Yeah... Kind of expected GHA to be a money trap at some point. It was tempting with how easy it is to setup. And every since Claude Code integrated tightly it assumes i want pipelines in gha even though I have pipelines elsewhere. Glad I stuck with picking a different system and didn't invest a lot of time here. I had plenty of compute to run jobs myself.
Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions
141–150 of 853 posts
Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions
#142Ahh, so since GitHub is completely incompetent when it comes to managing a CI they are going to make it worse for everyone to get their cut. I hate GH Action runners with a passion. They are slow, overpriced, and clearly held together with duct tape and chewing gum. WarpBuild, on the other hand, was a breeze to setup and provided faster runners and lower prices. This is a really shitty move. Hey GitHub, your Microsof…
I have never been a fan of GitHub and their entire system, always felt Bitbucket or GitLab were superior in terms of the tooling and included features across all plans.
However, my experience with GitHub Actions was really poor. Some build that would run perfectly on my local machine and any other servers we have hosted would always time out on GitHub runners. I went back and forth from small runners to large runners and the result was always the same. Then I found that there are third-party companies just offering replacement runners for GitHub Actions at less than half the price for an amazing reliability and cost. It was a night and day difference.
Now... this move by GitHub is almost unbelievable. Charging folks to use their own machines
Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions
#143Yikes! They seem to be gunning for services like WarpBuild, which we've used for a couple years to keep our costs low. The $0.002 per minute on top of WarpBuild's costs is exactly GitHub's new pricing scheme. I'm happy for competition, but this seems a bit foul since we users aren't getting anything tangible beyond the promise of improvements and investments that I don't need.
The lever that matters the most with the new $0.002/min tax is to reduce the number of minutes consumed.
Given that GitHub runners are still slow as ever, it actually is a point in our favor even compared to self-hosting on aws etc. However, it makes the value harder to communicate .
Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions
#144Everyone in this thread has gone absolutely insane. $5/month gets you 41 fucking _hours_ of continuous operation. If you're not utterly abusing the platform, this falls extremely below the threshold of caring. And if not, what the fuck are you even doing with all those hours? The new per-minute charge is less than one millisecond of engineer labor cost.
per minute billing is hard to wrap around the head
On my larger organization, we have on average 20 to 30 *active* runners during business hours. Assuming 5 on the off-hours, my napkin math says it comes down to about 10 fully-utilized-runners per month, so about 864$/mo. For the size of my organization that is honestly totally acceptable.
This is assuming 0.002$ per minute of job being actively executed. If it turns out to be 0.002$ per minute of *runner being registered* on the control plane, it would increase quite a bit. We are still using the old HorizontalRunnerAutoscaler with actions-runner-controller, with quite a pool of prewarmed runners idling to pick up a job. It would be a strong reason to use the new RunnerScaleSet (to take advantage of the reactive webhook-based scaling) and keep a very lean pool of prewarmed runners.
Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
I initially felt a bit offended when I saw this. Then I thought about it and at the end of the day there's a decent amount of infrastructure that goes into displaying the build information, updating it, scanning for secrets and redacting, etc. I don't know if it's worth the amount they are targeting, but it's definitely not zero either.
Does it make sense to accept charge per minute when you are hosting yourself? When GHA is not very good?
Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions
#146Time to get off for good. We're moving to https://forgejo.org/. With downtime and this, screw them.
Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions
#147Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
Monorepo, though Gitlab, self-hosted runner, 41 hours in the last week.
Tell me that $20/month is a notable amount of expense for your business spending 41 hours per week on workflows. Go on.
Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions
#148> TL;DR GitHub is adding a $0.002-per-minute fee on all GitHub Actions usage, so the control plane is no longer free.
That's not true for _all GitHub Actions usage_.
https://resources.github.com/actions/2026-pricing-changes-fo...
> Standard GitHub-hosted or self-hosted runner usage on public repositories will remain free.
Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions
#149Use open source software. Buy your own compute. Make the effort. It's worth it.
Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions
#150This seems backwards. Why charge for me to run the thing myself instead of them?
They still run the whole orchestration.
If you don't want to pay, you'd have to not use GitHub Actions at all, maybe by using their API to test new commits and PRs and mark them as failed or passed.