<p>GitLab.com is monitored 24/7. You can see its current and historic performance on our <atitle="status"href="http://status.gitlab.com/">status page.</a></p>
<h2>Why is GitLab.com free</h2>
<p>We offer GitLab.com for free to widen the audience for GitLab. The income we generate with <ahref="https://www.gitlab.com/subscription/">subscriptions for on-premise installations</a> is sufficient to cover the costs of GitLab.com and our work on the GitLab Community Edition. In the future we might expand our.com offerings based on customer demand. We will likely add paid extra's for costly services such as phone support. But we plan to continue to offer the core service for free.</p>
<p>We offer GitLab.com for free to widen the audience for GitLab. The income we generate with <ahref="https://www.gitlab.com/subscription/">subscriptions for on-premise installations</a> is sufficient to cover the costs of GitLab.com and our work on the GitLab Community Edition. In the future we might expand our.com offerings based on customer demand. We will likely add paid extra's for costly services such as customer support and CI. But we plan to continue to offer the core service for free.</p>
<p>
We think free public and private repositories will become the norm. Just like email accounts and pictures went from being paid to being free for almost all situations. The business model supporting email and pictures is advertising but we would like to see something less intrusive for repositories. Repositories are valuable because each one is a central point in the process that creates a digital product. We think this value will be monetized be in the form of offering paid add-ons that support this process. As an independent bootstrapped company we can affort to take a long term view on this.
</p>
<h2>Limitations</h2>
<p>
GitLab.com does not allow you to easily export your repositories, wiki's and issues to your own GitLab instance.
