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).

You could of course host it yourself.