> there is a certain kind of lock-in. But vendor lock-in is one of the perfect factors to considerate when monetizing these services, as are short notice perio

> there is a certain kind of lock-in. But vendor lock-in is one of the perfect factors to considerate when monetizing these services, as are short notice periods, amount of work required for migration, and time pressure. I can imagine they have more impact on final price than things like value of service, SLAs and warranties. After analysis, Gitlab found that the current prices are the best balance between getting revenue and users migrating away. I compare this with Photobucket: it was a free image hosting site that allowed hotlinking and ended up used everywhere. One of the largest group of users was the small scale online merchants, they hosted lots (lots!) of product photos there and hotlinked them to Amazon, eBay, etc. Then overnight they changed the free users features, disabled hotlinking and replaced the images with a placeholder, unless users paid for a subscription costing USD 400,00. The hosting and bandwidth cost were not the important factors: there was a very long tail and most images were loaded just once in forever. There was a lot of less expensive sites doing the same, but the incentive for paying was the amount of hotlinked images that needed to be changed manually in a very short notice -- and the small merchants had no time nor resources to do this quickly enough, before the lost sales pile up or their ads get reported for not featuring the images. So I can suppose a lot of them just paid up. This strategy would not have worked if accounts were grandfathered. That's the reasoning for Gitlab (and Github, it's just a matter of time): how much effort would cost to migrate away and how the projects would be disrupted until it is finished? As git is distributed and users are technically versed and can automate migration of the centralized features, it's no wonder that it cost less the Photobucked. However, there must be factors pushing the price up: one that I can easily imagine is amount of Go projects that download dependencies from repos with URLs hardcoded in source. And all their cloned copies, packaged tarballs, etc.