There's always opportunity costs. What about regular maintenance and updates? What happens when a bug appears? What if the disk is full?

Working 50% freelance and 50% revenue-generating niche side-project, I always calculate my time costs. Assuming I earn $80 an hour as a freelancer and a hosted git costing $10 a month, if I estimate I will need an additional 15mins a month if I go self-hosted, then I'll pay for the hosted version.

I've seen enough projects, where they decided to self-host gitlab, only to have issues like disk full, updates needed, deployments not initiating.

When suddenly a team of 10 can't push or deploy for a day, there's additional costs there as well.