Half sarcastic, half serious? I think the prevailing theory is that yes these companies are spending tons of money to get a little bit of money, but it's a one time per customer expense and that customer will still be there for many more quarters, paying monthly dues.
The theory is lot stronger/valid in enterprise sales like gitlab, customers take a lot of time to switch even if they are not satisfied with a product, there may not viable competitior with bespoke solution the same your current provider gives you etc
It is far less true for consumer/SMB mid market products as cost of leaving there is not high.
Oh yeah, I think GitLab will make a fine company. Even if as a user of their product I routinely find it to be half-baked, but of course in enterprise the actual user is commonly the least important aspect of any deal.
> Even if as a user of their product I routinely find it to be half-baked
I thought so too, but then my enterprise started moving to Github. Hoo boy, that’s a whole different can of worms. Their core functionality is great, but if you need anything outside of that you are shit out of luck.
A lot of that money gets spent on adding features to win sales and those features are a one time cost so they can be used for free to win new customers later. GitLab pushes hard to be the do everything tool.
