Actually, that's only for the Woodpecker instance. Forgejo Actions can be used without asking for permission, and three tiers of (Linux-only, adm64-only) free runners are provided.

Ok, that's very interesting. Last I checked only self-hosted runners were documented, but I definitely want to look into this.

Been a while since I applied, but when I did the "reasonable case" was mostly just your repo being FOSS and having a license file (+ a very vague description of what you plan to do and how much resources you'll use)