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GitHub postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions

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Re: GitHub postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions

#41

Post by Narretz »

bilekas wrote: post #26
techterrier wrote: post #24

from the tweet [1]: "We’ve read your posts and heard your feedback. 1. We’re postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions to take time to re-evaluate our approach. 2. We are continuing to reduce hosted-runners prices by up to 39% on January 1, 2026. We have real costs" ^ theres more in the actual tweet, but the preview that gets unfurled on discord cuts off there. That last lines a killer, p…

> We have real costs" Am i wrong or didn't they have a bug in the action runners that would basically cycle the CPU infinitely ? > https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/2380 > https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792 Didn't they take years to fix this ? Or its unrelated ?

They are talking about the cost to run the Actions control plane and the scheduler that is not executed on the runner itself.

Re: GitHub postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions

#42

Post by embedding-shape »

denismi wrote: post #35

Outside of work, I'm a very sporadic coder. On some side-projects where I'm using Actions, I'll have an inspired few days of progress followed by completely idle weeks/months/quarters. Losing free Actions doesn't particularly bother me, and I have no issue with paying what is most likely a negligible amount, but I don't really want to have a credit card on file which could be charged some unbounded amount if somebody…

Setup something like CircleCI that mainly relies on paid users of their main product, and has a free plan. Microsoft currently seem to be in the process of figuring out how to lower the costs of GitHub for free users, since I'm guessing they make their actual money on other segments and products.

Re: GitHub postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions

#43

Post by dvh »

There's one thing I don't understand. Isn't GitHub action just "take a repo, do something with it, save something somewhere". So how is it different than writing a bash script that "clones the repo, do something with it, pushes the changes back"? If actions became paid feature, wouldn't that just generated myriads of show hn posts like "I recreated GitHub actions in xyz"?

Re: GitHub postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions

#44

Post by CafeRacer »

dvh wrote: post #43

There's one thing I don't understand. Isn't GitHub action just "take a repo, do something with it, save something somewhere". So how is it different than writing a bash script that "clones the repo, do something with it, pushes the changes back"? If actions became paid feature, wouldn't that just generated myriads of show hn posts like "I recreated GitHub actions in xyz"?

It's like bash scripts, but with ability to debug them.

Re: GitHub postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions

#45

Post by germandiago »

embedding-shape wrote: post #40
thomasnno wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great! Who did you jump to ?

The most obvious "all-in-one" package is GitLab, if you have the hardware for it and don't mind bit of bloat but all the needed features in one package. Personally, for smaller scale projects that still require collaboration over the web, Gitea/Forgejo + Woodpecker CI has been a really simple, lightweight and easy to maintain solution.

I am self host8ng forgejo. What can other CIs do that I could potentially need that is absent?

Re: GitHub postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions

#46

Post by 000ooo000 »

dvh wrote: post #43

There's one thing I don't understand. Isn't GitHub action just "take a repo, do something with it, save something somewhere". So how is it different than writing a bash script that "clones the repo, do something with it, pushes the changes back"? If actions became paid feature, wouldn't that just generated myriads of show hn posts like "I recreated GitHub actions in xyz"?

Where does one get to suffer YAML hell then??

Re: GitHub postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions

#47

Post by KJBweb »

redrove wrote: post #32
Daviey wrote: post #28

Oh good, I can postpone my migration for personal projects.

Or, rather, you have more time to execute it. They _will_ rug pull again, this is Microsoft ffs.

That's the signal I'm getting here and they're not even being coy about it, they're just postponing some form of inevitable price increase.

Re: GitHub postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions

#48

Post by hi_hi »

denismi wrote: post #35

Outside of work, I'm a very sporadic coder. On some side-projects where I'm using Actions, I'll have an inspired few days of progress followed by completely idle weeks/months/quarters. Losing free Actions doesn't particularly bother me, and I have no issue with paying what is most likely a negligible amount, but I don't really want to have a credit card on file which could be charged some unbounded amount if somebody…

I just want to say I found this quite an insightful comment. I similarly would love to use a pay-as-you-go pricing model as a way of safely trying out various SaaS services.

Unfortunately I feel it is not in the SaaS businesses interests, who want to replicate the gym membership model where the 70% who don't use the service are supplementing the other 30% who use it frequently.

Re: GitHub postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions

#49

Post by Kinrany »

CafeRacer wrote: post #44
dvh wrote: post #43

There's one thing I don't understand. Isn't GitHub action just "take a repo, do something with it, save something somewhere". So how is it different than writing a bash script that "clones the repo, do something with it, pushes the changes back"? If actions became paid feature, wouldn't that just generated myriads of show hn posts like "I recreated GitHub actions in xyz"?

It's like bash scripts, but with ability to debug them.

There are few things less debuggable than Github Actions. Bash scripts isn't one of them

Re: GitHub postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions

#50

Post by donatj »

The utter rent-seeking audacity of charging by the minute for action runners you run on your own server...

Charge a flat fee per Action, sure. There is a tiny cost on GitHub's part associated with the API calls for starting and stopping, but if my build takes 8 hours on a self-hosted runner there is no more cost to GitHub than it taking 10 seconds.

That's the whole point of self-hosted runners.

Maybe there was more outrage elsewhere, but I was frankly confused at the seeming lack thereof here on Hacker News.

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