Bitbucket was certainly more generous than GitHub at the time. I used them too. Their problem was the pricing structure. The break between "free" and "
all your money, please" felt pretty harsh. They always appeared to be pushing very industrial companion tooling (eg Jira) which might have suited enterprise customers but wasn't very helpful to a freelancer. That's pretty common in SaaS. Enterprise is easier than volume.
By contrast GitLab's tiers are... Cheap. And it's perfectly feasible to do professional, modern CI flows on their free tier.
It'll be interesting to see what happens next.