"I want a hosted service which is free-libre and free-beer, and don't want the provider to charge or be acquired by a company, and don't want to do anything other than consume their service."
I do not ask for any more feature than they currently have in the free-libre version. I would not care if they were to be bought by X or Y. I am happy with them selling a non-free-libre version. Providing a basic free-libre, free-beer version that works and eventually wins other Github (free-beer version) would be very powerful marketing-wise.
The feature you're asking for is free hosting and maintenance. It's a totally reasonable business model to supply that either through a paid-plan, or by hosting only the non-libre version of the software.
As you've mentioned, hosting costs time, which is money. It also costs bandwidth and storage. That gets quite expensive when you're at the scale Gitlab is currently at.
I do not understand how that would require a change of their business model because they currently provide free hosting and maintenance for a version that I think has more features than the community edition.
It does have more features; they're banking on the fact that users who try out Gitlab will like those additional features, and thus will want to pay for the enterprise edition when their business decides to self-host.
Though I will say that this can be a sneaky business model. Users might not realize some of the features they depend on in the gitlab.com version isn't from the community edition.
