I'm in a similar position. I'm a freelancer, and I have quite a few clients for various Ruby/iOS/Node projects. I need more private repositories, but the jump to Gold is too much for my business.
The issue is largely down to older clients that I only occasionally do maintenance work for. I've got about 15 of these, and they cut into my private repo count. Of course, it's easy to dump repositories on a server, which I have done in some cases, but I find my clients often like GitHub's interface. I've also put a few onto Bitbucket to give myself a bit of breathing room, this works well when projects are effectively 'archived' and have little client involvement but are still running.
I'm thinking about using GitLab, but I'm wondering about the amount of effort it'd take to maintain it. Cost for GitHub/Bitbucket vs. time to maintain another web application? Hmm...
> Cost for GitHub/Bitbucket vs. time to maintain another web application? Hmm...
Both Github's and Bitbucket's prices max out at $200 a month; if you're a freelancer, that's worth about 2 - 4 hours of your time per month. That amount is easily spent on hosting/managing your own repositories. If you can avoid spending 2 - 4 hours a month on repositories, go for those.
If you bill 160 hours per week and work maybe 200 hours, that’s still 1.5 to 2 percent of your time. I would call that non-trivial and worth at least looking into.
And my point is that a cost that’s 1 to 2 percent of your revenue every month is worth looking into and possibly reducing. Even if you decide to keep it for the time being, it’s worth revisiting every couple of years or so.
The issue is largely down to older clients that I only occasionally do maintenance work for. I've got about 15 of these, and they cut into my private repo count. Of course, it's easy to dump repositories on a server, which I have done in some cases, but I find my clients often like GitHub's interface. I've also put a few onto Bitbucket to give myself a bit of breathing room, this works well when projects are effectively 'archived' and have little client involvement but are still running.
I'm thinking about using GitLab, but I'm wondering about the amount of effort it'd take to maintain it. Cost for GitHub/Bitbucket vs. time to maintain another web application? Hmm...