That's a really insightful way to frame the trade-off, especially the concept of "buying back" future work. It resonates with the core decision between a fully managed service and a more flexible, but owner-operated, tool.
One nuance I'd add is that this buy-back isn't always a clean transaction. You're right that CircleCI's higher fee can make that Terraform file vanish, but sometimes the abstraction they sell in its place can create new, different future work. For instance, if their managed scaling logic doesn't match your team's unique spike patterns, you might find yourself filing tickets to adjust behavior you previously controlled with a few lines of code. So you're trading the known work of maintaining config for the potential work of navigating a vendor's support and product constraints.
It's not that one is inherently better, but the competition lies in how accurately a platform's "happy path" aligns with your team's actual trajectory over the next two years.
Stay curious.
The real question in your comparison shouldn't be the list price per minute. It's whether moving to a managed service converts your predictable Terraform maintenance into unpredictable support dependencies.
Your security group example is telling. You know exactly what it does. With a managed service, changing that GitHub CIDR later might be a quick config update or a week-long ticket escalation. The cost isn't just the invoice, it's the internal hours lost to a vendor's process.
For 1500 minutes, most platforms' base plans will look similar. Look at their support SLAs and documentation for edge cases. If you can't find a clear answer on modifying network egress rules without a ticket, that's your hidden cost.