Runner minutes from runners on gitlab online are limited to some certain amount according to some calculations… I dunno. But if you self-host your own runners, wherever they may exist (your own home lab in shell, in containers, in a k8s cluster, really a lotta options ) then you don’t pay anything to use your own runner minutes. I can tell you from experience they aren’t that difficult to get going and registered to your online gitlab workspace or self-hosted gitlab platform, simple matter of registering the runner with a token key given to you in the runner panel on gitlab, and providing it a TLS cert especially if you intend for the runners to interact with self-hosted container registries because then it will stop yelling at you.