I have just deleted two forks I had of the GitLab project in my gitlab.com account. I did this after receiving a warning that quotas would now start to be enforced. It didn't say that I was going over quota, so I actually had to go look in the usage quotas page, which stated I was using 5.6GB of storage.
I found that puzzling: maybe wallabako? I build images there in CI... Or the ISOs in stressant?
Nope. The biggest disk users were... my forks of gitlab-ce and
gitlab-ee (now respectively called gitlab-foss and gitlab-ee,
but whatever). CE was taking up roughly 1GB and EE was taking up the
rest.
So I deleted both repos, which means that the next time I want to contribute a fix to their documentation — which is as far as I managed to contribute to GitLab — I will need to re-fork those humongous repositories.
Maybe I'm reading this wrong. Maybe there's a bug in the quotas system. Or, if I'm reading this right, GitLab is actually double-billing people: once for the source repository, and once for the fork. Because surely repos are not duplicating all those blobs on disk... right? RIGHT?
Either case, that's rather a bad move on their part, I feel like. With GitHub charging 4$/user/month, it feels like GitLab is going to have to trouble to compete by charging 20$/user/month as a challenger...
But maybe it's just me: I'm not an economist, surely there's some brilliant plan here I'm missing...
In the meantime, free-ish alternatives include Quay.io (currently free for public repos) and sr.ht (2$/mth, but at least not open-core, unfortunately no plan for a container registry). And of course, you can painfully self-host GitLab, sr.ht, gitea, pagure, or whatever it is the current fancy gitweb.