Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions • Hacker News Board

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#91

Post by IshKebab » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 6:23 PM UTC

Arcuru wrote: 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-...

It's because there are easy-to-use third party runners that cost around 3-10x less than the GitHub ones. This is aimed squarely at them.

https://github.com/neysofu/awesome-github-actions-runners

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#92

Post by teach » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 6:23 PM UTC

thewisenerd wrote: post #18

Arcuru wrote: 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-...

it'd be great if they can couple this with an SLA for GitHub actions so we won't have to end up paying as much.. (ofc, that'd only mean they stop updating the status page, so eh)

For what it's worth, they already fail to update the status page. We had an "outage" just this morning where jobs were waiting 10+ minutes for an available runner -- resolved after half an hour or so but nothing was ever posted

https://downdetector.com/status/github/

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#93

Post by Hamuko » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 6:23 PM UTC

Possibly a good time to remind people that the default value of jobs..timeout-minutes is 360 (minutes), meaning that your hanging job will cost $0.72 before it times out.

https://docs.github.com/en/actions/reference/workflows-and-a...

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#94

Post by BugsJustFindMe » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 6:24 PM UTC

Everyone in this thread has gone absolutely insane. $5/month gets you 41 fucking _hours_ of continuous operation. If you're not utterly abusing the platform, this falls extremely below the threshold of caring. And if not, what the fuck are you even doing with all those hours? The new per-minute charge is less than one millisecond of engineer labor cost.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#95

Post by gz09 » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 6:24 PM UTC

awestroke wrote: post #58

MathiasPius wrote: post #16

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

They already charge for this separately (at least storage). Some compute cost may be justified but you'd wish that this change would come with some commitment of fixing bugs (many open for years) in their CI platform -- as opposed to investing all their resources in a (mostly inferior) LLM agent (copilot).

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#96

Post by pestaa » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 6:24 PM UTC

logankeenan wrote: post #20

I guess I’ll start to look at an alternative to GitHub self hosted runners. It’s been awhile since I looked. What’s a good alternative?

On the heavy side, but TeamCity is full of goodies.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#97

Post by jrochkind1 » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 6:24 PM UTC

a per-job cost instead of per-minute cost for non-compute "control plane" for CI would have made more sense and seemed more reasonable to me -- but don't really know if customers would have liked it better/worse or paid more/less under it.

(I work exclusively on public repo open source at the moment, and get Github actions for free).

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#98

Post by IshKebab » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 6:24 PM UTC

verdverm wrote: post #22

Tangled has a nix based workflow engine that looks very similar, if you are into nix and self-hosting runners https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core/blob/master/docs/spindl... (no affiliation) --- Blog post about Tangled's CI: https://blog.tangled.org/ci

Useless for Mac or Windows presumably.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#99

Post by defraudbah » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 6:24 PM UTC

this article explains release better than github itself https://www.blacksmith.sh/blog/actions-pricing

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#100

Post by featherless » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 6:24 PM UTC

hedgehog wrote: post #78

featherless wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I'm curious, what are you doing that has over 1000 hours a month of action runtime?

I run a local Valhalla build cluster to power the https://sidecar.clutch.engineering routing engine. The cluster runs daily and takes a significant amount of wall-clock time to build the entire planet. That's about 50% of my CI time; the other 50% is presubmits + App Store builds for Sidecar + CANStudio / ELMCheck.

Using GitHub actions to coordinate the Valhalla builds was a nice-to-have, but this is a deal-breaker for my pull request workflows.