Hi! GitLab Team Member here. Our Premium tier comes with 10,000 minutes per organization per month. You can also buy additional minutes or use your own infrastructure as runners (which would be at no charge from GitLab).

Just host your own runners https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/install/

That requires on-prem hardware (or I guess you could spin VMs up in the cloud, but I doubt that works out cheaper than hosted CI).

Hi, GitLab team member here. You can spin up a cloud instance, or dive deeper into auto-scaling the GitLab CI/CD runner: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2017/11/23/autoscale-ci-runner...

Depending on your needs, automatically managing and deploying this could also be interesting. We have started a new project called the "5 min production app": https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2020/12/15/first-code-to-ci-cd...

Alternatively, partners provide hosted runners, if that is an option for you: https://partners.gitlab.com/English/directory/search?f0=Serv...

It definitely is. On AWS, you can run it on spot instances with autoscaling. Including also networking price, it is an order of magnitude cheaper.