I LOVE gitlab, but their new pricing is absurd. It feels like they are trying to shovelware their AI stuff. Their cheapest plan is more than 7x the cost of github, AND more expensive than github enterprise! And thats on the _cheapest_ non free gitlab plan. If you self host gitlab entirely, you can't even get branch/force-push protection. If they could bring their pricing to even just 2x github by having a NON-AI plan, I would purchase again in a heartbeat.
I had to go check to see what their pricing was, and I couldn't believe it. The base tier was $4/month, now that tier is gone and the premium tier is 2x what it used to be only 5 years ago.
You mean "Protected branches"? Last time I checked that was part of the free tier, and the documentation[0] states the same.
[0]: https://docs.gitlab.com/user/project/repository/branches/pro...