> justification of that fee

ZIRP ended, its remaining monopoly money has been burnt through, and the projected economy is looking bleak. We're now in the phase where everything that can be monetized is being monetized in every way that can be managed.

Free tiers evaporate. Fees appear everywhere. Ads appear everywhere, even where it was implied they wouldn't. The lemons must be squeezed.

And because everybody of relevance is in that mode, there's little competitive pressure to provide a specific rationale for a specific scheme. For the next few years, that's all the justification that there needs to be.

Your edit made your post confusing for us now...

I thought that "Bitbucket" was in your original post and you added only your edit message to say that it was, in fact, Gitlab and not Bitbucket that added cost for self-hosted runners.

Actually, Atlassian is just getting rid of their on-prem hosted software all together. It’s not a product they will offer any longer.

I initially felt a bit offended when I saw this. Then I thought about it and at the end of the day there's a decent amount of infrastructure that goes into displaying the build information, updating it, scanning for secrets and redacting, etc.

I don't know if it's worth the amount they are targeting, but it's definitely not zero either.

That's a surprise, do you have a link to their announcement?