[trengrj]

There are two reasons that self-hosted is expensive, both having no relation to real costs.

1. If you are self-hosting, you have now segmented yourself into the customer category with the government, military, and large corporates concerned about security. This segment will pay more and so will be charged more. In an enterprise software company the vast majority of revenue comes from the larger customers vs many small customers, so these are the users that pricing gets optimised for.

2. Gitlab wants to be seen in the market as a SaaS company as subscription revenue is far preferable to licence revenue from a churn perspective, and also from a general trend perspective where self-hosted, hard to maintain solutions get replaced by cloud solutions.