameters seen here [1].
I understand that if I'm running a managing runner in machine mode with limit=10 then it can start a maximum of 10 machines. What does "concurrent" affect in this context. I don't want the managing runner to do any builds locally -- just to send to runners managed by machine.
I love both GitLab and DigitalOcean, but why do I feel so devalued by IT deflation? The longer I'm part of something and the more effort I put into promoting a platform, the less perks I get. Why? I understand the importance of new customers, but why do you alienate the loyal user-base that made you what you are today? Are we rewarding ignorance now?
At GitLab we try to cherish our contributors. Every month we celebrate a most valuable contributor https://about.gitlab.com/mvp/
We try to ship great new features in our open source version every month that you can use for free on your server and on GitLab.com
EDIT I can't comment for DigitalOcean, what follows is my personal opinion.
I think it is great that DigitalOcean is willing to both sponsor the Runners for GitLab.com and offer promotion codes. Although I understand with your wish for promotion codes for existing customers I also understand their decision to only apply this to new customers in order to make this cost effective.
I hope that as an existing DigitalOcean customer you enjoy the benefits of their cost-effective servers, quick boot time, great UX, and the templates and tutorials that they keep updating.
You're getting free CI runners where you had none. Is that not enough benefit? It's not as if there is a scale where newbies get EVERYTHING and vets of 10+ years get nothing.
New? Here is a small incentive.
Not new? Thanks for using the product, check out these fresh features!
Eat what? Other people? Not sure what you're getting at, because I'm paying my membership dues, and I'm quite sure you're not living on less than $1/day either.
"GitLab Runners do not offer secure isolation between projects that they do builds for. You are TRUSTING all GitLab users who can push code to project A, B or C to run shell scripts on the machine hosting runner X."
Seems like a very strong reason to use one's own paid DigitalOcean instances for runners instead of using the free shared runners, at least for commercial projects. I was wondering if anyone from GitLab could expand further on this?
This warning is outdated for the shared runners on GitLab.com since we do not reuse runners there at all. All runners are destroyed after a since build. Please see https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ce/issues/14732 for more background and our effort to update this message.
You're correct, we fixed this issue, the new warning will be: "Shared runners execute code of different projects on the same Runner unless you configure GitLab Runner Autoscale with MaxBuilds 1 (which it is on GitLab.com)."
Speaking on a more meta level here,this is an interesting phase of Product offerings.
We have a single giant whose products are used by the masses(Google/Uber/Github-in this sense) which had customer-focussed /domain-oriented paths but seem to have lost it midway, and then we have smaller/modular companies who are more focused to the domain improvement in itself (DDG,Lyft,Gitlab) who partner up with other specialised companies(Yandex/Didi Kaudi/DO) to remain customer-focussed /domain-oriented.
In the meantime the consumers get to choose between what the world chose and what could be a more sensible decision.
Good suggestion, if this gets abused we'll look at ways to prevent this, limiting the number of runner hours per user account is one of the ways we're thinking about.
> If you purchase GitLab.com Bronze Support you can email support directly for timely, personal and private answers. This costs $9.99 per user per year for next-business-day response time and is available in packs of 20 users.
Reducing the pack size to 10 and improving the rate limit for paid accounts?
I don't mind paying for GitLab.com, I just don't want to pay $200/year for it. ;)
In case we start rate limiting it makes sense to me to offer a smaller user pack than 20. I'm not sure if it will be part of the bronze pack or a separate offering. I'm also not sure about the price, it might have to be based on activity (pay per hour) or a price higher than $200 per year. For now we'll first wait how the situation develops and what will cause the biggest problems.
One possible business model is charging for speciality machines with OSX or Windows on them.
BuildKite is really nice, they also support pipelining and are acting as glue between CI and Github.
I can't answer your question about GitLab since I haven't used your product. A plus for us was also that they are willing to support Gogs if we need it.
I use self-hosted gitlab as my primary CI and love it. Setting up CI runners is still too complicated (maybe because I use the gitlab docker image and there's no compose support). drone.io seems to have better support for deploying & cleaning up images, but I'm sure gitlab will get there.
I'm sure you hear this a lot, but thanks & keep up the good work. I'm grateful for all the great open source tools I use, but you guys are in the upper echelon for making consistent forward strides without breaking too much.
More affordable than free? Not sure I get this. Is CI really so hard that we need to pay someone else to do this? I have a perfectly good server doing nothing and I installed TeamCity on that. Works great and is essentially free.
You're only paying for the server time, Gitlab CI is free. Many companies don't have nor want to have servers lying around, they'd rather outsource it.
As of today DO remains to be my experimental playground for testing new ideas, linode is my official site, it seems DO keeps its innovative momentum and I begin to wonder when or should I switch over fully, Gitlab adds one more point on DO side certainly.
Install `gitlab-ci-multi-runner` on your existing droplet and enjoy (relatively) free CI with high priority. GitLab already made it incredibly simple to setup.
Came here to post it, but too late! Good job @fweespee_ch!
The importance of this announcement is that DigitalOcean is all over Fortune 500, and GitLab partnership means that Git is not only mainstream - it's THE stream.
Do you have any reference for that? I was under the impression that DigitalOcean was mostly used by developers and startups. I was also under the impression that Git became the mainstream VCS a while ago...
What do you mean by "reference"? I was talking about corporate environment of dozens or so F500 where I participated in various projects personally, and saw myriads of archaic in-house development tools that would embarrass even prehistoric. DO was used in a couple of cases, not too widespread, but I had a feel it's one of the places it could really make a difference. And introducing Git to that would just make the whole deal so much better.
Consider that an average Global 2000 enterprise has over 10,000 in-house apps, and a lot of them are being developed in a dedicated environment.
I have not yet worked for a fortune 2000 enterprise that would allow a VPS to be used that did not offer actual private networking. Which ones have you seen that used DO?
Existing paying customers? Why would you spend money to acquire customers that you've already acquired. You had your reasons for signing up for DO, and apparently, the lack of a $10 credit wasn't one of them. And we all know this is a flimsy firewall to breech anyway - a different e-mail address that - if you're really feeling saucy - you could have delivered to an SMTP daemon on your existing droplet.
Promotions are by definition a form of publicity or advertisement, and if you're already a customer, you're already a customer, know what I mean? Why advertise "hey, check us out" if you've already checked them out and signed on the dotted line.
If you feel really, really, really burned by this, do what other cost-conscious consumers do, and whenever you see a box "promo code" on a signup form, Google "example.com promo code" (substituting the actual domain name, obviously) and see what you can find.
I do not understand, even a little bit, the amount of outrage over the fact that you want a company to spend advertising money (that's what a promotion is budgeted to) to advertise to an existing customer. Not unless you feel that DO isn't worth it already, that is, and in that case, what the hell is $10 going to do to change your mind?