Project management features pricing

We've been a customer of Gitlab.com since the start of this year, with a Silver subscription. We're a startup building a SaaS product so project and product management is a big deal for us. I've previously used a number of other tools including Gitlab in 2 previous companies and I'm not unhappy with Gitlab, although there are certainly weaknesses in the product management corner that have been addressed by other customers here.

My current beef is with pricing and specifically feature allocation in the package offerings. I generally get it, the free package is probably meant for private personal projects and doesn't include any more or less advanced project management features, which makes sense. The bronze package is probably designed for startups in the early stage of building their software and improves collaboration. The silver package includes features to automate your delivery, so it's probably compiled for the life cycle between launch and scale-up. The gold package includes a lot of features that I would deem suitable for enterprises (compliance, security, analytics). I hope this makes sense, it's what I get from the choices made.

However, project management, in my opinion, should not be an enterprise feature. We are building a product, we're shipping new features daily using Gitlab and are having an increasingly hard time managing that process without access to Epics or another way of bundling features together. We've been abusing labels to group these tickets together but this has quickly turned into a mess. A team as small as 4 programmers could easily go through 20-50 issues a week and if you're unable to correlate those tickets together while planning, it's very hard to deliver on business goals.

The thing is, we don't need Gold. We have silver because we're depending heavily on CI/CD and it's suitable for our current stage of life (also with regards to pricing). Still, paying an extra $1000.- per user for epics doesn't sit right with me. In fact, we won't be doing that and as a result are now considering moving away from Gitlab for project management, while our main reason for picking Gitlab (and only Gitlab) was that it would be an adequate all-in-one solution for our product development process.

Now, I know Github doesn't have Epics at all, but their issue board is, in my humble opinion, by far superior to the one Gitlab uses and quite suitable to use as a substitute for what we'd use Epics for, if done right. The Atlassian product offering (used by many, loathed by all) is much more composable and therefor a lot cheaper for most companies, because I'm only paying for the features I need, for the users who require those features. Moving to JIRA would feel like defeat, though.

In previous issues discussing this (like #6057 (closed) and gitlab-ce#58388) suggestions made to correct these imbalances were dismissed without any explanation which is, of course, your prerogative, but I'd really like some insight into what we're missing here. Is my understanding of your plan design incorrect? Do you feel your product management features in the Silver offering are suitable for startups? Are we using it wrong?