GitLab Community Edition is fully open source and completely free: https://about.gitlab.com/features/#community
Meanwhile at Github, $7 gives me hosted private repos. It's free on Bitbucket if I limit collaborators.
The biggest selling point of these services is peace of mind and knowing someone is taking care of the code when I sleep. Otherwise, Git has always been a FOSS.
Definitely. There's not much you can do with self-hosted GitLab that you can't do with pure git. GitLab just makes it easier, IMO. The main reason my company uses it is to restrict the master branch to certain people - doable with pure git, less effort with GitLab.
There's no reason we couldn't use GitHub for this (wouldn't cost much for a team our size), but my company prefers on-prem whenever practical for various reasons.
Self-hosted GitLab doesn't fit all the same uses as GitHub (I wouldn't use it for personal projects), but when it does fit it's great to have.
The point I was making in the original comment was that Gitlab has absolutely no options without heavy onboarding that is hosted as well as reliable. I wasn't really undercutting their on-prem, just pointing out that comparisons with Github are heavily misplaced.
Setting up your own instance is not hard [1], but we're also offering managed hosted instances on GitHost.io nowadays.
If you're still in the middle, you could use the one-click deploy options from providers such as Digital Ocean, Cloud 66 and AWS images [2].
[0]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/operations/issues/42