Build vs Buy is a very individual decision that should be based on your team and your product.
At my last employer, we used a free tier of CI/CD through CircleCI as it was sufficient enough and easy to spin up for testing a couple of small internal libraries we needed to hook things together with a SaaS product we were using. We weighed the benefits and came up with a number that balanced the estimated cost of implementation and running cost of self-hosted against the free tier offering and estimated cost of implementation there.
Once you factor in engineering costs and the additional server to maintain, it made sense to go hosted for us. But every team is different, and hardware cost isn't the only thing. You need to consider the running cost of utilities, maintenance, and in the case of larger equipment, even cooling costs.
That said, for personal projects, yeah, I just kick things onto my home file server, since it's running anyways, and normally has nearly no load other than managing my ZFS and occasional backup operations.
At my last employer, we used a free tier of CI/CD through CircleCI as it was sufficient enough and easy to spin up for testing a couple of small internal libraries we needed to hook things together with a SaaS product we were using. We weighed the benefits and came up with a number that balanced the estimated cost of implementation and running cost of self-hosted against the free tier offering and estimated cost of implementation there.
Once you factor in engineering costs and the additional server to maintain, it made sense to go hosted for us. But every team is different, and hardware cost isn't the only thing. You need to consider the running cost of utilities, maintenance, and in the case of larger equipment, even cooling costs.
That said, for personal projects, yeah, I just kick things onto my home file server, since it's running anyways, and normally has nearly no load other than managing my ZFS and occasional backup operations.