#gitlab

GitLab CEO Bill Staples says enterprises’ monthly bill for developer platform services has risen from tens of dollars per seat to hundreds over the last year, and is headed toward the thousands, signaling a structural change in how they will be billed for AI-enabled software development tools. The increase in cost reflects the volume of work AI agents generate inside development pipelines, Staples wrote in an open letter to customers, investors, and employees titled “GitLab Act 2. “Agents open merge requests in parallel, trigger pipelines around the clock, and push commits at a rate no human team ever did,” he wrote. GitLab introduced consumption pricing for agent work earlier this year and will now allow customers to mix consumption and subscription pricing, the letter said. The announcement comes as software vendors increasingly reposition themselves around autonomous AI systems and usage-based pricing. Earlier this year, rival GitHub moved Copilot toward usage-based billing as AI-as