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Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

resources.github.com

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Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#511

Post by __turbobrew__ »

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…

> 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

If it is so easy why don’t you write your own orchestrator to run jobs on the hardware you own?

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#512

Post by jononor »

IshKebab wrote: post #91
Arcuru wrote: post #2

> We are introducing a $0.002 per-minute Actions cloud platform charge for all Actions workflows across GitHub-hosted and self-hosted runners. Charging for self-hosted runners is an interesting choice. That's the same cost as their smallest hosted runners [1] [1] - https://docs.github.com/en/billing/reference/actions-runner-...

It's because there are easy-to-use third party runners that cost around 3-10x less than the GitHub ones. This is aimed squarely at them. https://github.com/neysofu/awesome-github-actions-runners

Starting an external CI company for GitHub is becoming more interesting now. Gitlab offers ability to do CI for external repositories. Travis CI was what everyone used before Github Actions. Time for a new Travis?

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#513

Post by Sytten »

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.

We also use WarpBuild and very happy with the performance gain. This changes nothing except maybe it should signal to WarpBuild to start supporting other providers than Github. We are clearly entering the enshitiffication phase of Github.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#514

Post by Nextgrid »

throwaway150 wrote: post #455

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…

Takes like these do not account for the value you gained by using the software in the meantime. Here are 2 scenarios:

1) company uses exclusively free software, spends more time dealing with the shortcomings of said software than developing product, product is half baked and doesn't sell well, company dies.

2) company uses proprietary but cheap/free (as in beer) software that does the job really well, focuses on developing product, product is good and sells well, company how has a ton of money they could use to replicate the proprietary product from scratch if they wanted to.

A purist approach like in scenario 1 leaves everyone poor. A pragmatic approach like scenario 2 ends up earning enough money that can be used to recreate the proprietary software from scratch (and open-source it if you wanted to).

In this case the problem isn't even the proprietariness of the software, it's the fact that companies are reliant on someone else hosting the software (GH being FOSS wouldn't actually change anything here - whoever is hosting it can still enforce whatever terms they want).

FOSS alternatives already exist, it's just that our industry is so consumed by grifters that nobody knows how to do things anymore (because it's more profitable for every individual not to); running software on a server (what used to be table stakes for any shop and junior sysadmin) is nowadays lost knowledge. Microsoft and SaaS software providers are capitalizing on this.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#515

Post by suryao »

Sytten wrote: post #513
zamalek wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We also use WarpBuild and very happy with the performance gain. This changes nothing except maybe it should signal to WarpBuild to start supporting other providers than Github. We are clearly entering the enshitiffication phase of Github.

thanks for the love! we are actively considering supporting other providers.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#517

Post by embedding-shape »

Nextgrid wrote: post #514
throwaway150 wrote: post #455

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…

Takes like these do not account for the value you gained by using the software in the meantime. Here are 2 scenarios: 1) company uses exclusively free software, spends more time dealing with the shortcomings of said software than developing product, product is half baked and doesn't sell well, company dies. 2) company uses proprietary but cheap/free (as in beer) software that does the job really well, focuses on deve…

> A purist approach like in scenario 1 leaves everyone poor.

That depends, not always. Sometimes the employees of said company manages to contribute back upstream, on the dime of the company. If the "free software" they used and contributed to have a lot of users, it's certainly not "leaves everyone poor" but rather "helps everyone, beyond monetary gain".

Sure, you can make the argument that it isn't that great for the company, and you may be right. But the world is bigger than companies making money, killing a few companies along the way to make small iterative steps on making free software for absolutely everyone is probably a worthwhile sacrifice, if you zoom out a bit.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#518

Post by liamkinne »

Someone1234 wrote: post #463

I really enjoy how they list the price PER MINUTE to make it sound like this isn't absurdly expensive. A lot of people leave their self-hosted runners running 24/7 because, after all, they're self-hosted. This is $2.88/day, $86.4/month, $1051.2/year. For them to do essentially nothing. Most notably, this is the same price as their hosted "Linux 1-core" on a per-minute basis. Meaning they're charging you the same for…

$1k per year if you run an action 24/7. How many minutes per month do you actually use? How does that compare to the cost of the machines being used as runners?

The real mistake was GH not charging anything for self-hosted runners in the first place, setting an expectation.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#519

Post by skilning »

throwaway150 wrote: post #455

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…

Have any suggestions to those community-developed and maintained options?

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#520

Post by janc_ »

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…

The Dutch government represenrative mentioned contacts with French colleagues about this also.
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