It exists yes, but you need to request access to it (which is manually reviewed), comes with a bunch of restrictions and it’s a limited resource.

I have several projects I’d want to move over but thats enough of a barrier for me to lose interest. There’s also Forgejo Actions but I assume paying for your own runner is probably more expensive than GitHub.

> you need to request access

Codeberg has free Forgejo Actions instance that you can use without a request, but with limited resources[1]:

> own runner is probably more expensive than GitHub

You can rent a VPS for as cheap as $15/year or run it locally.

[1] https://codeberg.org/actions/meta

CI is an important feature of a project to give automated feedback to contributors.

However I would not trust external contributors' code on my server.