> because self hosted runners are... self hosted.

Sure, but there's a separate mechanism that you need to make it all work: the orchestration. Without that, you have only the capacity to run jobs -- it's potential energy, if you will, not doing real work.

That orchestrator thus provides real value. And it's not like it's free for them to build, operate, and maintain.

The CI pipeline using my own runner is absolutely something that I expect to come for free with hosting the repository.