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Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

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Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#771

Post by madog »

Cthulhu_ wrote: post #733
madog wrote: post #719

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something like Gerrit. Instead of carefully crafting a logical series of patches that are all well documented with commit messages, PRs are just garbage filled diff soup of "fix typo" commits. I hate it. It's hard to review and seems to be based on putting the least amount of effort into proposing changes to the code. See https://gist.github.com/thoughtpolice/9c45287550a56b2047c631...

That's down to culture and (self) discipline, not tools.

It's not entirely, because Github simply does not support inter-version diffs when you have multiple commits. If you force push onto multiple commits there is no way to show a diff between version 2 and version 3 of those commits. How Github lacks such basic (and imo necessary) functionality in 2025 is amazing to me.

Something like linked and dependent PRs in a chain would go someway to replicating Gerrit but again this basic functionality is not available out of the box for whatever reason.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#772

Post by az226 »

madeofpalk wrote: post #611
golovast wrote: post #131

I got contacted by our rep a couple weeks ago, who informed me of this news. I thought it was a disaster and it really pissed me off. The rep couldn't even explain the reasoning well. It basically summed up to "because we can" and "where are you going to go?". He was shocked to find out that I didn't like it. We currently self-host on kubernets/aws. The thing that really got to me isn't the new charge per se. It's th…

It seems clear to me this is in response to all the third party GHA runners who were undercutting GitHub by just reselling cloud instances for cheaper. They’ve lowered their runner costs to compete, and introduce minimum charge to discourage abd make sure they still get paid.

100% this.

They could have made their service better or more competitive like with price but instead they chose this route. SMH.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#773

Post by wereHamster »

Nextgrid wrote: post #590
cyberax wrote: post #396

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And I mean sure, everything is kinda janky on Jenkins, but everything falls into an expectable corridor of jank you get used to. Self-hosting Jenkins on an EC2 instance is probably going to result in a _better_ experience at this point. Github Cache is barely better than just downloading assets directly, and with Jenkins you can trivially use a local disk for caching. Or if you're feeling fancy and want more isolat…

Self-hosting on a host whose data actually persists is an even better experience, as it removes a lot of the tedium and workarounds such as extracting/down-/up-loading caches and so on. Get another host for redundancy and call it a day. Hardware is getting cheaper and cheaper, but the fear-mongering around running a Linux machine has successfully prevented most businesses from reaping those cost reductions.

I repurposed old M1/M4 Mac Mini's at my workplace into GitHub action runners. Works like a charm, and made our workflows simpler and faster. Persisting the working directory between runs was a big performance boost.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#774

Post by anchochilis »

k4rli wrote: post #747
tyre wrote: post #681

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm a contractor so have worked on a lot of different projects for different companies, big and small and also early startups. This is far from truth imo. It is very possible to only use (F)OSS. Github, AWS, Azure, Vercel are not at all more pleasant or easier to work with than on-prem Gitlab/gitea/codeberg/jenkins/k8s/kibana/prometheus/grafana. I could spend an hour and have a full setup done on physical or VPS to h…

What you're missing is maintenance, security, scaling, and protection from data loss.

Bespoke CI is easy to build but no one wants to be in charge of rolling out a critical security patch to that on-prem box no one's touched since that consultant from 2 years ago.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#776

Post by mukundesh »

Will OSS (public) repositories also have to pay if they use self-hosted GitHub runners ? If yes, that seems a bit counterintuitive, given that Github hosted runners are free for public repos.

Why would a public repo use a self-hosted runner ? because the self-hosted runner storage available is only 14GB !!

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#777

Post by mukundesh »

Schnitz wrote: post #601
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…

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

GitHub Actions are amazing ! For a public repository who will give you a free machine to run for 6 hours at a stretch for a job !!

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#778

Post by gallexme »

alexellisuk wrote: post #700
gallexme wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I run about 1 action a day taking 18h running on 2 runners One being self hosted 24gb ram 8 core ARM vps and one being a 64gb 13900k x86 dedicated server Now the GitHub pricing change definitely? costs more than both servers combined a month ... (They cost about 60$ together ) 3 step GitHub action builds around 1200 nix packages and derivations , but produces only around 50 lines of logs total if successful and maybe…

It sounds like you'd be better off self-hosting Jenkins. The other issue with GHA is they cap all runs at 6 hours. Despite what people say about "maintaining" Jenkins (whatever that means to them personally) - you can set it up in an IaaC way including the jobs. You can migrate/create jobs en masse via its API (I did this about 10 years ago for a large US company converting from what was then called TFS)

I'll likely check out buildbot or just switch to gitlab

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#779

Post by solarengineer »

If Github runs the control plane, I presume there would be some costs to that. Consider the costs of hosting a control plane that assigns jobs to runners, receives and processes heart beat signals, receives log streams, exchanges file artifacts with the runner. Such actions would take up compute for the Control Plane.

Are Control Plane costs already separately charged?

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#780

Post by luma »

groundzeros2015 wrote: post #66
andsens wrote: post #54

That's not a move of a company that thinks it can still grow. That's a Netflix "we have 90% of the market, let's squeeze them" move. This is the beginning. We have all seen this pattern over the last 5+ years. You know their next few moves.

The Netflix one worked

The first stages always do, that's why corporations keep pulling the enshittification lever.
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