Wait, what? So you're on the hook for backups, upgrades, etc. and you have to pay them for the privilege? I thought GitLab was free as in speech and beer.

It's an Open Core model. You can deploy the free version, but it lacks some pretty important features like SSO.

But that $30 per month per user is also the cost for their cloud-hosted version. It also includes quite a bit of CI/CD runtime.