Yeah, this had been the case for me.

Throw in a feature like epics or roadmaps and some CI time for $5/mo and I would have been on it, but $20/mo is too much for how few of the premium features I'd use. I'd just always assumed this tier didn't exist because the opportunity lost with long tail consumers was weighed up against the possible of business users downgrading to a lower tier. But then they could just go with the jetbrains model, and have the exact same tier have two different prices depending on whether the buyer is an individual or a business, if they're worried about that. Call it Gitlab Premium Personal or something.

That said, the youtube-dl github drama did push me into self hosting my private projects and mirrors of at-risk projects on Gitea, so that window has closed now. Also Gitea is a lot nicer than Gogs was the previous time I compared gitlab against other options. But gitlab is still for now my host for public projects.

I second that. I could probably convince my manager to pay $5 per person even if we get no extra features. It's too hard a sell for $19. I think they could do a lot to milk their current free tier users.

We buy compute time periodically and that is a small amount I guess.

We happily pay Bitbucket for our backup storage. I'm sure we'd pay for our code storage if that was required.

Yes, GitHub is $4 a month for Pro and it does give some additional features (mostly more Action minutes and protected branches)

GitLab has nothing to compete against that.