Throw in a feature like epics or roadmaps and some CI time for $5/mo and I would have been on it, but $20/mo is too much for how few of the premium features I'd use. I'd just always assumed this tier didn't exist because the opportunity lost with long tail consumers was weighed up against the possible of business users downgrading to a lower tier. But then they could just go with the jetbrains model, and have the exact same tier have two different prices depending on whether the buyer is an individual or a business, if they're worried about that. Call it Gitlab Premium Personal or something.
That said, the youtube-dl github drama did push me into self hosting my private projects and mirrors of at-risk projects on Gitea, so that window has closed now. Also Gitea is a lot nicer than Gogs was the previous time I compared gitlab against other options. But gitlab is still for now my host for public projects.
We buy compute time periodically and that is a small amount I guess.
We happily pay Bitbucket for our backup storage. I'm sure we'd pay for our code storage if that was required.
Maybe $5/person/month is not a lot for active projects a business relies upon, but the 90% of hobby and (semi-) dormant projects would be deleted or moved to GitHub if Gitlab tried to ask money for them. Which would reduce the attractivity of the platform.
GitLab has nothing to compete against that.
Instead of arguing "we need to cut costs", why don't they work on an entry-level paid tier? Seriously, it is like they're not even trying to compete with GH at this level.