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Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

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Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#241

This is my first comment on HN despite being a user for over a decade -- this is one of the most outrageous pricing changes I've encountered - I couldn't believe it when I read the email earlier (I run self-hosted runners). Anyone using GitLab or any other VCM that you'd recommend? I'm absolutely done with Github. Or is everything else just as bad?

I will try Gitea -- thanks everyone for the recommendations

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#242

This is my first comment on HN despite being a user for over a decade -- this is one of the most outrageous pricing changes I've encountered - I couldn't believe it when I read the email earlier (I run self-hosted runners). Anyone using GitLab or any other VCM that you'd recommend? I'm absolutely done with Github. Or is everything else just as bad?

codeberg.org for open source, because it's a non-profit, with what it seems, very well intentioned people, with a good governance structure, and it's starting to support federation.

For a company, I'd recommend self-hosting forgejo (which also has actions), which powers codeberg.

(forgejo started as a fork of gitea)

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#244

> In the past, our customers have asked us how GitHub views third-party runners long-term. The platform fee largely answers that: GitHub now monetizes Actions usage regardless of where jobs run, aligning third-party runners like Blacksmith as ecosystem partners rather than workarounds. It does? I feel like it implies that they want third-party runners like Blacksmith out of the ecosystem, which is why they're now fin…

With these changes, three things hold:

1. Services like blacksmith and WarpBuild (I'm the founder) are still cheaper than GitHub hosted runners, even after including the $0.002/min self-hosting tax.

2. The biggest lever for controlling costs now is reducing the number of minutes used in CI. Given how slow Github's runners are, or even the ones on AWS compared to our baremetal processor single core performance + nvme disks, it makes even more sense to use WarpBuild. This actually makes a better case for moving from slow AWS instances running with actions-runner-controller etc. to WarpBuild!

3. Messaging this to most users is harder since the first reaction is that Github options make more sense. After some rational thought, it is the opposite.

Overall - it is worse for Github users, but options like blacksmith and WarpBuild are still the better option.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#245

This seems backwards. Why charge for me to run the thing myself instead of them?

GitHub has still been managing the orchestration and monitoring of runs that you run on your own (or other cloud) hardware. They have just decided that they are no longer going to do this for free. So the question becomes: is $0.002/minute a good price for this. I have never run GitHub Actions, so I am going to assume that experience on other, similar, systems applies. So if your job takes an hour to build and run th…

Additionally, they could just self-host their code since code is data is a moat.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#246
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worked for them not for the consumers

Netflix is looking out for Netflix shareholders, not for consumers, like any other public company.

Perfectly good excuse to make society worse for people. Oh wait, what's that? It's not a good excuse? Oh okay.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#247
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

One problem is that GitHub Actions isn't good. It's not like you're happily paying for some top tier "orchestration". It's there and integrated, which does make it convenient, but any price on this piece of garbage makes switching/self-hosting something to seriously consider.

Yeah, it seems like a half-assed version of what Jenkins and other tools have been doing for ages. Not that Jenkins is some magical wonderful tool, but I still haven't found a reasonable way to test my actions outside of running them on real Github.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#248
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

On ZeroFS [0] I am doing around 80 000 minutes a month. A lot of it is wasted in build time though, due to a lack of appropriate caching facilities with GitHub actions. [0] https://github.com/Barre/ZeroFS/tree/main/.github/workflows

ZeroFS looks really good. I know a bit about this design space but hadn't run across ZeroFS yet. Do you do testing of the error recovery behavior (connectivity etc)?

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#249

This seems backwards. Why charge for me to run the thing myself instead of them?

Because they know Forgejo is starting to get attention from major players and thus becoming competitive, and hosting your own CI infrastructure will make completely moving away from GitHub all that easier - If you don't really care about the metadata all it pretty much takes is moving git repositories with their history. Or shortly summarized: lock in through pricing. Pretty sure this will explode straight in their f…

How can you lock in through charging money? Seems it’s like the opposite and they are charging because people are already locked in and they can or am I misreading your comment?

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#250

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.

I have a nightly software build of a piece of software that takes 6 hours to create a 70GB artifact. The build process requires a GPU so it runs on my own HW. That's ~180 hours per month for this job alone. Is that really so hard to imagine?

I don't know how much of that 6 hours build is tangled up in github workflows, but if it's a single contiguous block, you probably could make it near zero by making the self-hosted runner do only the preparation and only the final upload process (workflow_dispatch when the build is complete).
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