Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

Why are there no changes for plans with included minutes e.g. enterprise that has 50000 since the runners are now cheaper? So now the included tier has effectively been reduced.

Am I right in assuming it’s not the amount of payment but the transition from $0 to paying a bill at all?

I’m definitely sure it’s saving me more than $140 a month to have CI/CD running and I’m also sure I’d never break even on the opportunity cost of having someone write or set one up internally if someone else’s works - and this is the key - just as well.

But investment in CI/CD is investing in future velocity. The hours invested are paid for by hours saved. So if the outcome is brittle and requires oversight that savings drops or disappears.

We have internal integrations with GitHub webhooks that will hit our server to checkout a branch, run some compute, and then post a comment on the thread. Not sure if you can integrate something like that to help block a PR from being merged like Actions CI checks, but you can receive webhooks and make API calls for free (for now). Would definitely result in some extra overhead to implement outside of Actions for some tasks.

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 though all tests (a bit on the long side, but I have some tests that run for days), then you are going to pay GitHub $.12 for that run. You are probably going to pay significantly more for the compute for running that (especially if you are running on multiple testers simultaneously). So this does not seem to be too bad.

This is probably going to push a lot of people to invest more in parallelizing their workloads, and/or putting them on faster machines in order to reduce the number of minutes they are billed for.

I should note that if you are doing something similar in AWS using SMS (Systems Management Service), that I found that if you are running small jobs on lots of system that the AWS charges can add up very quickly. I had to abandon a monitoring system idea I had for our fleet (~800 systems) because the per-hit cost of just a monitoring ping was $1.84 (I needed a small mount of data from an on-worker process). Running that every 10 minutes was going to be more than $250/day. Writing/running my own monitoring system was much cheaper.

At $0.002 per minute there are at most 90 dollars in a month. Maybe even after an year of cumulative costs it's less then the cost of switching to something else. Maybe even after many and many years of cumulative costs: the larger the company the more expensive corporate inertia gets.