GitLab has declared it will stop providing free CI/CD for private repos hosted on GitHub this month. Definitely, finally, once and for all.

The repo to DevOps vendor introduced CI/CD for GitHub way back in March, 2018, saying that “While GitLab is designed to use SCM & CI/CD in the same application, we understand the appeal of using GitLab CI/CD with GitHub version control.”

At the time, it said the feature would be free for a year. That deadline was extended, first to September 2019, and then again to March 22, 2020. Each time, the rationale was the same. 

“We don’t currently have all of the instrumentation in place to give us confidence that we can appropriately notify users, so we’ll spend some time in the coming months to build this ability,” it said.

At the same time, it continued “we’ve seen greater interest in using GitLab CI/CD with other Git hosting options” and wanted to give customers more time to test it out, while also gaining more feedback.

Well, presumably, it’s gotten its instrumentation right now – recent bumps around telemetrics aside – as the move is on, and no more extensions.

Hence, according to GitLab, “If you wish to continue using CI/CD for private external repositories past March 22, 2020, you will need to upgrade your plan to at least a Silver plan.”

Alternatively, users can migrate their repos to GitLab.com, with the company helpfully pointing out that, “As part of our commitment to our value of transparency and open source, all public repositories on GitLab.com get all of the features in our top-tier Gold plan for free. If your repo on GitHub.com is public, then it gets mirrored to GitLab.com as a public repo and you have access to CI/CD capabilities.”