alt Hacker NewsYou know that making CI/CD doesn’t mean you have to pay boatloads of money to a vendor.
Putting up bash script that pulls repo and deploys it is already CI/CD.
Setting up basic Jenkins installation for a technical person should not be taking longer than 2 hours. For person who already is familiar with Jenkins that would be 30mins.
Once you have paying customers I would say there should be max and minimum 2 devs that can fiddle with prod. Others should pass changes via senior people.
A truly lean team (say, <=5 people and limited project scope) should be able to live off their code forge's free CI/CD minutes, or whatever is included in the basic tier they're running. Just run the suite on a schedule against trunk instead of on every PR.
If not, then that's a good signal they should invest more into their CI/CD setup, and like you said it's not necessarily a huge investment, but it can be a barrier depending on skills.