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Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

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Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#51
post #3
post #2

> We are introducing a $0.002 per-minute Actions cloud platform charge for all Actions workflows across GitHub-hosted and self-hosted runners. Charging for self-hosted runners is an interesting choice. That's the same cost as their smallest hosted runners [1] [1] - https://docs.github.com/en/billing/reference/actions-runner-...

Yep - Bitbucket made a similar move recently and I guess they are just following along. I'd love to get the justification of that fee tho… Edit: Confused GitLab and Bitbucket

> justification of that fee

ZIRP ended, its remaining monopoly money has been burnt through, and the projected economy is looking bleak. We're now in the phase where everything that can be monetized is being monetized in every way that can be managed.

Free tiers evaporate. Fees appear everywhere. Ads appear everywhere, even where it was implied they wouldn't. The lemons must be squeezed.

And because everybody of relevance is in that mode, there's little competitive pressure to provide a specific rationale for a specific scheme. For the next few years, that's all the justification that there needs to be.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#52

Introducing a separate charge specifically targeting those of your customers who choose to self-host your hilariously fragile infrastructure is certainly a choice.. And one I assume is in no way tied to adoption/usage-based KPIs. Of course, if you can just fence in your competition and charge admission, it'd be silly to invest time in building a superior product.

This is absolutely bananas; for my own CI workflow I'll have to pay $140+/month now just to run my own hardware.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#53
post #38

I have a love-hate relationship with GitHub Actions. Love because they are right there in my GitHub repository. Hate because they are very brittle once you move out of the happy path. It seems GitLab has a much better experience in this department, but their pricing is hard to justify for us... Genuinely curious if folks here had better experiences or recommendations for a smooth CI/CD experience.

Love-hate for me as well. Love that there is native github integration for triggering events and other github bits. Hate the brittleness and anymore the reliability even if you are just using the control plane. I've always sought to keep my actions as mainly just calling existing scripts, that is keep logic out of them and make them relatively dumb wrappers but it would still be some effort to get off it.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#54
That's not a move of a company that thinks it can still grow. That's a Netflix "we have 90% of the market, let's squeeze them" move. This is the beginning. We have all seen this pattern over the last 5+ years. You know their next few moves.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#55

Introducing a separate charge specifically targeting those of your customers who choose to self-host your hilariously fragile infrastructure is certainly a choice.. And one I assume is in no way tied to adoption/usage-based KPIs. Of course, if you can just fence in your competition and charge admission, it'd be silly to invest time in building a superior product.

Meanwhile I'm just running `pytest`, `pyproject-build`, `twine` etc. at the command line....

(People seem to object to this comment. I genuinely do not understand why.)

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#56

> > We are introducing a $0.002 per-minute Actions cloud platform charge for all Actions workflows across GitHub-hosted and self-hosted runners. Holy s*** That's more expensive than an m8i.large. What on earth.

That's actually $90/month, that's kind of crazy. I realise 100% utilisation isn't realistic, but that still sounds very expensive when you're already BYOB.

> I realise 100% utilisation isn't realistic

It's worse than unrealistic. It's ludicrous. Any company running more than an hour of actions workflows per week on GitHub can afford a few dollars a month for infrastructure. The per-minute charge is less than the cost of a millisecond of engineering labor time.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#57
Given they've been essentially subsidizing self-hosted orgs for a while, I'm kinda surprised they didn't do this before now. Probably wanted to lead with the price cut for everyone else.

It'll be interesting to see how this affects third party companies providing GitHub runners.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#58

Introducing a separate charge specifically targeting those of your customers who choose to self-host your hilariously fragile infrastructure is certainly a choice.. And one I assume is in no way tied to adoption/usage-based KPIs. Of course, if you can just fence in your competition and charge admission, it'd be silly to invest time in building a superior product.

They still host all artefacts and logs for these self-hosted runs. Probably costs them a fair bit

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#59
I’m genuinely excited about this. The GitHub actions platform is genuinely bad compared to circle or Travis but they’ve been totally crowded out because GitHub was just so easy to use. This has led to plenty of security issues and a general lack of innovation in the ci space. Hopefully by this pricing structure change we’ll see more investment in ci tooling across the industry
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