It's quite easy to burn 1000G of storage on GitHub/GitLab (again, don't forget all the revisions). That puts just the storage cost at $6000/year. At this price point, it's really worth hosting on your own.
As Danieru mentioned they are forcing ppl to manually do cleanups, that probably indicates the storage costs are even higher which worth manual interventions.
An I happy paying 6 dollars a year for a single gigabyte: I'd rather pay less.
Edit: I pay attention to costs, and repo size is the sort of thing which has a. Habit of growing. All else being equal I'd prefer my team receive the money. A dollar I can give to my team/employees feels good, a dollar paying for over priced storage feels bad.
I know that a small game studio must have a tight budget — and yours looks like a really interesting project (just subscribed) — but it seemed like an awfully strong objection to what I would have assumed would be a small fraction of your total expenses.
> it doesn't seem terribly far off of S3's pricing
GitHub's offering is close to S3 but only because AWS charges so much for bandwidth. The storage portion is less than a quarter of the equivalent bill.
And then GitLab is charging 5x as much as GitHub.
I need the data for my team, so we pay, but I use it as an excuse to force the team to clean up data every so often. As a game company we need large repos. It was either Gitlab or Azure DevOps.