Yes, if you are completely allergic to IT work, then your options are more limited. In terms of time, I would say the initial setup cost us a day or two, but after that our EC2 build box has just been fire and forget.

edit: I'll also add that in terms of time, I feel like most of the time in build pipelines is actually spent in tweaking, adding, and modifying the build configs, as opposed to the servers themselves (and you might also value developer time differently from devops time). I have found Buildkite easier to work with than CircleCI in this regard, and thus saved much more time overall.