If your question is not answered by the key links above or this guide:
Not all Fulfillment features are available at the time for all types of customers, please refer to the availability matrix below.
Customer Type | Cloud Licensing (Y/N) | Auto-Renewals (Y/N) | Quarterly Subscription Reconciliation (Y/N) | Operational Data (Y/N) |
---|---|---|---|---|
Customers with credit card on file | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Customers paying with invoice | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Customers requiring a PO | Yes | No | No | Yes |
Customers with an MSA | Yes | No | No | No |
Customers with multi-year deals | Yes | No | No | Yes |
Customers purchasing through a GitLab Reseller or other Channel/Alliance Partner | Yes | No | No | Yes |
Public Sector Customers | Yes | No | No | Yes |
Customers with offline/airgapped environments | Yes (Offline cloud license released in GitLab 15.0) |
No | No | No |
GitLab for Education, Open Source and Startups Customers | No | No | No | No |
Free Tier Users | No | No | No | No |
We currently have a version of User Caps for groups built for SaaS, which is similar in behavior to the self-managed User Caps feature. As of now, this feature is not ready for production use. GitLab team members can learn more about the feature in the internal handbook.
List of features managed by the billing and subscription management group within the Fulfillment section.
Customers can renew their SaaS or Self-managed subscriptions using either auto-renewal or manual renewal. By default, subscriptions are set to auto-renew. Customers who are not eligible for auto-renew or do not want to auto-renew their subscription can manually renew their subscription through the Renew
button on the subscription card in the Customers Portal.
As of 2023-01-21, almost all of the subscriptions enrolled in auto-renewal (identified in Zuora as Subscription.TurnOnAutoRenew = Yes
) will be scheduled for auto-renewal and processed. Certain exceptions exist:
We will not attempt to auto-renew if:
Auto-renewal will fail if:
Accounts and Subscriptions excluded from auto-renewal:
Account.PO Required = Yes
(customer notifies GitLab they have a “no PO, no Pay policy”, booking requirement and pre-billing).Account.Portal Required = Yes
(customer notifies GitLab that they require invoices to be manually uploaded to a billing portal, and includes non-PO, PO, contract, or SOW).Account.Support Hold = Yes
(customers are placed on support hold when accounts become >90 days past due without payment commitment).Account.Credit Hold = Yes
(customers are placed on credit hold when any balance is written off to bad debt)There’s an automated process (Zuora Workflow) that sets Subscription.TurnOnSeatReconciliation__c
to No for the use cases listed above.
The target audience is the internal GitLab team, and covers the admin panel of the Customers Portal. Customers or subscription managers should refer to the Customers section of GitLab's user documentation for help in using the portal, or the licensing FAQ for questions on subscriptions such as how users are counted.
For members of our sales teams, you can learn more about how to use CustomerDot for common use cases in our Field Operations - CustomersDot Access and Use page.
When using the admin panel search, be aware that results will be based on searching only one field at a time. For example, entering a person's full name will likely provide no results because the system will not search first and last name at the same time, only one or the other.
We recommend searching by email address, partial email address (e.g. company domain), or company name. When searching by name, enter only first or last name.
After your initial search, you can further filter the search results.
In the search results, any account which has a subscription tied to it will have a "Subscription" badge next to their name.
Customers
in the admin panel.Refresh
or hit Enter
on your keyboard to initiate the search.Add filter
.Refresh
again.Note: The updated customer details are synced to the matching Zuora BillTo/SoldTo contact.
Customers
section.First name
, Last name
, and Email
.Save
.Deactivate login for Customer
If you want to update the physical address of the customer or other details, you need to impersonate the customer.
Impersonate
.Customers
section.Login activated
Save
.The customer is now blocked from accessing their Customers Portal account.
Note: That does not affect the ability to access their GitLab.com account.
History
.Note: If a user is admin:xyz@gitlab.com
in a log line, that indicates a change on the customer's record that was done via the admin panel.
With the one-time sign in url
a customer is able to directly sign in to their Customers Portal account. This works for customers that have or don't have a GitLab.com account linked to their Customers Portal account.
