> there's no discount pricing for self-hosting your gitlab instance, so you may as well use Gitlab's resources on the SaaS platform, which is more expensive for

> there's no discount pricing for self-hosting your gitlab instance, so you may as well use Gitlab's resources on the SaaS platform, which is more expensive for gitlab themselves I think organizations that self-host aren't looking to save money so much as have more control. I'm also unsure how much money Gitlab would save by not paying the SaaS costs. Yes, servers cost money, but it also costs money to make something available for self-hosting. When you're running SaaS, you can do continuous deployments and don't have to worry about cutting releases and the development slowdown that incurs. You don't have to do the same level of testing for SaaS because any issue can be much more quickly resolved since you control the deployment - you can even just ungate a small amount of traffic to new things to test them and make sure they're working well. With on-prem, there's likely a decent amount of work to be done making sure it works well in a lot of different environments, a lot of work testing various different things, and a lot of work supporting and debugging the on-prem deployments. Plus, that doesn't even go into the cost of slowing down your development cycle or eliminating potential avenues for greater efficiency. For example, if you're a SaaS-only company, you can decide that a message broker from Google Cloud or AWS is going to save your developers a lot of time so they can focus on your core product. Instead, now you need people to run a Kafka cluster and you need a way to spin up a Kafka cluster for the on-prem deployments which isn't really why people are buying your product - or maybe the SaaS uses a message broker for things and you build the on-prem to just poll the database every minute; either way, you're having to do extra work. Instead of having people advancing your product, you have people spending time on learning how to launch Kafka clusters in lots of different on-prem environments and providing pluggable storage options instead of just S3. As such, I'd argue that on-prem deployment is a feature that you're paying for rather than a way to save money. If you're deploying on-prem, you're paying Gitlab for all the work that goes into making the service something that can be stood up in an on-prem environment. I'm not saying that the price hike is good, but I think there are definitely costs in making a product that can be deployed for both on-prem and SaaS.