I am a product manager at GitLab and my focus is on making renewals as easy and pain-free as possible for customers. I am very sorry that you had such a confusing and frustrating experience here. We are working on a number of issues that will improve this process, including:

* Making Gitlab.com aware of who the payment owner is so we can more accurately target the renewal banner - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/growth/product/-/issues/1551

* Updating the renewal banner copy for group owners that aren't payment owners so they don't attempt to renew if they do not have the right permissions - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/growth/product/-/issues/1553

* Moving the renewal behavior from the customers portal into Gitlab.com so payment owners can more easily manage their subscription and renewal - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/growth/product/-/issues/1528

* Adjusting how we do "true-ups" so they are done quarterly and pro-rated to the end of the subscription instead of in arrears - https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/customers-gitlab-com/-/issues/...

I would love to chat with you to learn more about the challenges you experienced and to review some of our plans to make things better if you're up for it. You can reach me directly at mkarampalas[at]gitlab.com