Customers
section.One time sign in url
.Note: A new one-time sign-in link will be generated after the previous one has been used. The one-time sign in url
does not log the customer into their GitLab.com account, only their Customers Portal account.
If a customer has a connected GitLab.com user account, then a list of namespaces will show with relevant information including current plan.
Note: This only works as long as the customer's access_token
is valid.
The list of namespaces are:
Owner
The billing account is the representation of a billing entity which is mostly connected to an organization. The billing account has data associated to Zuora, SFDC, important company information and all billing account memberships.
Billing accounts
in the admin panel.Refresh
or hit Enter
on your keyboard to initiate the search.Add filter
.Refresh
again.History
.The billing account membership defines the relation between a customer and a billing account. The customer will be able to see the subscription in their Customers Portal account if there is a billing account membership with an active subscription.
Currently a customer can only have one billing account membership.
Adding a new billing account membership between a customer and a billing account results in the customer becoming a subscription management contact.
Billing account memberships
section.+ Add new
action.Save
.Note: We display the Zuora account name
and Zuora account ID (in brackets)
in the list of billing accounts.
Billing account memberships
section.x Delete
action.Yes, I'm sure
.Billing account membership successfully deleted
success notification.GitLab Groups
.Renew Trial
button.Update
. Warning: Do not change the date to a date prior to today's date in UTC timezone.If a bug is discovered that impacts Fulfillment, including provisioning, purchasing, billing, subscription data, etc., please do the following:
Reporting the issue
@fulfillment-group/leadership/fulfillment-pm
group.ofernandez2
for review and action.Notifying appropriate DRIs
The following individuals should be looped into the issue, depending on the impact of the bug:
Sarah McCauley - Director, Billing & AR
Jessica Salcido - Finance Systems Administrator
Jesse Rabbits - Sr. Manager, Deal Desk
Lyle Kozloff - Director of Support, Global Readiness
Justin Farris - Sr. Dir, Product Monetization
License won't activate due to a true-up or seat overage mismatch
What type of connection does the GitLab instance require to activate Cloud Licensing?
The instance would need to have a 443 port connection to customers.gitlab.com in order to activate. This is also used for license synchronization as outlined in our documentation here.
Can customers opt out of telemetry or sharing license sync data?
The data transmitted with Cloud License is covered in this documentation. In short, it's aggregate user counts and some license metadata. This data is required for Cloud Licensing. It's intended to only include necessary data to support our needs for administering a license, supporting future renewals, supporting add-ons, and any seat reconciliations.
You can look at sample code that generates the counts by searching for subscription
events in metrics.gitlab.com.
What is Operational vs Optional Data?
Our service usage data primarily aggregate counts from your instance (e.g. counts of issues or MRs) and is sent to GitLab on a weekly (or slower) cadence.
Can a customer send subscription data ad-hoc, while keeping their GitLab instance airgapped/not connected to the internet?
Please see Offline Cloud Licensing for more information.
Across our stable counterparts, we follow four key principles to keep us focused on delivering the right results. These principles are not absolute, the intent is for them to guide our decision-making.
Make conducting business with GitLab seamless
When customers choose to purchase GitLab they've already decided to unlock additional value by accessing the features or services enabled by a transaction. We strive to make the transaction experiences fade into the background, helping customers unlock this additional value as easily as possible. This creates a better customer experience and results in accelerated growth for GitLab.
This means that in every initiative we question the need for complexity. We strive to build functionality that is easy to understand and use, and make sure it works flawlessly for customers of all types. As much as we can, we won't require a customer to speak to a sales representative and will allow them to choose whether to transact via online self-service tools.
Build a strong foundation so GitLab can scale
Fulfillment systems are the foundational layer for many commerce activities within GitLab. Our systems provision licenses for customers, are the source of data for multiple KPIs and data models, and interact directly with Zuora and Salesforce. These systems need to be reliable, scale with demand, and allow other teams to collaborate.
