[lazypenguin]

I've said it before and I agree with this comment. Their pricing structure is just too aggressive for smaller teams and I think they missed out on capturing a market segment. Maybe they determined it would be unprofitable to support small teams or something but I would have happily kept my team on GitLab if there was an ala carte or "lite" option like you suggested. Instead we also ended up on Github (as paying customers).

[jacquesm]

You could of course host it yourself.

[reaperman]

For small teams which were happy using the "free" tier, that's really the correct solution. Just self-host it and retain free-tier functionality.

That said, it looks like the premium features are $29/mo or $99/mo per user regardless if you self-host it or take advantage of their managed SaaS offering. It's somewhat bizarre - there's a lot of costs associated with managing this on-site but no discount for that. I presume they feel that extra overhead cost to the customer of self-hosting breaks even with the perceived or actual added security value of self-managed installations.

I might be reading it wrong, but that's how I see the pricing presented here and associated pages: https://about.gitlab.com/install/ce-or-ee/

[lazypenguin]

We actually did self-host the community edition for several months using the omnibus version (some features you still need a license for that is same price as hoested). After initial setup it worked okay and was mostly hands-off except for that the performance started to degrade slowly over time. After spending a few weeks digging into the internals and failing to solve the problem we felt that we were better off just switching to a hosted provider. In this case we switched to GitHub because the pricing was better for the features we needed.

[JeremyNT]

Yes, and the open source/core nature is IMO the single biggest feature of GitLab.

The value proposition just doesn't look great to me when you're apples-to-apples comparing cloud hosted Gitlab to cloud hosted GitHub.