Gitlab has introduced a five-user limit for free groups

Their pricing update end of last year was one of the reasons we switched over to Github. Other reasons were, that most external services had integration with Github but not with Gitlab, or that we didn't use many of the features Gitlab provided but charged for. If they would provide some lite plans with custom feature addons, we might have kept it, but all in all there was not much difference between Gitlab and Github except for the pricing then

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).

Yup. If I could say something like "I'll pay $12/year for a public repo, but don't want a wiki, container ecosystem or bug tracker" that would be great. Heck, I would pay $36/year for that. But I'm not paying $29/month/user for all the features I'm not going to use.

SourceHut seems like it will someday be a competitor, but I'm frightened away by it's "alpha" state.

Maybe there's a market for something that's more ala-carte?

And of course, github is owned by microsoft, so at some point it'll probably be bundled into their Azure/Office/Microsoft 365 nonsense. Then it'll be a no brainer to buy it because you'll already be getting it whether you like it or not.

You could of course host it yourself.

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.

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/

I don't know if I see that happening. They'd either have to either give it away for free as part of the bundle, or raise everyone's prices. The first would be bad for revenue and the other would cost them customers that don't care about Github.

$12/year/repo? No, that is way too much. I would rather selfhost at that price point. With the number of repos I have that would be a ridiculous price. I don't use the wiki or the container registry so it is largely text file hosting at that point.

Too much... for you. I appreciate that. Sounds like we have mostly the same requirements though.

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.