We regularly invest in our foundations and will continue to pause new feature development in favor of foundations whenever we feel that our foundational systems aren't robust enough. We established a Fulfillment Platform group in FY23 for focused efforts in this area.
Use data to make decisions and measure impact
We have many sensing mechanisms at our disposal: feedback routed via our GTM teams, meetings with business counterparts, customer feedback from user research, and improvement suggestions raised by GitLab team members and members of the wider community in our issue tracker.
We're also improving how we use data as a sensing mechanism to set direction and prioritization. Understanding our funnel is paramount in building a seamless commerce experience for our customers. Fulfillment teams in collaboration with Growth are instrumenting each point in our transaction funnels so we can use data to inform our strategy and direction.
Iterate, especially when the impact of a change is sizeable
Iteration is one of the most challenging values to follow, especially within Fulfillment. Oftentimes our work needs to be bundled and aligned closely with external announcements or communications. Even so, we strive to break work down as much as possible and decouple functionality releases from broader announcements. Doing this expedites delivering value to our customers and the business.
Minimize and remove business logic from the GitLab application code
In the past, we have embedded significant business logic into the GitLab instance code directly. For example, we have logic in our licensing system that checks at the instance level whether the customer license should be activated based on licenses paid for, etc. This causes significant issues as we evolve our business policies, which we can't then reflect in past GitLab versions that we support.
We will minimize such logic and remove it from the application code whenever possible, seeking alternative solutions.
Our roadmap is prioritized and scheduled following our Project management process. We aim to update this roadmap every month as a part of our milestone planning process.
To request work to be added to the Fulfillment roadmap, please follow our intake request process. Changes in priorities of this roadmap follow our prioritization process.
The source of truth for all Fulfillment projects is our in-product Fulfillment Roadmap.
By nature of our direction, Fulfillment works mostly on highly cross-functional projects where either or both of the following are true:
To focus on the most impactful work, Fulfillment’s prioritization process seeks to:
A project will be prioritized in the Fulfillment roadmap based on the considerations below.
All initiatives, regardless of who requests them, will be evaluated based on this same criteria.
Some initiatives will have a direct impact on these criteria, but others will have an indirect impact. We will consider indirect impact as part of the prioritization.
When scoping new solutions we will prefer those that best allow GitLab to scale and accelerate future work. These solutions often require more upfront foundational work, which we will include in the initial scope. In cases when we decide to accelerate a solution by skipping on some foundational work, we will add this foundational work as a separate line item to the roadmap.
A note on Customer Satisfaction: to understand the impact of efforts aimed at improving customer satisfaction, we should estimate the indirect impact of improving CSAT on revenue and cost. For example, by reducing the number of steps or improving the steps required to purchase we will see an increase in conversion rate and thus revenue.
Prioritization based on the established criteria will drive the order in which work is scheduled to be completed. The product team will review overall prioritization regularly. Before changing priorities, will consider:
To minimize impact and give more predictability to partner teams, we will minimize changes to initiatives that we’ve already agreed with cross-functional partners to do within the ongoing quarter.
Anyone can request new items to be added to the roadmap via an intake request.
One of our prioritization goals is to maximize overall team output across Fulfillment and cross-functional partners. We want to give transparency to all GitLab team members about the work that Fulfillment and its partner teams plan to deliver.
To enable this, we will do a roadmap review with our stable counterparts before the beginning of a new fiscal quarter. As part of this review, we gather feedback on roadmap priorities, update the roadmap based on the feedback, and agree with partners on the scope and delivery milestones for the upcoming 3-6 months.
During these quarterly reviews we will aim to commit up to 70% of Fulfillment’s engineering capacity for the upcoming quarter, and no more than 30% of capacity for the quarter after. This is meant to provide enough visibility into upcoming activities for cross-functional partners to plan for them while leaving room for reprioritization and changes as needed.
Any proposed changes to the roadmap will be first communicated to cross-functional partners async in a relevant Slack channel with the relevant context and rationale, and ask for feedback. As needed, a synchronous meeting will be scheduled to discuss. All feedback will be considered by the product team and a final decision will be made and communicated once made.