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Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

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Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#361

Post by gz09 »

naikrovek wrote: post #207
gz09 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They already charge for this separately (at least storage). Some compute cost may be justified but you'd wish that this change would come with some commitment of fixing bugs (many open for years) in their CI platform -- as opposed to investing all their resources in a (mostly inferior) LLM agent (copilot).

Copilot uses other models, not (necessarily?) its own, so I’m not sure what you mean.

It does leverage various models, but

- github copilot PR reviews are subpar compared to what I've seen from other services: at least for our PRs they tend to be mostly an (expensive) grammar/spell-check

- given that it's github native you'd wish for a good integration with the platform but then when your org is behind a (github) IP whitelist things seem to break often

- network firewall for the agent doesn't seem to work properly

raised tickets for all these but given how well it works when it does, I might as well just migrate to another service

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#362

Post by tracker1 »

gaigalas wrote: post #148

> TL;DR GitHub is adding a $0.002-per-minute fee on all GitHub Actions usage, so the control plane is no longer free. That's not true for _all GitHub Actions usage_. https://resources.github.com/actions/2026-pricing-changes-fo... > Standard GitHub-hosted or self-hosted runner usage on public repositories will remain free.

That was my biggest concern... I've used runners for personal/public repos because they're there and generally good enough. If I were paying for it, I might be inclined to look at faster options.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#363

Post by suryao »

eugercek wrote: post #354

Companies like Ubicloud gives hosted actions faster and far more cheaper (5-10x) than Microsoft itself. Now Microsoft will charge "data plane usage" (CRUDing a row that contains (id, ts, state_enum, acc_id ...) in essence) 2.5 more than what Ubicloud offers for WHOLE compute. Also to have "fair pricing" they'll make you pay 2.5 more the compute's price for being able to use their data plane. cool.

it's rather egregious that it is a "per minute" tax rather than a $0.002 per job.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#364

Post by hadlock »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #305
hadlock wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github being a single pane of glass for developers with a single login is pretty powerful. Github hosting the runners is also pretty useful, ask anyone who has had to actually manage/scale them what their opinion is about Jenkins is. Being a "Jenkins Farmer" is a thankless job that means a lot of on-call work to fix the build system in the middle of the night at 2am on a Sunday. Paying a small monthly fee is absolute…

I run Jenkins (have done so at multiple jobs) and it's totally fine. Jenkins, like other super customizable systems, is as reliable or crappy as you make it. It's decent out of the box, but if you load it down with a billion plugins and whatnot then yeah it's going to be a nightmare to maintain. It all comes down to whether you've done a good job setting it up, IMO.

Lots of systems are "fine" until they aren't. As you pointed out, Jenkins being super-customizable means it isn't strongly opinionated, and there is plenty of opportunity for a well-meaning developer to add several foot-guns, doing some simple point and click in the GUI. Or the worst case scenario: cleaning up someone elses' Jenkins mess after they leave the company.

Contrast with a declarative system like github actions: "I would like an immutable environment like this, and then perform X actions and send the logs/report back to the centralized single pane of glass in github". Google's "cloud run" product is pretty good in this regard as well. Sure, developers can add foot guns to your GHA/Cloud Run workflow, but since it is inherently git-tracked, you can simply revert those atomically.

I used Jenkins for 5-7 years across several jobs and I don't miss it at all.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#365

Post by [deleted] »

no_wizard wrote: post #304
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…

The exodus from GitHub has not begun, as far as I can tell. They seem to care much less about free users than in the past but businesses still flock to it. GitLab is the only other platform I’ve seen in the workplace of anywhere I worked, with the exception of a big tech company I worked at. They had both GitHub enterprise and an internally maintained platform which was being phased out. if I recall correctly it base…

[deleted]

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#366

Post by seniorThrowaway »

fbcpck wrote: post #250
seniorThrowaway wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a nightly software build of a piece of software that takes 6 hours to create a 70GB artifact. The build process requires a GPU so it runs on my own HW. That's ~180 hours per month for this job alone. Is that really so hard to imagine?

I don't know how much of that 6 hours build is tangled up in github workflows, but if it's a single contiguous block, you probably could make it near zero by making the self-hosted runner do only the preparation and only the final upload process (workflow_dispatch when the build is complete).

Most of it is just time waiting either while the source assets are downloaded (I clean slate it, that's the point of CI after all), the build itself runs, or the artifact is uploading to it's storage home. I'm sure it could be re-architected to use less actions minutes but if I'm going to redo it I will probably just move away from actions altogether because it's only loosely linked to Github anyway (runs on a schedule) and that way I am insulated from any future changes they come up with. The hardest part will likely be figuring out the Slack bot posting, I do use the marketplace action for that, but that's probably low lift. With LLM assisted coding I'm leaning more and more to little in house apps for stuff like this, it keeps you from dealing with lock in and other extractive gotchas.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#368

Post by falsedan »

gaigalas wrote: post #316
falsedan wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you were paying me a monthly license fee for each developer working on your repos, I'd probably consider it

What happens if I am, and now my developers suddenly start to produce changes much faster? Like, one developer now produces the volume of five. Would you keep charging the same rate per head?

no, I'd cut the monthly seat cost and grow my user base to include more low-volume devs

but realistically, publishing a web page is practically free. you could be sending 100x as much data and I would still be laughing all the way to the bank

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#369

Post by NewJazz »

foresto wrote: post #325
eduardogarza wrote: post #136

This is my first comment on HN despite being a user for over a decade -- this is one of the most outrageous pricing changes I've encountered - I couldn't believe it when I read the email earlier (I run self-hosted runners). Anyone using GitLab or any other VCM that you'd recommend? I'm absolutely done with Github. Or is everything else just as bad?

I'm pretty happy with codeberg.org as a free host. Alternatively, Forgejo, Gitea, or (based on praise I've seen from other people) maybe sourcehut.org. I find GitLab's interface intolerable. Heavy reliance on javascript even for read-only access, nonintuitive organization, common operations hidden behind menus, mystifying icons... Every time I seek out a project's home and discover a GitLab instance, I find myself pa…

Gitlab interface is busy, yeah. But you it packs a lot of functionality in. If you want, you disable features like wiki and snippets to free up space on the side bar of a project. Or just look past it and find the part you want, issues merge requests, whatever.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#370

Post by watermelon0 »

zzo38computer wrote: post #337

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-hos…

This sounds correct, there are no changes for public repositories.

For private repositories, each GitHub account gets 2000 free minutes of runtime per month. Both self-hosted runners and GitHub-hosted runners count against that quota.

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