> No small time hobby coder needs GitLab Premium. You are free to create as many projects and groups as you need, without having to pay a dime.
For now, I'm nowhere near any limits of the free plan. I'm not sure I'll ever be but I'm not ruling out the possibility, especially if/when the plans change in the future.
Edit: My local Linux kernel git repo is over 4GB. If I wanted to hack on that and keep it on Gitlab, with my current usage, I would be pretty close to the 5GB limit. Of course I don't need Premium in such a case as there is a (relatively expensive) storage addition option, but if I need to expand again then Premium would actually be $1 less and I'll get more storage.
OR: You can run your own node and pay the native cost for storage.
I run a gitlab for my IRC network (https://git.drk.sc) because I like to do sysadmin things and some people don't want to do that.
But storage isn't free, it's not really fair to expect everything hosted for free, they give you the software which you can run yourself.
I know Github does this; but it's obviously a loss leader for them and I do think that the day will come that they'll start restricting (heavily) the free tiers once they have total dominance on the Git ecosystem or the financials start becoming a huge issue.
> OR: You can run your own node and pay the native cost for storage.
At that point I'll just run Gitea on a sub-$5 VPS. It does more than what I need and is simple to run, and has more storage for less.
> But storage isn't free, it's not really fair to expect everything hosted for free, they give you the software which you can run yourself.
I'm more interested in paying a reasonable amount if I hit their free plan limits. My point is that their pricing scheme seems ridiculously high for small time hobby coders like myself and will drive me away from Gitlab if I hit their limits, instead of giving them money.
I'm pretty sure of my reading: if your GitLab repo is a fork of an existing repo, you only pay for the difference.
It may well be that your repo currently isn't a fork of something like https://gitlab.com/linux-kernel/linux then you can fork it, add the fork as your origin, and push the result.
For now, I'm nowhere near any limits of the free plan. I'm not sure I'll ever be but I'm not ruling out the possibility, especially if/when the plans change in the future.
Edit: My local Linux kernel git repo is over 4GB. If I wanted to hack on that and keep it on Gitlab, with my current usage, I would be pretty close to the 5GB limit. Of course I don't need Premium in such a case as there is a (relatively expensive) storage addition option, but if I need to expand again then Premium would actually be $1 less and I'll get more storage.