I'm curious what you're replacing Actions with on the Forgejo side, and whether running that infra yourself feels like part of the benefit or another thing you'd rather not own

Forgejo has Runners that you can install on another server and register with Forgejo Actions. There might be 3rd party Runners you can pay to use, I've just run my own on a hardened VM.

My gh actions were straightforward and moved to forgejo runners with zero drama.

What makes it lightweight, and how does it boost your development over other saas solutions?

Easy to install , no external ci runners , everything is single binary Easy ci - no YAML complexity - just regular programming languages No devops knowledge is required to operate

nice old.reddit.com, but I don’t think people want something as far back as 2015, they just want their forge to stay boring and fast

Curious what's driving the self-hosting discussion most, reliability, control, or compliance? Disclosure, I run a managed forgejo service

If you move the company too, what would make you pay someone to run forgejo instead of self-hosting it? Disclosure, I run Fjord, a managed dedicated forgejo provider.

This is a fair criticism of hosted Forgejo in general. Running Forgejo is the easy part. Backups, restore testing, upgrades, isolation and actually operating it for years are the product. Disclaimer, I run one called Fjord

once you add multiple users, bare git stops feeling "just" pretty fast. do you need reviews/CI too, or only shared access?

Forgejo is a great fit for what you're describing. I run Fjord, which is managed Forgejo. Our dedicated instances are above your $5-10 budget, but we also run a free public Forgejo instance if you want to try it without operating anything yourself.

Disclaimer: I work at exe.dev

Forgejo has been great for me too. I liked it so much, I added a feature to make it relatively easy to get up and running on exe.dev. Support for Gitea and Tangle.org is also available.

I build Fjord, managed Forgejo with runners. The idea is to keep the GitHub-like workflow without having to operate the forge and CI infrastructure yourself.

This is exactly the migration problem we're trying to make boring with Fjord. It shouldn't require a flag day, bring up Forgejo alongside GitHub, mirror while the team moves over, then migrate CI incrementally.

For a 20–30 dev team I'd be happy to help work through what that rollout would actually look like