> And therein lies the business model of throwing good money after bad, and that's not even taking into consideration the enormous cost benefits of self-hosting with one's own physically colocated hardware infra and a meager full time staff.

First, depending on where you are taking about, “meager” full time staff for that 5 minute response time would be a few hundred thousand dollars because you’d need multiple people per site to be on-call. Could those people do other things? Maybe! But thinking you can hire people for $35 an hour to be on-call or on-site if the servers go down is really misguided. In some parts of the world, that might be possible, but having multiple full-time staff to hit that “5 minute response time” claim is still going to be more expensive than you let on.

Second, you now get to multiply this figure by however many different regions you are in that have to be physically isolated for GDPR or other compliance reasons. And if you’re doing any government work? Well, that requires special audits (that are not cheap and governments love to spend money, regardless is where they are based) and very specific data residency rules and requirements. Even if you’re not contracting with a government, highly regulated industries have very specific data residency rules that must be followed that your local colo may or may not be able to handle. And if it does, that colo is often a lot more expensive than usual.

> Not batting an eye, or rather, "...so much as blinked", as you said, are bourne of business models with factored in wreckless budget kruft that may at first be acceptable until one merely scratches the surface of cost savings.

This reads to me like something a consultancy firm that hasn’t actually done the long-term math would say.

Look, for businesses of a specific size, I do agree that self-hosting can be a more efficient and economical model. But that size changes based on usage and is often elastic.

A smaller business that doesn’t already have its own on-prem setup already and needs single-tenant stuff for regulatory reasons is probably better off looking at getting a dedicated offering from Gitlab or using a third-party vendor who is setup to handle and manage that stuff for them. The hard costs (capex) are often large upfront and taxes work differently (amortized over time for capex) versus the economics on cloud (opex), which might provide some tax savings that are more beneficial.

A business of a certain size and volume who likely can amortize the costs better over time and has a lot of dedicated staff to do their own specialized and customized work, and who is already very deep in the regulated space? They are going to be better off self-hosting.

But the super huge businesses that have hundreds of thousands of employees and need to follow data residency requirements in dozens of regions? They are probably better off using a mix of both. Dedicated on-prem self-hosting in areas where they have lots of clients and business. Use a single tenancy SaaS for places that have high regulatory needs but that aren’t huge business centers (or that are in regions where it is difficult to setup your own tenancy or where you aren’t incorporated as a business).

There are trade-offs with everything. And this is a product that isn’t for 95% of the businesses out there. But for those that it is for, for a lot of places — especially places that don’t count devops as a core competency or product focus — it’s useful and not blinking an eye at the price doesn’t mean people are burning money. It means that the service is of value for their time and energy and focus.

Disclosure: I work at GitHub, who is obviously one of Gitlab’s competitors. But I find this knee-jerk “just self-host” rhetoric to really miss the nuance of all of this stuff.