They’re not an open source friendly company. They’re actively hostile to open source, even defaulting to providing you with a non open-source free version to self install, and making it hard to find the actual open source version.
And their management of the open source repo is also highly restrictive.
Which is their right. And maybe even the right thing to do, but what doesn’t make sense is giving them any brownie points for being “open source”.
I've been a huge fan of GitLab for years as well, but this is the problem. Every place I've gone, I could never justify spending money for their paid version. And I so desperately wanted to! Some of that was the ridiculous "all users are paid even if they are just looking at the web GUI and not actually doing anything". But not all.
But I have to agree with you. The pricing is outrageous. It was already way over-priced, now it is just insane. They shot themselves in the foot hard by making you buy all the things instead of some a la carte (which made incremental adoption highly expensive), and it is impossible to make a business case for adopting Gitlab. In addition Gitlab has gotten slower and less usable.
I still have warm feelings for Gitlab so I hope they will hear this plea: Please, make your prices more competitive and reasonable and don't force an "all or nothing" scenario because you're gonna lose a lot more than you win.