I find it funny people are up in arms and complaining, out of all places, on HN, where start-up culture should be more prevalent and aware of the costs it takes to run a business and maintain its operational capacity.

Nothing is free. It might be free to you, but Travis CI has to pay for the compute resources to run your free builds.

At the end of the day, never build your product or infrastructure on free services without planning on eventually paying for it and budgeting for it.

If you want a full CI/CD pipeline, there's plenty of open source tools. You can run it on your own hardware, which is what most do for builds as it's cheaper, or incorporate AWS spot instances if you want to run at the lowest cloud compute cost.