Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions • Hacker News Board

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#451

Post by user34283 » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 9:51 PM UTC

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…

After working for years with GitLab professionally, you know exactly where everything is.

Particularly making a contribution should anyhow be trivial - you push the branch and it shows a banner in the repo asking if you want to open a MR for the recently pushed branch.

I don't know why anyone would use GitHub actions. They seem like a weird, less powerful version of the GitLab CI. Now they want to charge for runtime on your own runner.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#452

Post by sakisv » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 9:52 PM UTC

parliament32 wrote: post #398

selkin wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think Forgejo is competitive in the markets GitHub makes most of their money from, nor does it seem Forgejo developers want it to be.

Where does GitHub even make most of their money? Their compliance posture makes them a non-starter for any regulated industries (which is atypical for a Microsoft property, generally MS is the market leader for compliance in all of their products).

Given that a lot of places that deal with money use them, I find your comment quite interesting and would like to learn more :)

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#453

Post by user34283 » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 9:53 PM UTC

otterley wrote: post #406

array_key_first wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's outrageous because self hosted runners are... self hosted. And the entire solution just sucks. It's bad, bad software. It barely works a lot of the time. The only reason they're doing this is because they can. Which is usually a really stupid reason. And here, it is. So, that's outrageous.

> because self hosted runners are... self hosted. Sure, but there's a separate mechanism that you need to make it all work: the orchestration. Without that, you have only the capacity to run jobs -- it's potential energy, if you will, not doing real work. That orchestrator thus provides real value. And it's not like it's free for them to build, operate, and maintain.

The CI pipeline using my own runner is absolutely something that I expect to come for free with hosting the repository.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#454

Post by lijok » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 9:54 PM UTC

otterley wrote: post #446

lijok wrote: post #439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s 2.5x what my actual runners cost. For every $100 in compute, I will be paying $250 to github. They can fuck right off

I'm curious - where are you finding runners for $0.0008/minute? What are their specs?

Ubicloud. Also faster than the analog runners github provide. Only problem is startup time is slower

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#455

Post by throwaway150 » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 9:57 PM UTC

It is us, developers, who convinced our management to purchase GitHub Enterprise to be our forge. We didn't pay any heed to the values of software freedom. A closed source, proprietary software had good features. We saw that and convinced our management to purchase it. Never mind what cost it would impose in the future when the good software gets bad owners. Never mind that there were alternatives that were inferior but were community-developed, community-maintained and libre.

The writing is in the wall. First it was UX annoyances. Then it was GitHub Actions woes. Now it is paying money for running their software on your own hardware. It's only going to go downhill. Is it a good time now to learn from our mistakes and convince our teams and management to use community-maintained, libre alternatives? They may be inferior. They may lack features. But they're not going to pull user hostile tricks like this on you and me. And hey, if they are lacking features, maybe we should convince our management to let us contribute time to the community to add those features? It's a much better investment than sinking money into a software that will only grow more and more user hostile, isn't it?

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#456

Post by otterley » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 9:57 PM UTC

featherless wrote: post #343

larkost wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 $1…

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

This is an odd take because you're completely discounting the value of the orchestration. In your grocery store analogy, who's the orchestrator? It isn't you.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#457

Post by lijok » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 9:58 PM UTC

PLEASE stop propping up the narrative that the GitHub Actions control plane was previously free. It never was. Pricing is not that simple. I see way too many people in this thread, and even GitHub Actions competitors promoting this nonsensical narrative.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#458

Post by progbits » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 9:59 PM UTC

So they are finally doing this. Our github account rep mentioned this back in February, but then they kept postponing and heard nothing so I was hoping they realized how stupid this idea was and abandoned it.

My org sadly has a lot of github actions workflows, even after this it's not expensive enough to justify migrating away, but with all their downtime and bugs they are really pushing us closer and closer.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#459

Post by featherless » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 10:01 PM UTC

otterley wrote: post #456

featherless wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 $1…

> The problem here is that this is like a grocery store charging me money for every bag I bring to bag my own groceries. This is an odd take because you're completely discounting the value of the orchestration. In your grocery store analogy, who's the orchestrator? It isn't you.

Do you feel that orchestration runs on a per-minute basis?

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#460

Post by loginatnine » Tue, Dec 16, 2025, 10:02 PM UTC

otterley wrote: post #388

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?

"Outrageous"? It's two tenths of a cent per minute. How much will it impact you, really, particularly relative to the cost of compute?

At our company, it's ~35k USD increase annually. This is not negligeable.