Interesting. I would be curious to see how this works out. My understanding was that people went to GitLab for the same reason they went to bitbucket - unlimited private repos.
As noted in both the article you're commenting on and their (linked in that same article) product[1] site that lists the different plans:
FREE
2,000 CI pipeline minutes per month
Unlimited private projects and collaborators
For me, this is great news. I generally tend to steer away from free (as in beer) products from startups since it is a sure shot sign of things to come (again, personal opinion).