It's breaking my heart to see Gitlab's recent behaviour (e.g., deleting old projects, removing sensible pricing options). I want to give them my money but no longer can because of how prohibitively expensive it is for me to buy the features I'd want.

It's clear they're struggling to compete with a post-acquisition GitHub that effectively has infinite budget from Microsoft.

Yes, and that's one more reason to stand by them. If they phase out the 'free' tier that I've been using for pianojacq.com I will be happy to pay.

Gitlab no doubt has some wonderful people, but out-of-touch behaviour and scorning your most loyal user base tends to point to bad leadership. It's very difficult to course-correct bad leadership without somehow removing them — just look at Mozilla.

They are definitely not perfect but Microsoft has been - and still is in many ways - outright evil and that's a different level for me. So Gitlab it is. Sytse is one of the very few billionaires that I know and/or know about that isn't an asshole so he's got that going for him.

No, they're suffering from needing to provide hockey-stick growth to their VC overlords. Gitlab will eventually go the fate of all promising startups and do things once thought unthinkable in their early years.

Kudos to you. I don't really use my Gitlab right now, but mostly because there is no project that I want to contribute to that uses Gitlab.