If you switch to Ultimate, you have to pay the higher price tier for every seat on GitLab for security scanning. Even if you expand to 10 people, it still seems like a lesser expense than paying Ultimate for all your GitLab seats.

One of our biggest frustrations with GitLab was the per-seat pricing. For our initial three-year agreement, we negotiated two things. First, because we were early adopters of the Ultimate plan, we secured a reduced price. Second, we negotiated a reporter license for people who only needed access but weren't involved in development. These individuals didn't have access to the Git repositories, CI/CD, or the security scans with Ultimate. They were more like project managers, and we effectively didn't have to pay for their seats. We did pay, but we differentiated between full seats and reporter seats, which helped bring down the Ultimate price significantly in the first few years.

If you switch to Ultimate, you have to pay the higher price tier for every seat on GitLab for security scanning. Even if you expand to 10 people, it still seems like a lesser expense than paying Ultimate for all your GitLab seats.

By the renewal time, probably in 2022, I was no longer interested in that arrangement. We negotiated a price close to the list price of Ultimate at that time. There was tension within BI WORLDWIDE about whether it was worth it. For teams using it as a Git repo and security scanner, it didn't seem worth it. However, the team I was on, which was building the flagship product of BI, used every feature of GitLab. We had security scanning, our roadmap, deployments to Kubernetes clusters, alerting, and incident management all integrated. For us, even the Ultimate price felt like a steal.