Running something locally is not necessarily free either. Even if maybe the "host" is for free (which I can not imagine, unless someone throw something at you), it will still require your time to setup and ensure its running.

For private/small open source projects I would highly welcome such a pricing tier from travis-ci but 69USD is just not in my pocket (not saying its unjustified though!).

For larger open-source projects that rely on many builds throughout the day/month, this might be a bigger problem.

So while its "free" marketing, it might be much more crucial to our open-source structure than we think it is (which might be a problem as well).

And I think we can all agree: open source software is an important part not only for the industry but our lives :)