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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

#111

Post by Xylakant »

chrisandchris wrote: post #106
Xylakant wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun thing is that almost every other CI as a service provider charges you in some shape or form for self hosted runners. CircleCI limits the number of self-hosted Job Running in parallel based on your plan and charges a fixed base fee per seat. So moving away from GHA will not make self-hosted runners free, they’ll move into a different pricing structure that may or may not be beneficial. And I think charging for sel…

Gitlab enters the room, where self-hosted runners are as free as in free beer (maintenance yes, but no limit on runners and no pricing expect on a per-user basis).

Yes, gitlab does still have free self-hosted runners. OTOH, github has a free organisation plan and gitlab doesn't. So yes, strictly speaking self-hosted runners are free, but you're paying for the dev-seats.

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

#112

Post by crote »

Xylakant wrote: post #54
embedding-shape wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wonder if Microsoft will ever get that asking users before making changes can help them avoid looking bad in public. Maybe half of all clients I work with use GitHub Actions for CI (the rest basically all use Jenkins), most of those using Actions use self-hosted runners for performance and security reasons, almost all of them reached out to me asking how difficult it would be to move away from GitHub Actions yet co…

Fun thing is that almost every other CI as a service provider charges you in some shape or form for self hosted runners. CircleCI limits the number of self-hosted Job Running in parallel based on your plan and charges a fixed base fee per seat. So moving away from GHA will not make self-hosted runners free, they’ll move into a different pricing structure that may or may not be beneficial. And I think charging for sel…

The problem is that they are charging a per-minute fee, and a fee at the same order-of-magnitude as actually running the tests. If you're offering cloud-hosted runners for $0.002/minute, asking that same $0.002/minute as an orchestrator fee for self-hosted runners is just insulting.

Charging for self-hosted runners is indeed not a huge deal, and I bet they wouldn't have gotten the same kind of backlash if they charged for it via a per-seat, per-run, per-gigabyte, or per-log-line fee. And if GHA hadn't been so poorly maintained...

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

#113

Post by 0x073 »

AndrewDucker wrote: post #11

It does not seem unreasonable that if the locally-run actions are using some GitHub resources (for logging, maintenance,etc) then there's a cost to that. What a reasonable charge is, is open to discussion.

Then why we pay a fix price for everything, size of repositories, webhooks etc, except the self hosted actions.

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

#114

Post by franktankbank »

donatj wrote: post #50

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…

I don't even understand how they could do it. You own the servers that are giving them responses to determine the start/end times, so fudge the numbers fuck them, maybe you could find bugs in their shitty code so they start crediting you.

I think they kinda fucked themselves 3 concrete ways (among the nerds which may not be a problem for them):

1) this whole thing

2) the infinite running jobs issues which called attention to how poorly managed the GHA system is

3) zig et al announcing their departure and all the positive conversation around that

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

#115

Post by p_j_w »

bilekas wrote: post #25

> GitHub stated that it has canceled the price increase after reviewing developer feedback. It added that it will take time to listen to customers and partners. I get the feeling they got the feedback that their runners are not as indispensable to developers as they thought and realized they would lose a significant amount of users. Now if only they would listen to the feedback about windows 11 and their forced copil…

> Now if only they would listen to the feedback about windows 11 and their forced copilot

I think they'll take the opposite lesson. Copilot hasn’t lost them many users because Windows users are locked into the ecosystem and unable to leave. They will try to get GitHub into a position similar to that and then try this shit again.

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

#116

Post by freedomben »

benterix wrote: post #94
codeflo wrote: post #73

My theory: Some manager's KPI is to increase the number of sold GitHub runner minutes. So they did some market research -- not enough to have a clear picture, but barely enough to be dangerous -- and found that some companies use self-hosted runners for cost reasons. So they deploy a two-pronged strategy: lower the cost of GitHub runners, and charge for the use of self-hosted runners, to incentivize switching. This f…

> Switching CI providers isn't hard, we had to do it twice already. Granted, most of our CI logic is in a custom build script that you can run locally, and not in the proprietary YAML file. But to be honest, I'd recommend that sort of setup for any CI provider, as you always want the ability to debug things locally. I believe this has been a CI/CD best practice for over a decade. Even in venerable Jenkins, this is on…

It has been best practice for over a decade, but for reasons I don't understand, nearly every developer I've worked with just wants to do the lock-in/propietary route and is entirely unpersuaded by the "portability" argument. I've now seen it burn teams hard multiple times now. At that point people realize the wisdom in the external scripts, but then a new wave of devs come in and start the whole cycle over.

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

#117

Post by CafeRacer »

Kinrany wrote: post #49
CafeRacer wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Apologies, I realized I had a typo. It should be "It's like bash scripts but WITHOUT the ability to debug them". I am personally not a fan of GHA and I think unsuperwised claude code could have produced a better CI system.

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

#118

Post by Xylakant »

crote wrote: post #112
Xylakant wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun thing is that almost every other CI as a service provider charges you in some shape or form for self hosted runners. CircleCI limits the number of self-hosted Job Running in parallel based on your plan and charges a fixed base fee per seat. So moving away from GHA will not make self-hosted runners free, they’ll move into a different pricing structure that may or may not be beneficial. And I think charging for sel…

The problem is that they are charging a per-minute fee, and a fee at the same order-of-magnitude as actually running the tests . If you're offering cloud-hosted runners for $0.002/minute, asking that same $0.002/minute as an orchestrator fee for self-hosted runners is just insulting. Charging for self-hosted runners is indeed not a huge deal, and I bet they wouldn't have gotten the same kind of backlash if they charg…

Any model that charges for self-hosted runner is going to feel unfair to someone. Per seat pricing is better for small orgs with a lot of CI minutes, per-run pricing would be good for orgs with few, long runs, per minute pricing is nicer for orgs with many small runs.

In my observation the critisicm was strongly dominated by outrage over the actual fact.

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

#119

Post by bilekas »

amluto wrote: post #67
bilekas wrote: post #25

> GitHub stated that it has canceled the price increase after reviewing developer feedback. It added that it will take time to listen to customers and partners. I get the feeling they got the feedback that their runners are not as indispensable to developers as they thought and realized they would lose a significant amount of users. Now if only they would listen to the feedback about windows 11 and their forced copil…

I feel like I could specify and vibe-code a CI workflow system that would be dramatically better (for a single organization’s workflow) than GitHub Actions. And hosting it would be barely more complex than hosting a GitHub Actions self-hosted runner. The stack would be: Postgres, as a job queue and job status tracker. The entire control plane state lives in here. Even in a fairly large org, the transaction rate would…

I'm not sure why this is so downvoted given the climate.

I guess it's the AI driven approach. These things, critical infra, are always done better with a few eyes in it.. introducing irresponsible ideas of "I'll just remake it with Claude without knowing the underlying infra" can hit a few nerves, also add a few lower level bugs, exploits etc.

I don't think it's fair for the downvoted but I think it's worth discussing where we draw the line.

Edit: I think AI is a tool not a replacement.

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

#120

Post by smivan »

I ended up prototyping self hosted https://woodpecker-ci.org/ on my k8s cluster. Ended up taking just a few hours of AI time (Claude Code). Woodpecker has a helm chart, can connect to Github and post status checks to commits.

Open to feedback or tips and tricks on this, but so far it's looking promising. Curious how other folks experience has been.

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