Hi Panzerboy. We understand the desire to have this in CE but this is one of the few features that is requested by a lot of large organizations and not many small ones. Of course we understand that smaller organizations and individuals like you would like it too. But there has to be extra value in GitLab Enterprise Edition (EE). We have to make hard decisions about what is EE only and we currently have no plans to port this to CE. As a workaround you can setup a separate git-annex server. It will be more work to setup, add the remotes, and you don't have the access control that the GitLab integration brings. But if you're a single user you might be able to live without the access control.
Of course, if it's an option for you consider using GitLab.com, it offers unlimited repositories and collaborators. Right now we don't limit the amount of annex data but we might in the future.
Unfortunately that's not an option for our (small) company. I'm already using gitlab.com for my own personal stuff, but for the company's, we have to stay on-premise.
How many people are you?
5 developers and a few other non-dev people who just use the issues and wikis.
Our pricing takes into account that not everyone is a developer, we have one price per user to keep it simple. Assuming you have 5 non-dev's the cost for GitLab EE would be less than 4 dollars per user per month or less than 7 dollars per developer per month.