Enterprise Git Hosting Got Expensive as Hell in 2025

GitHub's March 4th announcement was expert-level customer fucking without technically lying. They called it "modularity" - splitting one $40/month security package into two separate charges totaling $49/month.

Here's what actually happened to our budget:

• Before: GitHub Enterprise $21 + Advanced Security $40 = $61/user/month
• After: GitHub Enterprise $21 + Secret Protection $19 + Code Security $30 = $70/user/month
• Reality: Same features, over $100K more annually for 1,000 users

The "Free Tier" Trap That Gets Everyone

GitHub's "unlimited repositories" sounds great until you actually use it. GitHub's free tier gives you 2,000 CI/CD minutes monthly and 500MB storage. That's enough for maybe 10 developers doing minimal CI/CD - basically toy projects.

We burned through those 2,000 minutes in 6 days with 25 developers running standard CI/CD pipelines. Storage hit the limit when someone committed a 600MB Docker image to the wrong repo (thanks, Steve). GitHub's overage billing kicked in immediately at $0.08/minute. Suddenly you're paying overage costs or forced to upgrade.

GitLab's free tier is even more restrictive: 400 minutes and 10GB storage with a 5-user limit for private repos. Their September 2025 pricing structure shows they're doubling down on forcing upgrades - they added AI features to paid tiers while keeping the free tier deliberately constrained.

Self-Hosted: Great Idea Until You Actually Do It

Everyone thinks self-hosting will save money until they realize what's actually involved. We looked at self-hosted GitLab after getting tired of cloud pricing. The math looked promising:

• Cloud GitLab Ultimate: Nearly $600K/year for 500 users
• Self-hosted: Around $45K license + infrastructure

Sounds like a no-brainer, right? Wrong.

Reality check: Self-hosted GitLab needs 32GB RAM minimum or it crawls like a dying laptop. Our first attempt with 16GB was a joke - merge requests took forever to load, maybe 30 seconds on a good day. Then you need backup storage that doesn't shit the bed, SSL certs that don't expire during your vacation, and security patches that occasionally break everything. Plus someone who actually knows PostgreSQL, which is basically finding a unicorn these days.

By the time we factored in infrastructure costs (probably $3-5K/month) and a dedicated DevOps engineer ($120K+/year), we were barely breaking even at 300+ users. Break-even for GitHub Enterprise Server is even worse - closer to 400 users due to higher operational complexity.

The Compliance Tax Is Real

Regulated industries get screwed the hardest. Banking and healthcare can't use free tiers - period. GitHub Enterprise Cloud includes SOC 2 Type 2 and FedRAMP, but you're paying enterprise prices from day one.

Financial services clients I've worked with typically see 25-40% cost premiums for:

• Premium support contracts (because regular support is useless when you're down)
• Extended audit logging (180 days minimum, usually 7 years)
• Dedicated customer success managers (translation: someone who actually answers the phone)
• Data residency guarantees (your code stays in your region)

A 100-person fintech startup ends up paying enterprise prices ($8K+/month minimum) when they should be on a startup plan. Compliance doesn't care about your budget.

Git hosting pricing is designed to hide the real costs until you're locked in. Every vendor has their own way of screwing you - some are just more obvious about it.

GitHub's Death by a Thousand Add-ons

GitHub's pricing is like ordering at a restaurant where everything costs extra. Base GitHub Enterprise gets you git repos and basic CI/CD. Want security? That'll be extra. Need compliance? More money. AI coding help? Another add-on.

Here's what a "complete" GitHub Enterprise setup actually costs:

• GitHub Enterprise - $21/user (just git repos and basic CI/CD)
• Secret Protection - $19/user (finds hardcoded API keys and passwords)
• Code Security - $30/user (SAST that generates 2,000 false positives per week)
• GitHub Copilot Business - $19/user (AI that suggests `if (true) return true;`)
• Jira - $14/user (because GitHub Issues sucks for real project management)
• Premium Support - $8/user (so someone actually answers when shit breaks)

Total damage: $111/user/month, plus the poor bastard you'll hire just to coordinate support tickets between GitHub, Atlassian, and whatever other vendors you're stuck with. That's probably $75K/year of pure overhead, maybe more if you're unlucky.

GitLab: Pay More, Get Everything (Whether You Want It or Not)

GitLab Ultimate costs $99/user and includes literally everything - security scanning, project management, compliance frameworks, CI/CD, monitoring, the kitchen sink. It's either brilliant or overkill depending on your perspective.

The good: No surprise add-ons. No vendor management headaches. When you need SAST scanning, it's already there. When compliance asks for SOC 2 reports, they're built-in. When your CI/CD needs get complex, GitLab handles it.

The bad: You're paying for a Ferrari when you might only need a Honda. Small teams using 20% of GitLab's features are subsidizing the rest. But honestly? After dealing with GitHub's nickel-and-diming, predictable pricing feels like a luxury.

Reality check: GitLab's shared runners are slow as hell during peak hours. Their container registry occasionally shits the bed. Support is better than GitHub's but that's not saying much. Still, for $99/user you get what would cost $111/user on GitHub with way less vendor management hassle.

The Migration Tax No One Talks About

Switching git platforms is expensive as hell. We've done GitHub to GitLab migrations - budget at least $50K for a medium-sized team, up to half a million for complex orgs that have really screwed themselves over architecturally.

What breaks during migration:

• GitHub Actions workflows (goodbye 47,000+ custom actions, hello rewriting everything)
• Branch protection rules (they don't map 1:1 between platforms)
• Webhooks and integrations (prepare for a weekend of fixing broken services)
• Team permissions (everyone's access gets fucked up somehow)
• CI/CD artifact storage (hope you didn't depend on those build caches)

Time investment: Plan 3-6 months minimum, probably longer if you're being honest. The first month migrating repos is easy. Months 2-6 fixing all the shit that broke is where the real cost lives.

Vendor lock-in is real: GitHub Actions Marketplace has 47,000+ custom actions. Good luck finding GitLab CI/CD equivalents. Azure DevOps release pipelines are so Microsoft-specific they might as well be written in Klingon.

The Pricing Trend: Up, Up, and Away

GitHub's 2025 price hike proved that enterprise customers will pay whatever vendors demand. When Microsoft jacked up prices 23% and customers mostly just grumbled and paid, the message to every other vendor was crystal clear: there's more money to be made.

BitBucket pricing has stayed artificially low because Atlassian hasn't figured out how to monetize it properly. But with their Data Center deprecation and forced cloud migration, expect that to change fast. Azure DevOps keeps bundling more services into \"productivity suites\" at higher prices, betting enterprise IT departments won't unbundle.

The real pain is coming for self-hosted options. Vendors realized cloud margins suck compared to licensing software at on-premises prices. GitLab's self-managed Ultimate costs the same as cloud - there's no infrastructure savings passed to you.