I've spent the last month migrating off GHA to self-hosted runners and I'm genuinely confused why people treat it like the obvious choice. Yeah, the UX is polished but you're paying per-minute for builds that take 30s to spin up a runner, dealing with their pricing opacity, and locked into their yaml schema. I set up circleci competitors (buildkite, dagger) in a weekend and cut CI costs by 70%. The tradeoff is real maintenance overhead but at scale it's actually worth it. is anyone else doing this or am I just being stubborn about vendor lock-in.