I'm pretty happy with codeberg.org as a free host.

Alternatively, Forgejo, Gitea, or (based on praise I've seen from other people) maybe sourcehut.org.

I find GitLab's interface intolerable. Heavy reliance on javascript even for read-only access, nonintuitive organization, common operations hidden behind menus, mystifying icons... Every time I seek out a project's home and discover a GitLab instance, I find myself pausing to reconsider whether contributing to the project will really be rewarding enough to outweigh the unpleasant experience I'm about to have.

What does VCM stand for?

Gitlab interface is busy, yeah. But you it packs a lot of functionality in. If you want, you disable features like wiki and snippets to free up space on the side bar of a project. Or just look past it and find the part you want, issues merge requests, whatever.

After working for years with GitLab professionally, you know exactly where everything is.

Particularly making a contribution should anyhow be trivial - you push the branch and it shows a banner in the repo asking if you want to open a MR for the recently pushed branch.

I don't know why anyone would use GitHub actions. They seem like a weird, less powerful version of the GitLab CI. Now they want to charge for runtime on your own runner.

We self host GitLab and it’s been amazing. Never down, all the features we need. And the CI is, at least for me, easier to understand than GH actions. You’re just running scripts in a container no weird abstractions.

codeberg.org for open source, because it's a non-profit, with what it seems, very well intentioned people, with a good governance structure, and it's starting to support federation.

For a company, I'd recommend self-hosting forgejo (which also has actions), which powers codeberg.

(forgejo started as a fork of gitea)

Gitea is almost fully compatible with the GitHub runners. You might need to do small changes in the workflows.

Gitea!

And the best (maybe?) part in your case is that the CI is based on GH Actions, so you can probably reuse your workflows without the need to adapt them.

Have been using Gitlab happily for a decade, though I have never had to directly worry about the cost for larger teams.

Self-hosted gitlab here. Love it, and gitlab CI is excellent as well. Almost all product development revolves around some crappy AI integration that we don't use, and it worries me to see so much focus there instead of the core product, but the core product is still excellent.

I will try Gitea -- thanks everyone for the recommendations

tangled.org is up and coming and uses ATProto!

Gitea has a fully compatible system AFAIK.

"Outrageous"? It's two tenths of a cent per minute. How much will it impact you, really, particularly relative to the cost of compute?

It's outrageous because self hosted runners are... self hosted.

And the entire solution just sucks. It's bad, bad software. It barely works a lot of the time.

The only reason they're doing this is because they can. Which is usually a really stupid reason. And here, it is. So, that's outrageous.

> because self hosted runners are... self hosted.

Sure, but there's a separate mechanism that you need to make it all work: the orchestration. Without that, you have only the capacity to run jobs -- it's potential energy, if you will, not doing real work.

That orchestrator thus provides real value. And it's not like it's free for them to build, operate, and maintain.

The CI pipeline using my own runner is absolutely something that I expect to come for free with hosting the repository.

At our company, it's ~35k USD increase annually. This is not negligeable.

That’s 2.5x what my actual runners cost. For every $100 in compute, I will be paying $250 to github. They can fuck right off

I'm curious - where are you finding runners for $0.0008/minute? What are their specs?

Ubicloud. Also faster than the analog runners github provide. Only problem is startup time is slower