> If you are using the free tier on GitLab SaaS, there will be a 5GB storage limit per top-level namespace.

What does this cover? Does it cover the size of a git repo? Build artifacts, both temporary and exported to packages? And what about Docker images?

Docker images concern me the most. It's terribly easy to build and use Docker images that are >100MB, and 50 of those easily go beyond 5GB. Two projects with nightly builds easily go beyond that in a month even when doing nothing at all.

> What does this cover?

https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/faq-efficient-free-tier/#ma... provides a list of what counts towards the storage limits, and also ways to manage, reduce and cleanup storage.

> Does it cover the size of a git repo? Build artifacts, both temporary and exported to packages? And what about Docker images?

Yes, they all are storage types that add to the overall storage consumption.

> Docker images concern me the most. It's terribly easy to build and use Docker images that are >100MB, and 50 of those easily go beyond 5GB. Two projects with nightly builds easily go beyond that in a month even when doing nothing at all.

You can define container cleanup policies within the registry, matching on age, tags, etc. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/packages/container_registry/...

> You can define container cleanup policies within the registry, matching on age, tags, etc. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/packages/container_registry/...

Yeah, I gotta say - this is not great. Particularly given the overarching guidance on GitLab CI is "break everything up into 30 jobs", having to store containers as either an artifact or in the registry in order to pass them to sast or test jobs or w/e means that most projects are going to hit this limit instantly. Our largest work project has registry usage sitting at 800g - admittedly, we could be a lot better at cleaning up tags. But staying under 50 for the whole namespace, not even just registry, is going to incredibly difficult.

A fair while ago, we used self-hosted and swapped to SaaS because it was the same price and we didn't have to deal with upgrades etc - and we used our own CI runners anyway. Is the unspoken intention to force users like us onto self-hosted? Should we instead be using a non-GitLab registry to store this stuff?

Very long term GitLab user, very disappointed by this.

> You can define container cleanup policies within the registry, matching on age, tags, etc. https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/packages/container_registry/...

As a long time GitLab user, and a user who championed the adoption of GitLab by a previous employer, this is highly disappointing. This basically eliminates GitLab as a viable option to some SMEs and specially for personal projects that relied on GitLab to build Docker images and deploy them as part of the CICD pipeline.

I just checked a personal project I have hosted in GitLab that does nothing more than pulling a Docker image, do a minor tweak and deliver the image to the container registry, and the Docker image build step alone adds ~100MB to the usage quotas each time the pipeline is triggered.

I'm sorry to say, but if this plan stays as is, GitLab ceases to be an option.

Thanks. 2 more questions:

- Do I have to do anything now with all my “top-level” repositories (total >5GB)?

- When I create a new repository do I have to do something else as well (create new namespace)?

The FAQ contains information on how to manage your storage which will be helpful for top-level namespace exceeding 5GB in storage: https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/faq-efficient-free-tier/#ma...