Mar 21, 2023
A long while ago, GitLab was one of the best git servers with a lot of advanced capabilities, and they grew the feature set ever since. Back in the day, GitLab provided unlimited users compared to 3 users limit in GitHub. For us, this was a life saver, as we are working as part-time organization, which contains both developers and non-developers, at our best, we reached 15 users, spanning over product, web, mobile and other services. So, instead of having the 15 users in GitHub with full price of users for half of us coding, and working like 3 hours a day tops, and 5 days a week, this was an overkill. So, GitLab was the best one to choose at that time.
When Microsoft acquired GitHub, I was skeptical, I though they will ruin the platform (to some degree), and for a while there was no noticeable difference. Well, until they made the service free by lifting the 3-user limit. It did not effect us for a while, as we were using GitLab extensively. Our usages was mainly version control and nothing else, one time for one project, we tried to set up a CI\CD, our first one ever. Even thought we discarded that thought, it was a good experience. We heavily relay on version-control-based features, like forking and branching, tags and milestones, and pull/merge requests but nothing fancy.
When the bad time stormed us for the first time, when GitLab first announced the price change and the 5-user limit per namespace, we planned our migration to GitHub, it was in a critical time, and the situation was dire. So, we decided to breakdown the teams, we were like 8~10 members at that time, and so, we broke the team into 3 smaller teams. One for frontend web, one for backend, and one for mobile. We had 2 people in common in all 3 for redundancy and availability, as we are using other services that require some people to handle the integrations and usages of the other platforms, namely Netlify, CloudFlare, and Laravel Forge. So it worked out well, despite the quick changes.
When another round of price increase came, it killed GitLab in my eyes. The one who stood for open source and challenged GitHub at sometime, is now only seeking revenue at all costs. It does not effect us in any other way apart from splitting the team into 5-or-less members in a namespace, so it does not bring any new damage to us. But morally, we started to favor GitHub over self-hosted GitLab, as we don't know how bad will GitLab turn. In the first round, the price was way too high, with the second, it was just an overkill. So, I thinking GitLab is seeking its death by its own hands, and we will probably jump ships to GitHub or any suitable service when the times comes.
