Fair questions.
We're a company making WISP/ISP software here in India and our cloud (hosted) offering is also hosted on servers at our office itself[1]. Our infra manages hundreds of thousands of internet subscribers in India.
We're a small tech company with 25-30 people or so, with linux kernel experts who have experience of running software on questionable hardware so that service providers can take internet to new places in India, that experience helps a lot in keeping all our services up with minimum downtime.
Our office runs 24x7 with support. If anything goes down our business will be in jeopardy so we have protocol to be back up in minimum amount of time.
How many hours we spent on it? Less than a couple hours on setting up the self hosted gitlab instance. More time on getting people to get used to it and setting up the runner for CI, but I would have to spend that time on other paid solutions too.
As for time costing $0, definitely not, but people in India don't cost nearly as much as they do in the USA. Also because of experience with self hosting it is less of a deal for us to spend time on this.
[1] we have multiple bandwidth backup, electricity backup, etc needed to self host and we've always stuck with self hosting.