Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions • Hacker News Board

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#561

Post by Someone1234 » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 12:04 AM UTC

beAbU wrote: post #532

dijit wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not understanding something. If its the price of runs, then its not always running. If its price of the agent to exist, then thats not paying per runs- then you’re right that people tend to leave their runners online 24/7- but I’ve never worked anywhere that had workers building 24/7.

I guess some people just always have something running since it's owned hardware. Daily builds of popular OSS projects or constant vuln scans or whatever?

When you've already paid for the hardware, it is essentially free after that (aside electricity, I suppose). So there wasn't a reason to ration our runners, and we actually added additional workloads/scans/etc just because we could.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#562

Post by icy » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 12:06 AM UTC

defraudbah wrote: post #160

this is the third article about it, we know, good times are over, will start migrating towards something else

Consider tangled.org :)

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#563

Post by icy » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 12:08 AM UTC

benced wrote: post #277

Are there bring-your-own-agent CI platforms that don't have pricing structures like this? Buildkite and CircleCI do.

https://tangled.org's spindle CI is pretty much this. It's not quite as powerful as Actions yet, but we're getting there!

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#564

Post by Nextgrid » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 12:10 AM UTC

bdangubic wrote: post #525

Nextgrid wrote: post #514

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

or alternative hire right people that know what they are doing and don’t need a whole lot of junk to work on and deploy. I have been coding 31 years now and don’t have the slighest clue why anyone would ever need a “github action”

There's value in enforcing checks on the server side to avoid people accidentally/maliciously merging code that doesn't pass said checks. Checks can be linters, security scanners, etc.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#565

Post by ok123456 » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 12:13 AM UTC

matthewmacleod wrote: post #503

ok123456 wrote: post #379

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're squeezing their customers after locking in to juice their margins, having become a monopoly/monopsony. This is the classic enshitificaton playbook.

Nobody is locked in (unless they made some incredibly bad decisions) and this is a tiny fee in exchange for a useful service. I’m just baffled by the response to this.

It's not baffling if you read his Enshitification book. This is phase 2.

In 2010, people were saying it was very reasonable to start prioritizing publishers' ability to reach you over your organic contacts. After all, Facebook is providing this utility for free; shouldn't they be able to extract some additional revenue from their platform? And here we are in 2025...

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#566

Post by steve_taylor » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 12:14 AM UTC

So instead of addressing their runners being extremely slow to the point that a reasonable person would think it's deliberate in order to extract more billable minutes, they're charging customers for using an alternative. Makes sense.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#567

Post by molszanski » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 12:18 AM UTC

Is it a runner minute or workflow running minute? That would be a massive difference. Would people pay for idle time or not?

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#568

Post by Cyph0n » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 12:18 AM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #564

bdangubic wrote: post #525

Earlier quoted context omitted.

or alternative hire right people that know what they are doing and don’t need a whole lot of junk to work on and deploy. I have been coding 31 years now and don’t have the slighest clue why anyone would ever need a “github action”

There's value in enforcing checks on the server side to avoid people accidentally/maliciously merging code that doesn't pass said checks. Checks can be linters, security scanners, etc.

> Checks can be linters, security scanners, etc.

The first checks I setup are build and test. The rest is “extra”.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#569

Post by deepsun » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 12:22 AM UTC

ukd1 wrote: post #557

skilning wrote: post #519

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Gitea. Gitlab (ish?).

GitLab actually implemented Actions first back in the day (called CI/CD). I remember GitHub was following their lead.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#570

Post by crawshaw » Wed, Dec 17, 2025, 12:23 AM UTC

The funny thing is if GitHub let me pay extra for an actions runner that was not a potato, I would happily give them so much money. Instead they want to penalize me for working around their broken product.