I was at Gitlab Commit London and myself and colleagues raised this with a few Gitlab employees. They seem to be aware their jump from Premium to Ultimate is too big. At their feedback booth I passed on that it would be ideal to pay for what you use.

We use a separate issue tracker so any of that isn't relevant for us, but some of the security would be ideal.

Likewise, we have user accounts for non-development departments (Legal/Compliance/etc) that wouldn't be interested in SAST, for example. If we jumped to Ultimate we would have to pay monthly for those users to access features that never would use.

As I said, they do seem to be aware of this. I wouldn't be surprised if they came up with a different arrangement for Ultimate in the near future.