It's really not this simple. Even if it were just minutes (it isn't, but agree it's not huge overhead) you still have the operational risk when things inevitably go wrong. Now you're impacting your orgs ability to be productive (super expensive) and you incur the direct cost of fixing. Who do you think is going to be better at triaging Gitlab: someone looking after on-prem once a month, or Gitlab's team that do this full time every day. That's why people pay for SaaS.

The problem with Github and Gitlab is that it's actually turning out that those companies aren't that good at running their own product, which is tilting the economics of the above.

> someone looking after on-prem once a month, or Gitlab's team that do this full time every day

Keep in mind that Gitlab.com sees much more load & activity than your on-prem equivalent, and their maintenance schedules don't line up with yours. Ideally, you don't want someone messing with your VCS/CI "every day".

Your on-prem is not only very unlikely to need any of the moving parts that a world-scalable system needs, but any maintenance can also be planned out-of-hours to make sure eventual operator errors don't cause downtime during business hours.

In theory, yes, but in practice most of the difficulty in maintaining an on-prem Gitlab will be that individual company's bespoke installation of it.

> Any decent developer should be able to install and maintain on-prem Gitlab

By this measure, a lot of companies have zero decent developers.

I might be skewed because I do a lot of DevOps, but this is clearly one of the easiest thing to do for any half decent dev. You juste have to follow one half hour tutorial (and have a very basic knowledge of VLANs, DNS and routing, maybe? Depending on your internal network). The hard part is making sure your downtimes are low or inexistants, and if you this, hire a devops.