How does it work? Thank's to GitLab's excellent support for using external runners, all we need is the URL to report to (which can be your very own GitLab instance), and a runner key, which is provided by the GitLab UI. You pay us to keep the machine running (cheaper than a t2.micro !), and we take care of keeping the machine running while your jobs get processed.

What kind of jobs can the CI runner run? The CI runner can run anything you'd normally run on the runners on GitLab.com -- we keep our runners up to date with the official gitlab-runner repository.

What about storage space for cross-job caching? Yes they do! For every one dedicated core, you can make use of 25GB (so 2 vCores means 50GB) of HDD storage to use with your runs. If you find that your workloads need more, contact us!

Why not just use a t2.micro EC2 instance? While there are a lot of variables to consider in trying to price EC2 pricing, overall Runner Club is cheaper to run than EC2 for this usecase. t2.micro (up to 1C, 2GB) rarely cost less than $8 outside of the free tier and can cost twice that, especially if you use on-demand instances.

Compare these prices to EC2 instances which generally start at ~$10 for a t2.micro (1 vCore + 1GB RAM)!

Why shouldn't I just use a $5 Digital Ocean(tm) droplet? Digital Ocean is a great and affordable choice if your workloads can fit, however according to DO's pricing page, that means a 1vCPU + 1GB of RAM. Often workloads that take a long time that you might want to offload are precisely the ones that need more than 1GB of RAM on the runner machine to run effectively -- the more comparable droplet is the 2GB variant which is more expensive.

Why Runner Club instead of an Auto Scaling Group on AWS or GCE? Runner Club currently isn't a better option than ASGs on major cloud providers, if interruptions in your CI build pipeline are tolerable. Setting up an autoscaling on services like AWS and GCE is a fantastic option -- GitLab even provides documentation on autoscaling on AWS. Currently Runner Club can't orchestrate this for you (it's on the roadmap along with pay-for-use billing). Sign up for our mailing list to be alerted when the feature is available.

What about pay-for-use billing? We're working on more granular billing, but it's not done yet -- sign up for our mailing list to learn when it gets introduced!