For your particular use case, you could use the same cluster for multiple environments if you have separate namespaces and use separate service accounts for each. Using RBAC will further ensure you don't have any collisions, this way if there's an error in development, the production namespace will remain untouched.
When deciding which features are paid vs free we ask ourselves if the particular feature may be more relevant to larger organizations; that doesn't necessarily mean there won't be a use case at smaller companies, but just wanted to let you know our reasoning. You can read more about it here: https://about.gitlab.com/stewardship#what-features-are-paid-....
For your particular use case, you could use the same cluster for multiple environments if you have separate namespaces and use separate service accounts for each. Using RBAC will further ensure you don't have any collisions, this way if there's an error in development, the production namespace will remain untouched.
When deciding which features are paid vs free we ask ourselves if the particular feature may be more relevant to larger organizations; that doesn't necessarily mean there won't be a use case at smaller companies, but just wanted to let you know our reasoning. You can read more about it here: https://about.gitlab.com/stewardship#what-features-are-paid-....