SC

Strategy Canon

GitLab: sourced choices

42 product and go-to-market choices, oldest first. Back to the case study

  1. 2011Product · Self-hosted open source Dmitriy Zaporozhets and Valery Sizov started GitLab as open source software a team could run on its own server. GL3
  2. 2012Product · Hosted trial Sid Sijbrandij started GitLab.com so people could try GitLab without installing it first. GL44
  3. 2013-09Product · Enterprise Edition GitLab sold an Enterprise Edition adding features such as LDAP group support on top of the free edition. GL19
  4. 2013-09Go_To_Market · Early income Before the Enterprise Edition, GitLab lived on donations and consulting assignments. GL19
  5. 2013-09Go_To_Market · Per-user price The Enterprise Edition cost $2 a user a month. GL19
  6. 2013-09Go_To_Market · Early payers Three Fortune 100 companies paid for the Enterprise Edition; about 25,000 organizations used GitLab. GL19
  7. 2014Go_To_Market · Declined sale The two founders turned down a $10 million offer for the company before raising outside money. GL44
  8. 2014-10-08Go_To_Market · Open core GitLab described an open-core model, earning revenue from Enterprise Edition subscriptions, with more than 100,000 organizations using GitLab and seven employees. GL4
  9. 2015Go_To_Market · Y Combinator GitLab joined Y Combinator's Winter 2015 batch and raised $1.5 million of seed funding. GL5
  10. 2015-03-03Product · Gitorious import After buying Gitorious, GitLab added an import path from Gitorious.org and kept the site up until May 31, 2015. GL22
  11. 2015-07-01Go_To_Market · US incorporation GitLab incorporated in the US because most customers were in North America and a Dutch company was an obstacle for some. GL37
  12. 2015-09Product · CI merged GitLab merged its separate CI product into GitLab itself, on engineer Kamil Trzcinski's proposal, over the founders' initial objections. GL15
  13. 2015-09-17Product · GitLab 8.0 GitLab 8.0 was scheduled for September 22, 2015 with built-in continuous integration. GL41
  14. 2015-09-17Go_To_Market · Series A Khosla Ventures led a $4 million Series A to scale development, marketing and sales; on-premises users included NASA, CERN, Alibaba and IBM. GL41
  15. 2016-09-13Product · Master plan GitLab set out to put issues, wikis, code review, continuous integration and deployment into a single interface. GL23
  16. 2016-09-14Product · Free hosted service GitLab.com gave away every Enterprise Edition feature, private repositories, unlimited collaborators and CI runners at no charge. GL45
  17. 2017-06-29Product · Auto DevOps GitLab positioned its CI as a next-generation system and announced Auto DevOps. GL24
  18. 2018-01Product · Security scanning GitLab acquired Gemnasium to add dependency security scanning. GL5
  19. 2018-06Go_To_Market · Migration offer After Microsoft agreed to buy GitHub, GitLab offered 75% off its top tiers to new users who tweeted #movingtogitlab. GL7
  20. 2018-06-05Go_To_Market · Education and open source GitLab made its top tiers free for schools and open source projects so students would take advanced features to their workplaces. GL42
  21. 2018-10Product · Monthly releases GitLab shipped a release on the 22nd of every month, 83 consecutive releases by version 11.3. GL17
  22. 2018-11-09Go_To_Market · Buyer-based tiers GitLab placed individual-contributor features in open source and manager, director and executive features in Starter, Premium and Ultimate. GL18
  23. 2019Go_To_Market · Series E GitLab raised $268 million at a $2.7 billion valuation. GL5
  24. 2019-01-07Go_To_Market · Free plan terms GitLab's free plan offered unlimited collaborators and 2,000 CI minutes against GitHub's three-collaborator free private repositories. GL28
  25. 2019-04-29Product · Fork protection Sijbrandij said users depend on GitLab's user interface, which is harder to replicate than an API. GL39
  26. 2019-07-16Go_To_Market · Cloud partners After Microsoft bought GitHub, cloud and Kubernetes vendors that saw Azure getting close to GitHub's customers began partnering with GitLab. GL47
  27. 2020-03-30Product · Features to free GitLab moved 18 paid features, including feature flags and package registries, into the free tier. GL36
  28. 2020-09-01Go_To_Market · Enterprise platform deal UBS signed a multi-year strategic collaboration agreement to run its DevCloud software development on GitLab as a single DevOps platform. GL54
  29. 2021-01-26Go_To_Market · Tier consolidation GitLab phased out its $4 Bronze/Starter tier and moved to Free, Premium and Ultimate. GL34
  30. 2021-03-18Go_To_Market · China licence GitLab licensed its technology and brand to JiHu, an independent company, to serve China. GL43
  31. 2021-07-31Product · Unified data model GitLab described its product as a single application with one codebase, interface and data model. GL6
  32. 2021-07-31Product · Deployment options Customers could run GitLab self-managed in their own cloud account or use GitLab's SaaS. GL6
  33. 2021-07-31Go_To_Market · Land and expand GitLab described a customer journey that begins with developers and expands to teams and senior executives, helped by Google Cloud and AWS marketplaces and resellers. GL6
  34. 2021-10-14Go_To_Market · IPO GitLab listed on Nasdaq under GTLB. GL5
  35. 2021-10-17Go_To_Market · Cloud-neutral pitch GitLab promoted itself as a neutral platform available on every public cloud, and Amazon and Google sold its tools. GL48
  36. 2023-03-02Product · Premium scope Premium gained more than 400 features over five years, including epics, value stream analytics, approval rules and compliance. GL35
  37. 2023-04-03Go_To_Market · Premium price rise GitLab raised Premium from $19 to $29 a user a month, its first rise in more than five years. GL35
  38. 2024-07-17Go_To_Market · Sale exploration Reuters reported GitLab was working with bankers on a possible sale, with Datadog interested. GL11
  39. 2024-12-05Go_To_Market · CEO change Bill Staples, former New Relic CEO, replaced Sijbrandij as CEO; Sijbrandij became executive chair. GL9
  40. 2026-03-03Product · AI agent platform GitLab made its Duo Agent Platform for agentic AI across the software lifecycle generally available. GL10
  41. 2026-03-03Go_To_Market · Usage pricing GitLab introduced usage-based GitLab Credits and authorized a $400 million share buyback. GL10
  42. 2026-09-01Go_To_Market · Flex commitments GitLab introduced GitLab Flex, a dollar commitment spendable on seats or credits each month. GL13