I really like Gitlab, and I wanted to move my team onto their hosted offering, but earlier this year they changed the pricing so abruptly and drastically that it just killed it as an option.
It just feels like it does too much, and unless you want to commit to having everyone using it for _everything_ the pricing doesn't seem to make sense.
Same thing happened to me at a previous company: I had just migrated from Github to Gitlab and was planning on getting on the paid plan, when they suddenly did the price bump. Worse of all is that it is not possible to pay monthly (Github allows this). So we got back to Github.
The pricing model with GitLab is really unfortunate for certain types of companies. For our developers who really do most everything in Gitlab, it's great, but buying the same licenses for literally anyone else who might need to peek in there a couple of times a month? Hell naw.
Our spend would be much higher (probably 3-4x) if they allowed some type of reasonable mix of license levels.
Thats is what sales team is for. Talk to them, explain you usecase and set of features you are looking to use, they'll give you a discount based on that. If I remember correctly we managed to get a license for all users who ever need to login, but for the price of number of core active users.
It just feels like it does too much, and unless you want to commit to having everyone using it for _everything_ the pricing doesn't seem to make sense.