Charging for self-hosted runners is an interesting choice. That's the same cost as their smallest hosted runners [1]
[1] - https://docs.github.com/en/billing/reference/actions-runner-...
Really Dianne?
Also quite expensive!
It does have a big 'it shouldn't be this expensive' energy, but the market has shown it needs to be unfortunately. Nobody really survives in the CI world without going to complete neglect mode or goes expensive like buildkite I've found. It reminds me a lot of home automation / IoT. Lutron costs almost $100 a light switch for really silly economic reasons unfortunately even though the tech is basically unchanged since the 90s.
The interface is also geeky because the only people who are going to even realize you need to spend money on this are other software professionals.
(ofc, that'd only mean they stop updating the status page, so eh)
After like day 2 my workflows would take 10-15 minutes past their trigger time to show up and be queued. And switching to the self hosted runners didn't change that. Happens every time with every workflow, whether the workflow takes 10 seconds or 10 minutes.
Edit: Confused GitLab and Bitbucket
I don't know if it's worth the amount they are targeting, but it's definitely not zero either.
ZIRP ended, its remaining monopoly money has been burnt through, and the projected economy is looking bleak. We're now in the phase where everything that can be monetized is being monetized in every way that can be managed.
Free tiers evaporate. Fees appear everywhere. Ads appear everywhere, even where it was implied they wouldn't. The lemons must be squeezed.
And because everybody of relevance is in that mode, there's little competitive pressure to provide a specific rationale for a specific scheme. For the next few years, that's all the justification that there needs to be.
I thought that "Bitbucket" was in your original post and you added only your edit message to say that it was, in fact, Gitlab and not Bitbucket that added cost for self-hosted runners.