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Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

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Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#821

Post by novok »

IshKebab wrote: post #723
ghthor wrote: post #598

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Buildkite is so dope; love them

Their website is terrible though. Weird geeky interface, and I could only find reams and reams of gushing copy about how great they are. Nothing concrete about why . Also quite expensive!

CI is one of those twilight zone things that by the time you need something like buildkite, you're making a lot of money, otherwise why would you have such a complicated CI setup? To do it right, you basically need to start spending buildkite money either way in staffing or buying buildkite. There are probably under 50k organizations in the world that need something like buildkite.

It does have a big 'it shouldn't be this expensive' energy, but the market has shown it needs to be unfortunately. Nobody really survives in the CI world without going to complete neglect mode or goes expensive like buildkite I've found. It reminds me a lot of home automation / IoT. Lutron costs almost $100 a light switch for really silly economic reasons unfortunately even though the tech is basically unchanged since the 90s.

The interface is also geeky because the only people who are going to even realize you need to spend money on this are other software professionals.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#822

Post by kevin_thibedeau »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #654
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…

> 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.

Lots of businesses can't put sensitive work product onto external servers. You just don't work for them.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#823

Post by TheNewsIsHere »

oxalorg wrote: post #707
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…

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.

I have (almost completely) moved my business from GitHub to Forgejo as well. I’m deploying an instance at home as well.

It’s shocking how bloated and slow GitHub is even for basic actions when you compare it to Forgejo running just your own stuff.

Bonus: if you can manage to reliably backup a database and a filesystem, you can then backup your forge. Outside GH Enterprise there is still no restorable backup option inside GitHub.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#824

Post by terom »

__float wrote: post #818
terom wrote: post #801

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working with Jenkins CasC, JobDSL and declarative pipelines, I'm not sure where the million times comes from. Sure, there are some annoying parts, and GHA has the social network for reusable actions, but apart from that it's not that different. Oldschool maven type jobs where you type shell script into a ` `? Yeah, let's not talk about those, but we don't have a single one left anymore.

Jenkins Groovy is awful and full of footguns. Have you ever run into a serialization exception? It's too powerful and there are too many of its implementation details exposed to the user.

I haven't seen a serialization exception, but I have run into plenty of footguns with YAML (ref GitHub Actions).

The DSL semantics can be weird with when things like params/env expansions in options block are evaluated.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#825

Post by TheCondor »

fbcpck wrote: post #144
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #94

Everyone in this thread has gone absolutely insane. $5/month gets you 41 fucking _hours_ of continuous operation. If you're not utterly abusing the platform, this falls extremely below the threshold of caring. And if not, what the fuck are you even doing with all those hours? The new per-minute charge is less than one millisecond of engineer labor cost.

per minute billing is hard to wrap around the head On my larger organization, we have on average 20 to 30 *active* runners during business hours. Assuming 5 on the off-hours, my napkin math says it comes down to about 10 fully-utilized-runners per month, so about 864$/mo. For the size of my organization that is honestly totally acceptable. This is assuming 0.002$ per minute of job being actively executed. If it turns…

We have the same question, our runners are registers 24x7 but we probably only use a few hours a week.

I get the logic of it, they have to have some sort of task running on their side when the runner is working. If it's only build time, then we don't care.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#826

Post by zem »

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…

on the other hand, a better user experience is something open source projects can aspire towards as a pure goal, with no perverse incentives pulling them the other way. a lot of the recent github changes have degraded the user experience because that was overall more profitable for the company.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#827

Post by hadlock »

falsedan wrote: post #803
benrutter wrote: post #767

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I agree with you that: - everything else is trash. - Github Actions changed the landscape. - They're composable. And I still hate github actions! Aside from anything else, they have one major flaw, which is there is no good development/test loop for writing them. If you write most of your CICD in some kind of script, then you can run it locally, and do some basic checks around environment etc before deploying…

top tip: make a repo in your org for pushing all these nonsense changes to, test out your workflows with a dummy package being published to the repo, work out all the weird edge cases/underdocumented features of Actions once you're done, make the actual changes in your real repo. I call the test repo 'pincushion'

We call ours "bombing-range"

We maintain an internal service that hosts two endpoints; /random-cat-picture (random >512KB image + UUID + text timestamp to evade caching) and /api/v1/generic.json which allows developers and platform folks to test out new ideas from commit to deploy behind a load balancer in an end-to-end fashion, it has saved countless headaches over the years.

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#829

Post by pizzafeelsright »

cassidoo wrote: post #828

This has been updated. https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/182186

We’re postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions to take time to re-evaluate our approach.

We are continuing to reduce hosted-runners prices by up to 39% on January 1, 2026.

Good, for now?

Re: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions

#830

Post by swiftcoder »

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…

> is $0.002/minute a good price for this

I think a useful framing of this question is: would you run a c7gn.large instance just to do this orchestration?

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