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Comment by pmontra | Hacker News Reader

At $0.002 per minute there are at most 90 dollars in a month. Maybe even after an year of cumulative costs it's less then the cost of switching to something else. Maybe even after many and many years of cumulative costs: the larger the company the more expensive corporate inertia gets.

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Our org is showing around 200-300$/mo in added fees and we are exclusively self hosting in our own on premise cluster. Kind of wild we have to pay to use our own compute.

In fairness to Github, bringing your own runners isn't "free" on their end. The orchestration happens server-side, so there is some level of cost. I don't know if that justifies the $0.002/min price - just wanted to point this out.

Oh absolutely, but honestly the self hosted runner setups that I'm familiar with are just waiting for a call. As far as I can tell GH side just routes.

if you were only paying to use your own compute, you could just use your own compute - you don't have to use github actions, you can trigger actions on your own systems without github.

the control plane clearly has value to people beyond the compute used for running the actions, and it seems reasonable that they should charge for that if you're using it.

I agree that it’s probably not a big amount. But note that it can be potentially quiet a bit more than the 90$. Task runtimes are always rounded up to the nearest minute.

For example, in our pipeline we have 5 different linter tasks (for different subprojects), running each only a few seconds. Nonetheless, we’ll get billed for 5 minutes on every commit.

Ah I see, they are not minutes as on the clock. They are runtime minutes. That changes my assessment. I was thinking that they picked a balanced price point not to scare away many people except probably personal projects or unfunded open source. If it's something potentially in the ballpark of $500 per month it's a bit too greedy. It's more like: we want only corporate customers, free tier users need not apply.

Per minute per runner. If you have multiple workfows/jobs running, it can add up.

We are a ~20 person team who use private runners and this will increase our annual costs by ~12k/yr. This is a huge relative cost increase for us. If anything this hurts small teams that focused on expansive automated testing more than giant orgs.

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