Instead of giving cash to use I would encourage people to move their projects and contribute by adding the features they need or helping our people, see https://about.gitlab.com/about/#donations
A bit late responding to this thread, due to sleep.
I recently started to mirror my repositories between GitHub and GitLab (they're just really small R packages).
It was very simple to update my local git config file so that "git push origin master" now pushes changes to both GitHub and GitLab.
I've also made it clear in the README how to install from GitLab.
Three minor annoyances:
* GitLab doesn't support Rmarkdown in .Rmd files, so my vignettes look great on GitHub, but not GitLab.
* I wanted to start an R Group (and did so), where people could share their R related projects all in one place. Unfortunately, as the projects are only shared with the group, they don't display when publically looking at the group if not signed in.The group image is also broken. [0]
* Relative links don't quite work the same, so some README links still only point to GitHub, as they were broken on the GitLab mirror. (Might just be user error!)
I also have a self-hosted installation running for a couple of private projects. It's on a small DO instance and does thrash resources a little, but generally works fine for two developers.
One thing that more recent code hosting sites miss out is mailing list hosting, for less structured discussions between users and developers, or for providing a private group contact address for the developers.
We do not think that paying for hosting itself makes sense, see https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-com/#why-gitlab-com-will-be-...
Instead of giving cash to use I would encourage people to move their projects and contribute by adding the features they need or helping our people, see https://about.gitlab.com/about/#donations