On November 19, GitLab JiHu published “Notes on GitLab.cn SaaS feature adjustments”: all accounts will be set to a 90-day trial. If a user doesn’t upgrade to a paid plan (Premium or Ultimate) within the free 90 days, the account will be barred from logging into the SaaS when the trial ends. User data won’t be deleted immediately — it will be retained for three years, then permanently deleted.
As an old fan who joined during JiHu’s beta, I’m disappointed, but I understand. Domestic services never seem to escape the curse of being freeloaded to death — look at neighboring Gitee and all its restrictions. Costs certainly climb with user count.
During the beta, JiHu ran on Tencent Cloud, and cloud hosting isn’t cheap. Later I noticed they added Cloudflare China (JD Cloud) WAF protection too. I don’t know whether JiHu is still on the cloud — self-hosted servers might be cheaper.
This policy change is huge in scope, affecting nearly everyone: it effectively kills free accounts. My personal guess is that management changed and the business philosophy changed with it. What I could find: Chen Ran, the founding CEO who created JiHu, left, and Liu Gang took over as CEO. I can clearly feel the shift in JiHu’s community, events, columns, developer relations — the whole atmosphere has drifted from international-company style to typical-domestic-company style.
In any case, thank you JiHu for the earlier effort. Though you’ve shut the door on free accounts — old friend, goodbye. We both live in the IT world; we’ll surely meet again.
Git is a registered trademark of Software Freedom Conservancy; GitLab is a registered trademark of GitLab B.V.; GitLab JiHu is operated by JiHu Information Technology (Hubei) Co., Ltd.