My use-case for Gitlab is to support the internal tools and some bespoke development for a fan-run non-profit event. In a typical year we might have about $8,000 to run the whole event (ticket sales, less venue hire and other costs). Non-profit pricing is only available to registered charities in my country, so we're forced into paying full price for most of the SaaS services. That puts most of them out of our budget -- and it seems like Gitlab is joining that list.
So Gitlab are asking us to pony up $19 per user *per month* -- which is a cool $2300 a year. That's five times our current total IT spend (which benefits everyone), for a service which serves ten users. It's nearly a quarter of what we have to run the event.
Fair enough it unlocks extra features, but the only one I can see us using is Epics.
To compare prices -- Github is currently charging $48 per user, per year. That's $480 for the whole 10-person team. It's still going to be a tough sell for our Finance guy, but not as bad as $2300 (he'd ask if I hit my head if I asked for that).
The team picked Gitlab over Github because of the really good feature set on the free tier, and the availability of the bronze/starter tier for when we needed more. With Bronze going away last year, and now a 5-user cap, the message I'm getting from Gitlab is "we're a premium provider and we don't want your custom".
As @eslaught said -- it really feels like they're killing the golden goose.
If they added the option of buying more user seats for the Free tier and threw in a premium feature or two (Epics would win me over), I'd absolutely pitch that to my finance guy -- especially if the price was the same as Github.
Heck, I wouldn't even care if they cut the number of CI minutes... I can spin up a VPS if I need that.