You can have your private repository on GitLab. They have a Service Desk feature[0] which used to be in the basic tier but was moved not long ago.
Alternatively, if you're on a budget, you can:
- Set up a support@yourstartup.com email address
- In GitLab, open an account named "SupportStartup" for example with support@yourstartup.com
- As the project maintainer, add the SupportStartup member to the project
- As SupportStartup on GitLab, you get a custom email address you can create issues with simply by sending an email to that address[1]
- As the admin of your email server, create an alias or automatically forward incoming emails from support@yourstartup.com, to the custom email address you get on GitLab. So any email sent to support@yourstartup.com will automatically be routed to the email address that creates issues.
One other solution:
- Create a form for issues in your application.
- As a user, I write my complaint into that form, and I hit submit.
- As SupportStartup, you generate a personal access token on GitLab[2]
- In the backend, you get that message, and you use GitLab's API to create an issue with the personal access token.
Another solution:
Add an issue button to the application with an `href`:
<a href="mailto:support@yourstartup.com?cc=founder@yourstartup.com;cofounder@yourstartup.com&subject=The issue title&body=You can have a template here" rel="EMAIL">Complain!</a>
When the user clicks, it opens their mail client, with pre-filled email addresses, and CC addresses, a prefilled subject, and a body with a template. Everyone gets the email. Everyone gets notified on the most pressing issues, everyone does support, and after the n-th email, people say "Okay, that's enough" and they fix the most irritating stuff with high frequency/high impact.
[0]: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/service_desk.html
[1]: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/issues/managing_issu...
[2]: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/profile/personal_access_toke...