> Am I the only one that thinks that’s pretty insane?
Their pricing model might not be designed to cover only storage. Pretty much all features from GitLab are loss leaders, including computing costs and developing/maintaining a CICD system that arguably is by far the best in the world. At the end of the day the money needs to come from somewhere, and you don't get that cash flow by offering everything for free.
Bold opinion. I extensively use GitHub actions and GitLab CI on a daily basis, and I am slowly liking GitHub Actions more. GitLab CI is much more straight forward if you have your own Docker image, but the mix and match approach in GitHub actions, despite the configuration complexity, is more robust in my opinion.
That said, my rudimentary knack is that GitLab CI tend to be quite fast in their free hosted runners. I have CI jobs completing in under a minute on some setups that otherwise take 2-3 minutes on GitHub hosted runners. This could be because I use a custom container image on GitLab, that basically requires no additional tooling setup.
> GitLab CI is much more straight forward if you have your own Docker image
In my experience GitLab is straight-forward in all of its happy path, which happens to be exactly what all developers need to do: build software, push build artifacts, run tests, and in the case of services deploy stuff somewhere else.
With GitLab anyone can set their fully working CICD pipeline from scratch after a quick googling, which is absolutely not possible with GitHub actions.
The only downside of GitLab is their pricing model. If it wasn't for GitLab's not-so generous free tier, there wouldn't be any reason to bother looking at alternatives like GitHub and the like.
Their pricing model might not be designed to cover only storage. Pretty much all features from GitLab are loss leaders, including computing costs and developing/maintaining a CICD system that arguably is by far the best in the world. At the end of the day the money needs to come from somewhere, and you don't get that cash flow by offering everything for free.