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Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

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Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#491

Post by nebezb »

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…

I get the frustration. And I’m no GitHub apologist either. But you’re not being charged for hardware you own. You’re being charged for the services surrounding it (the action runner/executor binary you didn’t build, the orchestrator configurable in their DSL you write, the artefact and log retention you’re getting, the plug-n-play with your repo, etc). Whether or not you think that is a fair price is beside the point.

That value to you is apparently less than $140/mo. Find the number you’re comfortable with and then move away from GH Actions if it’s less than $140.

More than 10 years of running my own CI infra with Jenkins on top. In 2023 I gave up Jenkins and paid for BuildKite. It’s still my hardware. BuildKite just provides the “services” I described earlier. Yet I paid them a lot of money to provide their services for me on my own hardware. GH actions, even while free, was never an option for me. I don’t like how it feels.

This is probably bad for GitHub but framing it as “charging me for my hardware” misses the point entirely.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#494

Post by dijit »

mindcrash wrote: post #419
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.

Representatives from the Dutch government recently had a chat with representatives from Forgejo because they are quite interested in migrating their SCM infrastructure from Github to Forgejo. And trust me, they are running a lot of public and private repositories. And there are many more orgs and govs throughout Europe doing similar things because there's a (growing) zeitgeist here that the Trump administration nor a…

Can confirm.

I have seen this sentiment more and more, which is welcome to me as it’s a drum I have been banging for 15 years.

I have never had so many empathetic conversations than I have recently.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#495

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> They have just decided that they are no longer going to do this for free.

Right, instead, they now charge the full cost of orchestration plus runner for just the orchestration part, making the basic runner free.

(Considering that compute for "self-hosted" runners is often also rented from some party that isn't Microsoft, this is arguably leveraging the market power in CI orchestration that is itself derived from their market power in code hosting to create/extend market power in compute for runners, which sounds like a potential violation of both the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act.)

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#496

Post by suryao »

vsl wrote: post #435
bdbdbdb wrote: post #120

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

Because GHA was stagnant and expensive and multiple services like https://www.warpbuild.com/ popped up, with better performance and much lower price. Looks like they ate enough of GH’s lunch…

Hey, WarpBuild founder here. While it makes it harder for us to communicate this, we're still, we're still faster and cheaper even after the $0.002/min self hosting tax.

Overall costs go up for everyone but we remain the better option.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#497

Post by ajford »

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…

Sure, but that shouldn't be a time-dependent charge. If my build takes an hour to build on GH's hardware, sure thing, charge me for that time. But if my build takes an hour to build on _my_ hardware, then why am I paying GH for that hour?

I get being charged per-run, to recoup the infra cost, but what about my total runtime on my machine impacts what GH needs to spend to trigger my build?

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#499

Post by naian »

r2vcap wrote: post #407

This is a serious issue. How is it possible for GitHub/Microsoft to charge me for using my own machine as a self-hosted GitHub Actions runner?

For the same reason they charge you for running Word, even though you're the one who has to write, I guess?

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#500

Post by ExoticPearTree »

saagarjha wrote: post #476
whynotmaybe wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 a…

Is it polling the runner, or is the runner sending it progress?

The runner sends progress info, polls for jobs and so on. The runners don't have to be accessible from GitHub, they just needs general internet access (like through a NAT device).
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