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Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

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Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#341

Post by tonfreed »

tetha wrote: post #318
golovast wrote: post #131

I got contacted by our rep a couple weeks ago, who informed me of this news. I thought it was a disaster and it really pissed me off. The rep couldn't even explain the reasoning well. It basically summed up to "because we can" and "where are you going to go?". He was shocked to find out that I didn't like it. We currently self-host on kubernets/aws. The thing that really got to me isn't the new charge per se. It's th…

This kinda change also has some different gears turning in my head. At $0.002 / build-minute, some of our large software integration tests would cost us around 15 - 20 cents. Some of our ansible integration tests would be 5 - 10 cents - and we run like 50 - 100 of those per day. Some deployments might cost us a cent or two. Apples to oranges, naturally, but like this, our infra-jenkins master would pay for itself in…

Last place I worked had long running end to end tests that would take 30 minutes on GHA (compared to maybe 5 locally) on every PR. This is going to make that a very expensive endeavour

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#342

Post by paulddraper »

golovast wrote: post #131

I got contacted by our rep a couple weeks ago, who informed me of this news. I thought it was a disaster and it really pissed me off. The rep couldn't even explain the reasoning well. It basically summed up to "because we can" and "where are you going to go?". He was shocked to find out that I didn't like it. We currently self-host on kubernets/aws. The thing that really got to me isn't the new charge per se. It's th…

GitHub Actions runners are hard to self-host.

The runner configuration and registration process is unnecessarily byzantine. [1]

They can't cancel jobs cleanly. [2]

There are consistency problems everywhere. [3]

Their own documentations describes horrible things unless you use runners in JIT mode. Though JIT runners are not always removed after exit.

If there is a worse self-hosted CI runner, I haven't yet met it.

[1] https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-tos/manage-runners/se...

[2] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/26311

[3] https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/62365

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#343

Post by featherless »

larkost wrote: post #335
featherless wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

No. It is not worth a time-scaled cost each month for them to start a job on my machines and store a few megabytes of log files.

I'd happily pay a fixed monthly fee for this service, as I already do for GitHub.

The problem here is that this is like a grocery store charging me money for every bag I bring to bag my own groceries.

> But at $140 a month, how much time is that worth investing?

It's not $140/month. It's $140/month today, when my company is still relatively small and it's just me. This cost will scale as my company scales, in a way that is completely bonkers.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#345

Post by paulddraper »

esafak wrote: post #234
golovast wrote: post #131

I got contacted by our rep a couple weeks ago, who informed me of this news. I thought it was a disaster and it really pissed me off. The rep couldn't even explain the reasoning well. It basically summed up to "because we can" and "where are you going to go?". He was shocked to find out that I didn't like it. We currently self-host on kubernets/aws. The thing that really got to me isn't the new charge per se. It's th…

Any official Github action today: "Thank you for your interest in this GitHub action, however, right now we are not taking contributions. We continue to focus our resources on strategic areas that help our customers be successful while making developers' lives easier. While GitHub Actions remains a key part of this vision, we are allocating resources towards other areas of Actions and are not taking contributions to…

Reference: https://github.com/actions/runner?tab=readme-ov-file#note

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#346

Post by fishpen0 »

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.

We are a ~20 person team who use private runners and this will increase our annual costs by ~12k/yr. This is a huge relative cost increase for us. If anything this hurts small teams that focused on expansive automated testing more than giant orgs.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#347

Post by deathanatos »

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…

You know, one might ask what the base fee of $4k/mo (in my org's case) is covering, if not the control plane?

Unless you're on the free org plan, they're hardly doing it "for free" today…

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#348

Post by suryao »

cprecioso wrote: post #339
suryao wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We only have macos arm64 (M-series) runners. Can you point me to the intel reference so I can fix it?

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#349

Post by newsoftheday »

hinkley wrote: post #164
featherless wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely bananas; for my own CI workflow I'll have to pay $140+/month now just to run my own hardware.

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…

You're sounding a lot like a Microsoft damage control artist.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#350

Post by fishpen0 »

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…

This pricing model continues to incentivize them not fixing the hundreds of clearly documented issues that causes CI to be incredibly slow. Everything from their self-inflicted bottlenecking of file transfers to the safe_sleep bug that randomly makes a runner run forever until it times out.
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