[deastman]

Hi Darren here PM for Runner.

Yes if you compare just the price of a compute minute, then it is fair to state that the per-minute price is more than other services or do-it-yourself Runner on public clouds. And, of course, with GitLab, you can easily attach a self-managed Runner to a group or project, as there are no limitations or additional pricing that would prevent you from doing so.

However, we believe that the value of the GitLab SaaS solution will save you additional overhead costs over the long term compared to a do-it-yourself build environment. And we will continue to add more value to GitLab SaaS in the coming months, which your developers will immediately be able to use.

[wdb]

$99/user/month is already quite steep to get improved visual widgets in pull requests, such as the licensing, vulnerability UIs. Especially, when you don't use the ticketing functionality of GitLab SaaS as you can't have group-wide tickets. Especially, when you need to contribute merge requests to a paying product to get support for popular package managers.

Personally, I think, needing to pay a lot more to get the same spec runners (same memory and two vCPUs) is not really competitive to compared to Github. I had hoped it Medium would become the standard runner instead of Small so it would be comparable to Github at least for the Premium and Ultimate customers. The idea of using SaaS is that you don't need to worry about self-managed runners.

Especially, when you compare it with the beta announcement from Github that they are introducing more powerful runners: https://github.blog/2022-09-01-github-actions-introducing-th...