There's only a couple of missing features (for me, anyway) if you self host compared to the premium licensed self-hosted version (which, insanely, is the same price as the SaaS product!):

* CODEOWNERS

EDIT: Not true anymore! -- ~ * Protected branches (IE; preventing people committing to master/main) ~

* Approval Rules in merge requests

* Merge trains (auto-merging if another merge request depends on another).

* Viewing Jira issues in Gitlab

Merge trains would be nice, protected branches definitely exist.

Never missed the other features tbh

Protected branches is no longer premium-only.

I did a quick Slack bot that messages a channel with open merge requests every morning. I really wanted to show the approval status, too, just as a reminder for someone to go "oh, that's approved, I should go merge".

But the entire approval-related API fields are deliberately removed on free tier, not just the web UI "require approval" functionality. I found this to be pretty heavy handed, especially for a self-hosted instance.

Not trying to excuse the behavior but from what I've heard talking to other SaaS vendors... self-hosted is often priced similarly to the SaaS offering because even though the hosting costs are paid by the customer the support costs are often much higher.

I'm sure the hosting costs are a rounding error for Gitlab for the vast majority of ("cloud") customers. Knowing how big some repos are, storage is probably their biggest cost... and, coincidentally enough, they charge for that a la carte!

If you need the features in the Premium offering, you still have to purchase licensing.