This seems backwards. Why charge for me to run the thing myself instead of them?
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 though all tests (a bit on the long side, but I have some tests that run for days), then you are going to pay GitHub $.12 for that run. You are probably going to pay significantly more for the compute for running that (especially if you are running on multiple testers simultaneously). So this does not seem to be too bad.
This is probably going to push a lot of people to invest more in parallelizing their workloads, and/or putting them on faster machines in order to reduce the number of minutes they are billed for.
I should note that if you are doing something similar in AWS using SMS (Systems Management Service), that I found that if you are running small jobs on lots of system that the AWS charges can add up very quickly. I had to abandon a monitoring system idea I had for our fleet (~800 systems) because the per-hit cost of just a monitoring ping was $1.84 (I needed a small mount of data from an on-worker process). Running that every 10 minutes was going to be more than $250/day. Writing/running my own monitoring system was much cheaper.
I am not open to GitHub extracting usage-based rent for me using my own hardware.
This is the first time in my 15+ years of using GitHub that I'm seriously evaluating alternative products to move my company to.
So, like I said, the question for you is whether that $140/month of service is worth that money to you, or can you find a better priced alternative, or build something that costs less yourself.
My guess is that once you think about this some more you will decide it is worth it, and probably spend some time trying to drive down your minutes/month a bit. But at $140 a month, how much time is that worth investing?
I'd happily pay a fixed monthly fee for this service, as I already do for GitHub.
The problem here is that this is like a grocery store charging me money for every bag I bring to bag my own groceries.
> But at $140 a month, how much time is that worth investing?
It's not $140/month. It's $140/month today, when my company is still relatively small and it's just me. This cost will scale as my company scales, in a way that is completely bonkers.
Maybe they can market it as the Github Actions corkage fee
If it is so easy why don’t you write your own orchestrator to run jobs on the hardware you own?
This is an odd take because you're completely discounting the value of the orchestration. In your grocery store analogy, who's the orchestrator? It isn't you.
For scheduled work, cron + a log sink is fine, and for pull request CI there's plenty of alternatives that don't charge by the minute to use your own hardware. The irony here, unfortunately, is that the latter requires I move entirely off of GitHub now.
> My guess is that once you think about this some more you will decide it is worth it, and probably spend some time trying to drive down your minutes/month a bit. But at $140 a month, how much time is that worth investing?
It's $140 right now. And if they want to squeeze you for cents worth of CPU time (because for artifact storage you're already paying separately), they *will* squeeze harder.
And more importantly *RIGHT NOW* it costs more per minute than running decent sized runner!
That value to you is apparently less than $140/mo. Find the number you’re comfortable with and then move away from GH Actions if it’s less than $140.
More than 10 years of running my own CI infra with Jenkins on top. In 2023 I gave up Jenkins and paid for BuildKite. It’s still my hardware. BuildKite just provides the “services” I described earlier. Yet I paid them a lot of money to provide their services for me on my own hardware. GH actions, even while free, was never an option for me. I don’t like how it feels.
This is probably bad for GitHub but framing it as “charging me for my hardware” misses the point entirely.
It used to suprise me that people saw cool tech from Microsoft (like VSCode) and complain about it.
I now see the first innings of a very silly game Microsoft are going to start playing over the next few years. Sure, they are going to make lots of money, but a whole generation of developers are learning to avoid them.
Thanks for trying to warn us old heads!
It makes sense to do usage-based pricing with a generously-sized free tier, which seems to be what they're doing? Offering the entire service for free at any scale would imply that you're "paying" for/subsidizing this orchestration elsewhere in your transactions with GitHub. This is more-transparent pricing.
Although, this puts downward pressure on orgs' willingness to pay such a large price for GH enterprise licenses, as this service was hitherto "implicitly" baked into that fee. I don't think the license fees are going to go down any time soon, though :P
Now the GitHub pricing change definitely? costs more than both servers combined a month ... (They cost about 60$ 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 200 lines of log once when a failure occurs And I'm supposed to pay 4$ a day for that ? Wonder what kind of actual costs are involved on their side of waiting for a runner to complete and storing 50 lines of log
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)
Nice profit margin…
Unless you're on the free org plan, they're hardly doing it "for free" today…
Right, instead, they now charge the full cost of orchestration plus runner for just the orchestration part, making the basic runner free.
