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Comment by lherron | Hacker News Reader

Why would the self-hosted runner fee be per-minute instead of per-job? I don’t get it.

I had the same question — I understand that the Actions control plane has costs on self-hosted runners that GitHub would like to recoup, but those costs are fixed per-job. Charging by the minute for the user’s own resources gives the impression that GitHub is actually trying to disincentivize third-party runners.

Might be an estimation of logs storage/bandwidth.

That's generous, but doesn't seem consistent with how Microsoft does business. Also, if that's the case why does self-hosted cost the same as the lowest hosted tier?

Self-hosted runner regularly communicates with the control plane, and control plane also needs to keep track of job status, logs, job summaries, etc.

8h job is definitely more expensive to them than a 1 minute one, but I'd guess that the actual reason is that this way they earn more money, and dissuade users from using a third party service instead of their own runners.

Because the competitor services that provide much cheaper hosted runners also charge per minute.

This isn't aimed at people actually self-hosting; it's aimed at alternative hosted runners providers. See this list

https://github.com/neysofu/awesome-github-actions-runners

Runner price based on CPU/memory and time makes sense, since those are the costs associated with executing runners.

The costs for GitHub doing action workflows (excluding running) is less related to job duration.

The most charitable interpretation is that per-minute pricing is easier to understand, especially if you already pay runners per minute.

The less charitable interpretation is that they charge that because they can, as they have the mindshare and network effect to keep you from changing.

or some other metric like how many logs your job produces and they have to process

the only rational outside rationale is this has the best financial projections, equitability with the customer be damned

gotta make up for those slumping ai sales somehow, amiright?

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