> They literally offer no significant advantage other than being an alternative to Github.
I can self-host the community edition for free, and in addition to use it as a software forge and static websites hosting and deployment platform through GitLab Pages, I can use it to manage my users and have third-party services (like mattermost, hedgedoc pads, and other internally developped apps) for centralized login.
I really really hope that the buyer will keep the Community Edition alive, otherwise we'll have to move everything over to something else (I don't know what yet).
If you are using it for work, then it might be better to make everything paid. That would probably also reduce the cost per user, because we would have more users.
Per-user prices would be way to expensive. Thé self-hosted GitLab instance I manage is used for teaching and research. We don't use it to make money in any sort of way. We don't have the budget to pay for it. If we have to pay in the future we'll just (painfully) switch to another solution.
I can self-host the community edition for free, and in addition to use it as a software forge and static websites hosting and deployment platform through GitLab Pages, I can use it to manage my users and have third-party services (like mattermost, hedgedoc pads, and other internally developped apps) for centralized login.
I really really hope that the buyer will keep the Community Edition alive, otherwise we'll have to move everything over to something else (I don't know what yet).