(Considering that compute for "self-hosted" runners is often also rented from some party that isn't Microsoft, this is arguably leveraging the market power in CI orchestration that is itself derived from their market power in code hosting to create/extend market power in compute for runners, which sounds like a potential violation of both the Sherman Act and the Clayton Act.)
I get being charged per-run, to recoup the infra cost, but what about my total runtime on my machine impacts what GH needs to spend to trigger my build?
It was free, so anything other than free isn't really a good price. It's hard to estimate the cost on github's side when the hardware is mine and therefore accept this easily.
(Github is already polling my agent to know it's status so whether is "idle" or "running action" shouldn't really change a lot on their side.)
...And we already pay montly subscription for team members and copilot.
I have a self-hosted runner because I must have many tools installed for my builds and find it kinda counter productive to always reinstall those tools for each build as this takes a long time. (Yeah, I know "reproducible builds" aso, but I only have 24h in most of my days)
Even for a few hundreds minutes a month, we're still under a few $ so not worth spending two days to improve anything... yet.
It is not only not good. It is outrageous. The amount of compute required for orchestration is small (async operations) and also they already charge your for artifacts storage. You need to understand that the orchestration just receives details (inbound) from the runner. It needs very little resources.
Absolutely not, since it's the same price as their cheapest hosted option. If all they're doing is orchestration, why the hell are they charging per-minute instead of per-action or some other measure that recognizes the difference in their cost between self-hosted and github-hosted?
I think a useful framing of this question is: would you run a c7gn.large instance just to do this orchestration?
This argument is disingenuous. Companies pay GitHub per seat for access to PR functionality etc. What's next, charging per repository? Because of a decision to no longer provide the repositories "for free"? It's not for free, you're paying already, it's included in the per-seat pricing. If you charge per seat then sometimes there are users who hardly use it and sometimes there are users who use it a lot. The per-seat pricing model is supposed to make the service profitable overall regardless of the usage levels of individual users.
Or shortly summarized: lock in through pricing.
Pretty sure this will explode straight in their faces though. And pretty damn hard.
So they make CI a bit cheaper but a future migration to Forgejo harder.
In fact they could easily pull off some typical sleazy Microsoft bullshit and eventually make it a shit ton harder to migrate out of GitHub once you migrated back in.
I don’t know if that’s actually why they’re doing this, but it sounds plausible.
Now, if you are already looking at migrating, its also potentially a kick in the butt to do it now. But if you aren’t, the path of least resistance—or at least, the path of least present recurring cost—is a path to a greater degree of lock-in.
Microsoft’s sales reps know this.
https://docs.github.com/en/enterprise-cloud@latest/organizat...
And trust me, they are running a lot of public and private repositories.
And there are many more orgs and govs throughout Europe doing similar things because there's a (growing) zeitgeist here that the Trump administration nor any American SaaS company can be trusted. This started, by the way, after Microsoft suspended the ICJ from using Microsoft 365 on orders from the White House.
I have seen this sentiment more and more, which is welcome to me as it’s a drum I have been banging for 15 years.
I have never had so many empathetic conversations than I have recently.
Everybody now is like "Hey, we can take something like Kubernetes which is open source and is backed by a worldwide community, and you know like OpenStack which is open source and is backed by a worldwide community and we can build our own computing platform and deploy services and online communities and stuff on top of that"
And I was like "Wait, you guys are realizing that NOW?!? I've been an activist and part of a movement urging you all to try and be less dependent on US Big Tech and focus more on decentralization for YEARS"
Like you I am really happy things seem to get rolling now, though :)
> Or shortly summarized: lock in through pricing.
how would increasing price make you locked in more ?
> If you don't really care about the metadata all it pretty much takes is moving git repositories with their history.
moving PR/CI/CD/Ticket flow is very significant effort, as in most companies that stuff is referenced everywhere. Having your commits refer ticket ID from system that no longer exists is royal PITA
just rewrite the short links in your front-end to point to the migrated issues/PRs. write a redirect rule for each migrated issue/PR, easy
hard-coded links in commit messages are annoying, you can redirect in the front-end too but locally you'd have to smudge/clean them on local checkout/commit
Overall costs go up for everyone but we remain the better option.
