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How can Gitlab afford to host unlimited private repos for free?

They have enough premium customers, see https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/

Those services add: - Access to GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE) - Next-business day support

For a little more: - 24/7 Emergency Support - Live installation and configuration assistance - Live upgrade assistance - High Availability - GitLab CI Support

An for a lot more: - Prioritize features important to you - Best practices training - Dedicated Account Manager

Thanks, that is exactly how we make money.

By not doing it forever. They are competing with two entrenched players, so this is probably a move to gather a larger user base. They are probably going to limit private repos for new users at some point.

We think this market is going to end up like email, there was hotmail with 2MB but no private user is paying for unlimited email storage now. Our offer is like Gmail, except long term we want to make money from an application marketplace instead of advertising.

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