The pricing model with GitLab is really unfortunate for certain types of companies. For our developers who really do most everything in Gitlab, it's great, but buying the same licenses for literally anyone else who might need to peek in there a couple of times a month? Hell naw.
Our spend would be much higher (probably 3-4x) if they allowed some type of reasonable mix of license levels.
Thats is what sales team is for. Talk to them, explain you usecase and set of features you are looking to use, they'll give you a discount based on that. If I remember correctly we managed to get a license for all users who ever need to login, but for the price of number of core active users.
Our spend would be much higher (probably 3-4x) if they allowed some type of reasonable mix of license levels.