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Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

resources.github.com

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Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#281

Post by mindcrash »

sallveburrpi wrote: post #249
mindcrash wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Microsoft "suddenly" does not seem to want you to run your own CI, which is a key part of running your own SCM. And this decision miraculously happens the moment a lot of big orgs are looking at self-hosting a cost effective (because open source) near 1:1 alternative to GitHub (=Forgejo).

So they make CI a bit cheaper but a future migration to Forgejo harder.

In fact they could easily pull off some typical sleazy Microsoft bullshit and eventually make it a shit ton harder to migrate out of GitHub once you migrated back in.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#283

Post by ilvez »

lukeasrodgers wrote: post #203
ilvez wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't it like way more expensive and restricted? They were very competitive in the early days, but currently they are more capped than anything else it seems. Especially for self hosting.. > Hosted Agents > > 2,000 minutes/month :-o

Buildkite doesn't have per-minute charges for self-hosted agents.

Ok, they have changed their pricing. Currently they are capping the number of concurrent agents. At one point, they introduced minutes cap and that was very big step down.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#284

Post by pxc »

kjuulh wrote: post #226
matsimitsu wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This! We went from 20!! minutes and 1.2k monthly spend on very, very brittle action runs to a full CI run in 4 minutes, always passing, by just by going to Hetzner's server auction page and bid on a 100 euro Ryzen machine.

After self hosting our builds ended up so fast, that we were actually waiting for was GitHub scheduling our agents, rather than it being the job running. It sucked a bit, because we'd optimized it so much, but we on 90th percentile saw that it took 20-30 seconds for github to schedule the jobs as they should. Measured from when the commit hit the branch, to the webhook begin sent.

My company uses GitHub, GitLab, and Jenkins. We'll soon™ be migrating off of GitLab in favor of GitHub because it's a Microsoft shop and we get some kind of discount on GitHub for spending so much other money with Microsoft.

Scheduling jobs, actually getting them running, is virtually instant with GitLab but it's slow AF for GitHub for no discernable reason.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#285

Post by Kwpolska »

amarant wrote: post #161

Getting acquired by Microsoft is a death sentence for any product. The only variable is how long after acquisition before they gut it. It's almost never right away. GitHub was acquired 7 years ago, but it started showing symptoms perhaps 2 years ago. With this I think it's clear the wound was fatal. GitHub will stumble on for a few more years with ever-decreasing quality, before going the way of Skype. So, I guess we…

If Microsoft had not acquired GitHub, there would not be GitHub Actions. GitHub Actions is a mediocre knock-off of Azure Pipelines, and it was launched after the acquisition.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#286

Post by matthewmacleod »

some_furry wrote: post #216

Oh great. I finally get used to GitHub Actions after Travis CI shat the bed, and now I have to find something else. Thanks, enshittification.

What part of this is “enshittification”? It’s just a company starting to charge for a formerly free service. Hardly seems like that aggressive a move.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#288

Post by miclill »

StrLght wrote: post #183
wyldfire wrote: post #167

If this gives you pause, consider these hosted alternatives as another option: * Codeberg https://codeberg.org/ * Sourcehut https://sr.ht/ [1] [1] https://sourcehut.org/alpha-details/

Codeberg's uptime is so bad, that it actually makes GitHub look good. ~96.5% over last 2 weeks [1] [1]: https://status.codeberg.org/status/codeberg

The operate on less than 100_000€/year, so I would cut them some slack ;-) btw. codeberg is not a company, more like a foundation, Verein is the german word.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#289

Post by notatoad »

llama052 wrote: post #230
pmontra wrote: post #170

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.

Our org is showing around 200-300$/mo in added fees and we are exclusively self hosting in our own on premise cluster. Kind of wild we have to pay to use our own compute.

if you were only paying to use your own compute, you could just use your own compute - you don't have to use github actions, you can trigger actions on your own systems without github.

the control plane clearly has value to people beyond the compute used for running the actions, and it seems reasonable that they should charge for that if you're using it.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#290

Post by jillesvangurp »

A few years ago, I had a build that was a bit slow on Github actions. I didn't want to switch to the paid plan just to spin up a worker. Basically we are a bootstrapped company with, at the time, no budget to pay ourselves or for extra stuff like fancy build servers. If you are that kind of company, Github is amazing value.

To solve the problem, I created a simple vm in Google Cloud with a lot of CPU and memory that runs Ubuntu. I installed enough stuff on it to be able to check out code and run our build script (a jvm and gradle basically). And then I modified the Github action to 1) start the vm, 2) trigger the build script via ssh 3) pause the vm so we don't get billed for it. That vm runs for maybe an hour per month or so. It would probably cost us hundreds of euros per month if we ran it 24/7. But 1/3600th of that barely registers on our bills. And it's nice and fast.

This has been working flawlessly for a few years now. The Github action takes about 3 minutes. That includes starting the vm, running the script, and shutting the vm down again.

Wonky in a way. But also simple and robust enough. People over engineer/over think this stuff for the wrong reasons. For example, I could of course automate the provisioning of that vm. But I haven't. Because I only ever touch it once a year or so to run a quick apt-get update. I rebuilt it a few weeks ago in a different region. That was like a 20 minute job. Terraform or Ansible for vms you only create once every few years is redundant and might take more time than you would save. I can always do that when that stops being true.

I've been running this startup on the freemium layer in Github for five years now. It's great as a free service. I would actually pay for it if I needed to. I did actually pay for it before MS acquired Github in a previous startup when business usage wasn't free. But so far, there's no need for me to do that. I also run some monitoring scripts as Github actions. Simple curl jobs against our servers that trigger alerts when they fail. That has to run somewhere. It might as well be Github actions. But if/when that becomes inconvenient, I can improvise other solutions.

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