DevSecOps Platform · Self-Hosted Licensing
Self-Managed GitLab runs on infrastructure you own — your data centre, your cloud account, your rules. Indian teams choose it for one reason far more often than any other: source code and customer data must stay on infrastructure the company controls, usually because a client contract, a regulator or the DPDP Act made that a requirement rather than a preference. The licence price per seat is the same as GitLab.com, which surprises people. What is different is everything around it: you pay for the servers, the storage, the backups and the person who upgrades it. This page prices the whole thing honestly, not just the licence line.
Unlimited
Unlimited
Unlimited
Per instance
Per instance
Unlimited
The honest comparison is not licence-versus-licence — the seat price is identical — it is GitLab.com's included compute minutes and storage against your server, runner, storage, backup and admin bill. Self-Managed usually wins on cost only once CI load is heavy enough that GitLab-hosted compute minutes would be a large recurring top-up, or once residency is non-negotiable. On residency: the DPDP Act does not impose a blanket localisation mandate on all data, but sectoral rules do bite — RBI's payment data directions require payment system data to be stored in India, and many Indian enterprise and government contracts now carry their own residency clauses regardless of statute. Self-Managed on Indian infrastructure, or GitLab Dedicated deployed to an India region, both satisfy those. GitLab bills in USD and publishes no rupee rate card. Every INR figure here is a worked conversion at ₹95.2 to the dollar (the rate on 26 August 2026), shown pre-GST and indicative — it is not a GitLab list price, and it moves with the exchange rate. Buying GitLab directly from an Indian entity means a foreign remittance: 18% GST under reverse charge as an import of service, TDS on the payment, Form 15CA/CB paperwork, and no clean input tax credit trail. Bought through National IT Service you get a domestic INR invoice with GST charged on the face of it, which your CA can claim ITC against in the normal way. Licence activation is worth knowing about before renewal season: since GitLab 14.1 paid Self-Managed subscriptions activate with a cloud-licensing Activation Code rather than the legacy license-key file, and if you stop renewing, the instance does not lock you out of your code — it downgrades to Community Edition and the paid features simply stop working.
WhatsApp +91 98119 98370 with your seat count, where you plan to host (AWS Mumbai, a colocation rack, or your own data centre), and whether residency is a contractual requirement or a preference. We will size the instance, price the licence in INR with GST, and tell you plainly if GitLab Dedicated or GitLab.com works out cheaper for your load — self-hosting is not automatically the economical choice. Quotes typically take 3-5 working days; activation codes arrive within 24 hours of the PO clearing.
Not on the licence — Premium is $29 per user per month either way, and self-hosting earns no discount. Self-Managed becomes cheaper only when your CI load is heavy enough that GitLab-hosted compute minutes would cost a significant recurring top-up, because self-hosted runners consume no GitLab compute minutes at all. Against that you carry servers, storage, backups and upgrade engineering. For most teams under about 30 developers with moderate CI, GitLab.com works out cheaper once admin time is priced honestly.
It satisfies them if you host in India — self-hosting in an overseas cloud region does not help residency at all, which is a mistake we see regularly. The DPDP Act is not a blanket localisation mandate, but RBI's payment data directions require payment system data stored in India, and a large share of Indian enterprise and government contracts now carry explicit residency clauses. Self-Managed on AWS Mumbai, a Yotta or NTT facility, or your own Indian data centre meets those. GitLab Dedicated deployed to an India region does too, without you running the infrastructure.
For a production instance serving a mid-size team, plan on 8 vCPU and 16 GB RAM as a floor, with more for heavy CI, and keep CI runners on separate capacity — runners competing with the application server for CPU is the most common cause of "GitLab is slow" complaints. Add storage that grows with repositories, LFS objects and build artefacts, off-instance backups you have actually tested restoring, and ideally a staging instance to test upgrades on. Size it against your real repo count and pipeline volume rather than a generic table.
Nothing happens to the code. A Self-Managed instance that is not renewed downgrades to GitLab Community Edition — the repositories, issues and history all stay exactly where they are, and the paid-tier features stop working. That is a meaningfully softer failure mode than most enterprise software, and it is one of the genuine arguments for self-hosting: your source control does not become hostage to a renewal negotiation.
Since GitLab 14.1, paid Self-Managed subscriptions activate through cloud licensing using an Activation Code, which syncs subscription data with GitLab automatically — you no longer upload a new licence file at every renewal. The old static licence-key file has been a legacy method since 2022. If your instance is on cloud licensing, renewing simply synchronises the new terms down at the next subscription data sync. If you are still on a legacy key, you receive a new file to upload manually, and it is worth migrating.
Get GitLab Self-Managed licensed in INR with GST invoice — we size the instance, price the licence, and tell you if Dedicated is cheaper.