A large chunk of companies I've worked for or consulted for had their own on-prem Gitlab. I think they chose correctly.
GitLab is more powerful in some ways, but early startups might want to look at Forgejo first.
Sorry, but there are a million things to do. Paying someone to self-host Forgejo isn't even on that list. We'll just pay someone at the moment.
When I was the one-person eng and ops departments for a few-person seed-stage startup, which already had a major customer in critical production... even when we bought SaaSes (e.g., GitLab), I still needed to spend significant time on the recurring manual steps of backup processes for everywhere we put data we couldn't afford to lose, even after I'd spent time to automate everything that was worthwhile to automate.
For my last side-startup, I just self-hosted Forgejo myself (Git, Issues & Boards, Wiki), and it's less work than when I was doing the same with paid GitLab SaaS.
It depends on the case-by-case circumstances, but sometimes self-hosting an open source package, on your laptop, random PC in the corner, or your existing AWS account, takes less of your valuable time than a paid SaaS does.
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