They don't care about people actually self-hosting. They care about people "self hosting" with these guys:
If you don't want to pay, you'd have to not use GitHub Actions at all, maybe by using their API to test new commits and PRs and mark them as failed or passed.
Nothing kills morale faster than wrenching on the unreliable piece of infrastructure everyone hates. Every time I see an alert in slack github is having issues with actions (again) all I think is, "I'm glad that isn't me" and go about my day
Contrast with a declarative system like github actions: "I would like an immutable environment like this, and then perform X actions and send the logs/report back to the centralized single pane of glass in github". Google's "cloud run" product is pretty good in this regard as well. Sure, developers can add foot guns to your GHA/Cloud Run workflow, but since it is inherently git-tracked, you can simply revert those atomically.
I used Jenkins for 5-7 years across several jobs and I don't miss it at all.
People would be better served by not expecting anything different from Microsoft. As you say yourself, this is how they roll.
> The only learning to take away is never ever use anything from the big tech companies
Do you even believe in this yourself? Not being dependent on them would be a good start.
I mean maybe https://github.com/rust-lang/bors is enough to fully replace Github Actions? (not sure)
Listen to webhooks for new commits + PRs, and then use the commit status API to push statuses: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/commits/statuses?apiVersion=...
Rather than having to write some ad hoc code to do this
Post statuses, and add rulesets to require those statuses before a PR can be merged. The step after that is to lock out pushing to the branch entirely and perform the integration externally but that has its own challenges.
Their announcement gives a clue, and it’s to do with job orchestration.
I don’t make policy at GitHub and I don’t work at GitHub so go ask GitHub why they charge for infrastructure costs like any other cloud service. It has to do with the queueing and assignment of jobs which is not free. Why do they charge per minute? I have no idea, maybe it was easiest to do that given the billing infrastructure they already have. Maybe they tried a million different ways and this was the most reasonable. Maybe it’s Microsoft and they’re giving us all the middle finger, who knows.
I added some context that contradicts your assumption that the increased fees were to cover hosting/storage/scheduling costs.
Anyway, GitHub actions is a dumpster fire even without this change.
But you (yes, you personally) have to collect the results and publish them to a webpage for me. For free.
Would you make this deal?
Except the alternative is I do this for free but also I'm doing all the testing and providing the hardware.
I'm only going to charge you if you do most of the work yourself
Maybe it's bad business dealing with lots of non-standardized external hosts, and it drags you down.
Maybe people are abusing the free orchestration to do non-CI stuff and they're compromising legitimate users.
Look, I understand it's frustrating to some consumers. However, it's not irrational from GitHub's point of view.
Would you keep charging the same rate per head?
it's 2025, for log files and a spicy cron daemon (you pay for the artifact storage), it's practically free to do so. this isn't like the days of Western Union where paying $0.35 to send some data across the world is a good deal
All the people complaining can just tap into this almost-free and acessible cheap resource you are referring to instead.
but realistically, publishing a web page is practically free. you could be sending 100x as much data and I would still be laughing all the way to the bank
If you think that's easy, do it for me. I have some projects to migrate, give me the link of your service.
I think it's cheap to maintain. let me know how many devs you have, how many runs you do, and how many tests (by suite) you have, and I can do you up a quote for hosting some Allure reports. can spread the up-front costs over the 3-year monthly commitment if it helps
My point was that they profit from accessing your code, which is why they made it free in the first place. Now they make you pay because they believe they will make more profit. But they certainly weren't losing money before.
> If you respect the license and make the AI comply to valid license reuse
I think that the de facto situation is that AI does not have to know about licences or copyright at all. If they hack your computer to train their AI, the illegal part is that they hacked your computer, not that they trained their AI with the stolen data.
That is simply not true.
Companies can get into legal trouble if they don't.
Copilot does that bookeeping:
https://docs.github.com/en/copilot/how-tos/get-code-suggesti...
Heard of Meta torrenting copyrighted material? What kind of trouble did they get into?
Open source license litigation is a thing:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source_license_litigation