> Well, at the cost of "you reading the manual and installing it on a VPS"
... And managing and maintaining that server and backups of it. $2500 a year starts to look pretty reasonable when you consider the amount it will cost you to put one of your developers on to setting it up and maintaining it. Not to mention the peace of mind of not having to worry about disaster recovery.
Setting up is a real cost, but I manage users on our corporate github and our self hosted gitolite; for github, the user gives me their username, and I add it (after looking up my password), gitolite I add their public key to a directory and their username to a file and git commit; git push. Not a lot of difference.
I don't worry about backing up the git repos, one of the promises of git is that every person who checks out the repo has a full copy, any of which we could use for a backup (helpful if we get a recent checkout).
Third party hosting hopefully has a good disaster recovery plan, but the disaster could be your hosting provider quietly went out of business and everything is offline.
Literally the only time I have had to administer my GitLab setup in any way was when my SSL certificate was about to expire. It's really very solid, and all of the user management can be done from the web front-end.
GitLab is easy to upgrade via apt-get/yum with the Omnibus packages. But if you want a maintenance free GitLab please consider GitLab.com or our GitHost.io service for single tenant hosting.
... And managing and maintaining that server and backups of it. $2500 a year starts to look pretty reasonable when you consider the amount it will cost you to put one of your developers on to setting it up and maintaining it. Not to mention the peace of mind of not having to worry about disaster recovery.