I’m curious who carries out your data and research? Also, I’m curious who actually thought that those results were a great idea?
First Gitlab dropped the starter package, starting price now at $19 per user - which when Github has a $4 per user, you really are pricing yourselves out of the market. Even with that said, Github still has free user limits, with far less restrictions than Gitlab.
Now you limit the amount of users to a namespace, which is also far less than Github since collaborators at Github for public/private is unlimited.
So I’d like to hear of both research/data result sets which made you came to the conclusion that you should cripple your platform so much? All you are doing is simply pushing everyone away from Gitlab and on to Github. Github must be thanking you for all the users who would have wanted to pay for starter since it was pretty much the same price as Github Pro. But since you dropped that package you lost all that possible income. Now restricting the amount of users to a namespace or collaboration if you like to 5 users, you are pushing even more people to Github since they have unlimited collaboration.
Also, whilst I appreciate that open source projects can write to Gitlab and ask for their project to be given the ability to have more users than the limit - that is actually a pretty lame way of going about it. They can create a project/repo on Github, and do everything without having to make a request to increase the limit because there is no limit for collaboration. I could understand such a move to get Ultimate/pro features, but just to increase over 5 users is poor when by default that can be done elsewhere with zero hassle whatsoever.
Not only that, Gitlab and it’s communication is pretty poor when they take way too long to respond to support tickets that are opened anyway since if the user is a free user, the reply goes something along the lines of you don’t have a subscription. Anyone making such a request for open source projects to increase the namespace limit will be a free user, so you really need to address that properly and respond properly than just ignoring the request because Gitlab checked that they don’t have a subscription (free user) and ignore the request. Alternatively, create on the support ticket platform the appropriate option so that whoever responds actually doesn’t ignore free users and addresses their issues appropriately. For example, create an open source support request category (or something appropriate) and ensure that free users who do open a support ticket, get dealt with accordingly.
The only one I see winning here is Github. Gitlab has nothing to gain from this scenario and in fact has far much more to lose.