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Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

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Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#701

Post by timvdalen »

gitpusher wrote: post #255
timvdalen wrote: post #179

Our current GitHub bill is $90/month, this would add an additional $700/month. I don't see how this doesn't cause a mass outflux.

Curious: Can you expand a little bit on your usage? $700/month equates to 350,000 minutes. Are you just running a truck-load of different Actions, or are the Actions themselves long-lived (waiting on something to complete)?

Just a lot of different actions, none of them long-lived. It's CI/CD for a large monorepo maintained by a relatively small team.

We use feature branch deployments, so we trigger a lot of builds.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#702

Post by timvdalen »

fkorotkov wrote: post #243
timvdalen wrote: post #179

Our current GitHub bill is $90/month, this would add an additional $700/month. I don't see how this doesn't cause a mass outflux.

How much do you pay for the servers that run actions? Is it much more than $610? Then it kinda makes sense.

No it's much less. Our runners are hosted in AWS ECS, you'd be surprised how affordable you can make that given the right optimizations (which is probably why GH made this decision).

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#703

Post by maratc »

featherless wrote: post #64
sciencesama wrote: post #27

what are the opensource alternatives to selfhosted runners ?

Genuinely curious about this as well. It's a major bummer that self-hosted infra can't be used to validate GitHub Pull Requests now; basically means I'll have to move my entire workflow off of GitHub so that everything can be integrated reasonably again.

We use a combination of GHA and Jenkins jobs. All these end up as checks on GitHub. You could then proceed to say "Allow this PR Merge button if check A is ok and check B is ok" where check A arrived from GHA and check B from a Jenkins job.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#704

Post by ornornor »

NamlchakKhandro wrote: post #686
Schnitz wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub isn’t even good, it’s just the mediocre default everybody uses. PRs were fantastic and the best thing ever - 15 years ago!

100% don't understand why people think github actions are terrible. everything else is trash. Github Actions changed the landscape. They're composable. The only two other things that come close is Concourse.CI and CircleCi.... and circle-ci is 100% trash

Versioning sucks (the references are mutable), debugging sucks, you cant run them locally.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#705

Post by Ayesh »

AJRF wrote: post #576

I was born in 1993. I kind of heard lots of rumbling about Microsoft being evil as I grew up, but I wasn't fully understanding of the anti trust thing. It used to suprise me that people saw cool tech from Microsoft (like VSCode) and complain about it. I now see the first innings of a very silly game Microsoft are going to start playing over the next few years. Sure, they are going to make lots of money, but a whole g…

Microsoft had a very fair shot at redeeming themselves, but with how Teams, GitHub and all the AI crap they push into GitHub and Windows, it's clear they have not changed one bit.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#706

Post by maratc »

seniorThrowaway wrote: post #366
fbcpck wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 schedu…

Slack posting is literally one-line curl with a token. That's what the fancy marketplace action does behind the scenes.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#707

Post by oxalorg »

tyre wrote: post #681
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #654

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> learn from our mistakes and convince our teams and management to use community-maintained, libre alternatives Every company I've been at that tried to self-host something like GitLab, later moved to GitHub. Nobody in business cares if it's open source/free software. They care about managed hosting, centralized services, invoicing, etc. DIY is great for hobbyists and the cash-strapped.

Yeah I can't see a better alternative to GitHub. OSS can build truly incredible libraries and frameworks. User facing products? ehhhhh not so much. GitHub has gotten worse over the years but it's not like there's some gold standard open source alternative. And remember, early GH was filled with a pretty amazing group of developers and open source advocates. If the counter is that, instead of buying github, we could h…

At work we've started switching to codeberg (which uses forgejo) and honestly it's a breath of fresh air compared to GitHub. It's blazing fast compared to GitHub and has feature parity with our needs.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#708

Post by 8-prime »

NamlchakKhandro wrote: post #686
Schnitz wrote: post #601

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitHub isn’t even good, it’s just the mediocre default everybody uses. PRs were fantastic and the best thing ever - 15 years ago!

100% don't understand why people think github actions are terrible. everything else is trash. Github Actions changed the landscape. They're composable. The only two other things that come close is Concourse.CI and CircleCi.... and circle-ci is 100% trash

Github Actions is a cobbled together mess. It is mainly based on Azure DevOps Pipelines and still has some glaring bugs and wildly inefficient parts.

If it works for you, great. But it is far from being good.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#709

Post by hanwenn »

suryao wrote: post #244
mtlynch wrote: post #140

> In the past, our customers have asked us how GitHub views third-party runners long-term. The platform fee largely answers that: GitHub now monetizes Actions usage regardless of where jobs run, aligning third-party runners like Blacksmith as ecosystem partners rather than workarounds. It does? I feel like it implies that they want third-party runners like Blacksmith out of the ecosystem, which is why they're now fin…

With these changes, three things hold: 1. Services like blacksmith and WarpBuild (I'm the founder) are still cheaper than GitHub hosted runners, even after including the $0.002/min self-hosting tax. 2. The biggest lever for controlling costs now is reducing the number of minutes used in CI. Given how slow Github's runners are, or even the ones on AWS compared to our baremetal processor single core performance + nvme…

"WarpBuild are still the better option."

what makes you think they won't hike the control plane price again? They can turn this knob arbitrarily to put you out of business.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#710

Post by brulard »

saagarjha wrote: post #483
hinkley wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Am I right in assuming it’s not the amount of payment but the transition from $0 to paying a bill at all? I’m definitely sure it’s saving me more than $140 a month to have CI/CD running and I’m also sure I’d never break even on the opportunity cost of having someone write or set one up internally if someone else’s works - and this is the key - just as well. But investment in CI/CD is investing in future velocity. The…

Have you ever set up GitHub Actions? The outcome is brittle because of their platform, not because of my inability to do CI.

Exactly this. I've used Jenkins, Travis, CircleCI and all of them were so easy in comparison to the github actions runner mess.
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