No-one said it was.

But the answer of self-hosting is a perfectly valid answer for "Why the love for GitLab?" when one = $0 in licensing, and the other = > $2,500/year in licensing.

Plus, not too long ago, GitHub restricted the number of free private repositories, for users and educational organizations. Although they offered educational plans for labs, it still had its limitations. Thus, free self-hosting was what attracted us to use GitLab in our lab.

> No-one said it was.

That is literally what the comment I replied to said. That "self hosting" was a reason to root for gitlab.

"Reason to root for GitLab" does not necessarily equal "product differentiator".

Similar to the "you can't use price to differentiate the two" - why not?

so basically, you like it because it's free.

doesn't speak well for their business prospects.

Actually, we pay for GitLab EE.

GitLab's pricing model won a lot of people when GitHub's was ugly for anyone who wanted private repos (single guy at home with 10+ private repos for things like your dot files, etc? $20+ a month, for what likely amounted to under 1MB of disk space).

Ok, so change "free" to "cheaper", and the point remains: you like it because they charge less.

Still, most people in HN threads use it because it's free. Which is great for an open source tool, but bad for an unprofitable, VC-funded startup.

If I can only afford one, then the price is definitely a differentiator.

Price isn't a product differentiator?

The feature isn't a product differentiator.

If I had unlimited money, I could hire an army of coders to write me a git platform with all the features I want, and host it on all the servers, everywhere. It's simply not feasible to talk about product features in a vacuum without considering the costs.

Price is a feature.