Our Code Search team is currently working on moving to Zoekt[0] which is expected to be a significant improvement as it is purpose-built for code search.
We also shipped an improvement[1] to our existing search functionality at the end of last year. If you haven't used it recently, I'd encourage you to check out code search again to see if the quality has been improved for you.
I'd encourage you to take a fresh look at the Free tier. 89% of the features in Bronze/Starter are available in the Free tier - including the more than 450 new features that were added to Free in the last year.
Hi! GitLab Team Member here. Our Premium tier comes with 10,000 minutes per organization per month. You can also buy additional minutes or use your own infrastructure as runners (which would be at no charge from GitLab).