Move "Free guest user" to "premium" level
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As recommended in support ticket #326441 (closed), I am opening an issue to suggest that the "Free guest user" feature be moved to the "Premium" level. The recent decision to restrict private namespaces to 5 users is hurting "premium" customers in ways that are not affecting "ultimate" customers due to the existence of the "Free guest user" feature.
As I explained in a forum post, we are a small company but we are a premium customer for GitLab for all our employees and all our projects. But we do run another top-level namespaces in the free tier to collaborate with customers. That namespace is dedicated to customer support: we have one project per customer and we add multiple persons from each customer to the project so that they can report issues and we will reply to them in the issues that they opened.
This workflow is way superior to the use of the service desk feature:
- each customer has full visibility on all the issues they opened
- users are reporting issues with the web interface and we get proper formatting instead of the bad formatting you tend to have with the email input
So on this namespace we have all our employees (via a group import) and many accounts for our customers, it would be a steep price for us to switch to premium on this namepace. Without any change on your side, we will move away from GitLab for this service. And yet we were driving new users to GitLab with this setup since many of our customers were not yet GitLab users.
One clean way to solve this problem would be to move the “Free guest user” feature to the “premium” offer. I don’t really understand why you restricted that to “ultimate”. Anything that drives more users to Gitlab is good and the ability to add “free guests” is certainly a sure way to encourage your customers to invite their customers/consultants/partners as guest in some projects dedicated to collaborating with them.