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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

#121

Post by amluto »

bilekas wrote: post #119
amluto wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 discussin…

Sigh. I should probably have clarified the vibe-coded part. I think this entire project could he done with rather little total code, and that the code could be written entirely by humans without an immense programmer-hour commitment or by humans with AI help (fully human-in-the-loop) even faster.

My actual point is that GitHub Actions is kind of an unusual product. Many big cloud things solve what seems to be a simple problem but the actual requirements are much harder than they might appear, and replacing them well wouldn’t be very complex. But IMO GitHub Actions in particular is a bunch of complexity that does not actually solve the problem that needs solving very well; a small bespoke solution would actually be better.

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

#122

Post by nijave »

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"?

Part of the advantage is a fully hosted service where you don't need to worry about a control plane managing and scheduling jobs.

There's some cost involved there--especially if you're offering hosted runners (you need some capital to buy infra to run jobs)

There's also advantage of limiting how many companies you share your code with. If you're using GitHub, you're already trusting them with your source code so GitHub Actions doesn't require more trust or an additional entity to manage/pay

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

#123

Post by 000ooo000 »

franktankbank wrote: post #102
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"?

Yea but a bash script isn't declarative so thats somehow bad. (DECLARATIVE CI WHY?????)

Straightforward statements with a few conditionals considered harmful. Here learn this grotesque vendor-specific DSL hamfisted into YAML instead.

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

#124

Post by sltr »

otterley wrote: post #3

This is the official message: https://x.com/github/status/2001372894882918548 "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 in running the Actions control plane. We are also making investm…

Palmer's tweet said a similar thing and added, "we gave away 11.5 billion build minutes (~$184 million) to support OSS last year".

$184M in profit or cost?

It's called a loss leader, not a gift, and it's a marketing and adoption tactic. They already bought the machines which cost about as much to run idle as at 100% utilization. Might as well put that idle capex and opex to use.

Or just collectively bill OSS the $184M and stop signaling virtue.

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

#125

Post by chippiewill »

estimator7292 wrote: post #17
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.

It sure as hell isn't a per-minute cost

per-minute isn't a crazy unreasonable proxy for it though:

- logs are generally proportional to the length of the job

- other artifacts also usually correlate to an extent

- some of the cost for Github will be for the entire time the job is active: e.g. active connections for log streaming etc. - it's largely correlated to the value the end-user gets out of it

- it's easy to bill for because they can already do billing that way on the hosted runners

- the costs are easy to predict for end-users

It's not like the rest of the Github platform is a per-user cost to run, but that's how Github charge for most features.

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

#126

Post by otterley »

sltr wrote: post #124
otterley wrote: post #3

This is the official message: https://x.com/github/status/2001372894882918548 "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 in running the Actions control plane. We are also making investm…

Palmer's tweet said a similar thing and added, "we gave away 11.5 billion build minutes (~$184 million) to support OSS last year". $184M in profit or cost? It's called a loss leader, not a gift, and it's a marketing and adoption tactic. They already bought the machines which cost about as much to run idle as at 100% utilization. Might as well put that idle capex and opex to use. Or just collectively bill OSS the $184…

We don’t know whether GitHub has idle capacity to spare. If they’re auto scaling their resources like a well-architected workload should, then they probably don’t. Even if they’re not downscaling their compute, they may prefer to run other low-priority jobs on it.

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

#128

Post by baobun »

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…

(e): Community software like act and Forgejo/Gitea Actions have made it a lot easier to run GitHub Actions workflows without involving GitHub and are decreasing the friction of migration.

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

#129

Post by baobun »

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"?

This is likely the reason behind the recent push of "Trusted Publishing" from NPM. They are trying to make people consider GitHub (and GitLab) in its own higher tier with regards to supply-chain security by decree.

If you rely on "Trusted Publishing" you are assisting Microsoft in making a moat for their CI platform.

Use cryptographic signatures, not implicit trust in a hosted platform.

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

#130

Post by anothernewdude »

thomasnno wrote: post #34
anothernewdude wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've already jumped ship. Switching source control host was actually pretty easy. Builds still working just fine.

Great! Who did you jump to ?

Gitlab. Required very few CI/CD changes to be honest.
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