It's not as bad as you think, I run the helm upgrade when patches come out, the backing store is S3 or managed SQL, it runs a nightly k8s cron called gitlab-backup which tarballs the whole thing into an s3 bucket with a single command restore should disaster strike. (This is part of the product, not a thing I wrote.)

I probably only babysit it for 30 minutes per year, including all the upgrades.

It depends how high you value your headaches, and how high, your org's downtime. Github not working accrues over the hourly rate of every developer affected, which is likely $70-$100 a hour. 10 hours of outage in a year affecting a team of 10 would cost north of $70k, enough to hire a part-time SRE dedicated just to tend to your Gitlab installation.

>10 hours of outage in a year affecting a team of 10 would cost north of $70k

10 hours x 10 developers x $70 per hour = $7000, not $70000.

Thank you for the correction! This indeed completely changes the picture :-\

^ this. the last thing i want is to add to my workload. take my money and make my life easier, even if it means that for one hour every couple months i can't do anything

Have you ever actually hosted gitlab?

Not only have I hosted it, I've helped migrate two gitlab instances to github enterprise, because we didn't want to maintain it anymore

Don't you still have to maintain github enterprise?

It's the cloud managed one, they have an "enterprisey" license that gives you more features/limits but you don't have to run infra, upgrades, patches etc