Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

resources.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 853 posts

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#331

Post by Bjartr »

peterldowns wrote: post #273

I'm happy to see they're investing in Actions — charging for it should help make sure it continues to work. It's a huge reason Github is so valuable: having the status checks run on every PR, automatically, is great. Even though I'm more of a fan of Buildkite when it comes to configuring the workflows, I still need something to kick them off when PRs change, etc. Charging a per-workflow-minute platform fee makes a lo…

> charging for it should help make sure it continues to work

It's there a particular reason you're extending the benefit of the doubt here? This seems like the classic playbook of making something free, waiting for people to depend on it, then charging for it, all in order to maximize revenue. Where does the idea that they're really doing this in order to deliver a more valuable service come from?

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#332

Post by amarant »

Sammi wrote: post #292
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…

https://codeberg.org

This looks really nice actually! European non-profit is hitting some really good buttons for me! Thanks for the tip, I hadn't heard of codeberg before!

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#333

Post by suryao »

zamalek wrote: post #330
perbu wrote: post #274

The reason this makes sense, at least for Github, is because the only valid reason to run your own action runners is compliance. And if you are doing it for compliance, price doesn't really matter. You don't really have a choice. If you've been running your runners on your own infra for cost reasons, you're not really that interesting to the Github business.

Github runners are slow. We're using WarpBuild and they are still cheaper per-minute, even with all the changes Github has made. Then there's the fact that the machines are faster, so we are using fewer minutes. There are multiple competitors in this space. If you are (or were) paying for Github runners for any reason, you really shouldn't be.

Thanks for the WarpBuild love!

Performance is the primary lever to pay less $0.002/min self hosting tax and we strive to provide the best performance runners.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#335

Post by larkost »

featherless wrote: post #265
larkost wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

As a solo Founder who recently invested in self-hosted build infrastructure because my company runs ~70,000 minutes/month, this change is going to add an extra $140/month for hardware I own . And that's just today; this number will only go up over time. I am not open to GitHub extracting usage-based rent for me using my own hardware. This is the first time in my 15+ years of using GitHub that I'm seriously evaluating…

But it is not for hardware you own. It is for the use of GutHubs coordinators, which they have been donating the use of to you for free. They have now decided that that service is something they are going to charge for. Your objection to GitHub "extracting usage-based rent from me" seems to ignore that you have been getting usage of their hardware for free up to now.

So, like I said, the question for you is whether that $140/month of service is worth that money to you, or can you find a better priced alternative, or build something that costs less yourself.

My guess is that once you think about this some more you will decide it is worth it, and probably spend some time trying to drive down your minutes/month a bit. But at $140 a month, how much time is that worth investing?

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#336

Post by _cenw »

Bjartr wrote: post #331
peterldowns wrote: post #273

I'm happy to see they're investing in Actions — charging for it should help make sure it continues to work. It's a huge reason Github is so valuable: having the status checks run on every PR, automatically, is great. Even though I'm more of a fan of Buildkite when it comes to configuring the workflows, I still need something to kick them off when PRs change, etc. Charging a per-workflow-minute platform fee makes a lo…

> charging for it should help make sure it continues to work It's there a particular reason you're extending the benefit of the doubt here? This seems like the classic playbook of making something free, waiting for people to depend on it, then charging for it, all in order to maximize revenue. Where does the idea that they're really doing this in order to deliver a more valuable service come from?

Yeah. This is a reaction to providers like blacksmith or self-hosted solutions like the k8s operator being better at operating their very bad runner then them, at cheaper prices, with better performance, more storage and warm caches. The price cut is good, the anticompetitive bit where they charge you to use computers they don't provide isn't. My guess is that either we're all gonna move to act or that one of the SaaS startups sue.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#337

Post by zzo38computer »

I use GitHub Actions for only one thing, which is to automatically assign any issues to myself (by using the "gh" program), and I am not paying anything for it. Furthermore, the repositories that use this are all public (I do not have any private repositories on GitHub, and due to various things I will not do that).

As far as I can tell from that article, these changes will not affect me; it says "Standard GitHub-hosted or self-hosted runner usage on public repositories will remain free" and another section says "This will not impact Actions usage in public repositories". Hopefully, this information would behelpful for other people who use GitHub Actions. However, I don't know if I missed something else that is important, from the article.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#338

Post by whynotmaybe »

larkost wrote: post #168
bdbdbdb wrote: post #120

This seems backwards. Why charge for me to run the thing myself instead of them?

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 th…

> is $0.002/minute a good price for this

It was free, so anything other than free isn't really a good price. It's hard to estimate the cost on github's side when the hardware is mine and therefore accept this easily.

(Github is already polling my agent to know it's status so whether is "idle" or "running action" shouldn't really change a lot on their side.)

...And we already pay montly subscription for team members and copilot.

I have a self-hosted runner because I must have many tools installed for my builds and find it kinda counter productive to always reinstall those tools for each build as this takes a long time. (Yeah, I know "reproducible builds" aso, but I only have 24h in most of my days)

Even for a few hundreds minutes a month, we're still under a few $ so not worth spending two days to improve anything... yet.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#339

Post by cprecioso »

suryao wrote: post #244
mtlynch wrote: post #140

> In the past, our customers have asked us how GitHub views third-party runners long-term. The platform fee largely answers that: GitHub now monetizes Actions usage regardless of where jobs run, aligning third-party runners like Blacksmith as ecosystem partners rather than workarounds. It does? I feel like it implies that they want third-party runners like Blacksmith out of the ecosystem, which is why they're now fin…

With these changes, three things hold: 1. Services like blacksmith and WarpBuild (I'm the founder) are still cheaper than GitHub hosted runners, even after including the $0.002/min self-hosting tax. 2. The biggest lever for controlling costs now is reducing the number of minutes used in CI. Given how slow Github's runners are, or even the ones on AWS compared to our baremetal processor single core performance + nvme…

I checked the WarpBuild website and got excited because the header in the menu says you have macOS Intel runners, but then you click through and it doesn't seem to be so?

Right now at my company our biggest complaint are macOS Intel runners from GitHub which somehow take 15+ minutes to provision and are the slowest of the bunch.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#340

Post by ted_dunning »

newsoftheday wrote: post #301
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…

[flagged]

Democratic organization is a strike?

Where do you live that that seems like a bad idea?

Post reply on HN