Yes, you were discussing free repos. I was discussing the $7/month repos that we use haha. And very quickly we learn one of the reasons people pay the money... because they want to automate their testing and deployment with third party integrations that are troublesome to maintain (or simply not compatible) with local setups.

Spend some time setting up Jenkins for a locally installed Git based CI/CD flow and let us know how “easy” it is and how it costs nothing to maintain.

Sure, simplistic home repos don’t need automated testing or CI/CD and in those cases, I use free repos from Gitlab... but any respectable company is going to automate their deployment process. Your example and claims of simple and free maintenance breaks down very quickly when faced with that very common requirement in many companies. I’ve worked in archaic Fortune 500 / financial industry that doesn’t trust the cloud at all and they had teams dedicated to maintaining Jenkins and the deployment processes.