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Comment by Xylakant | Hacker News Reader

Fun thing is that almost every other CI as a service provider charges you in some shape or form for self hosted runners. CircleCI limits the number of self-hosted Job Running in parallel based on your plan and charges a fixed base fee per seat.

So moving away from GHA will not make self-hosted runners free, they’ll move into a different pricing structure that may or may not be beneficial.

And I think charging for self-hosted runners is actually fine. They’re not free for the provider either - log aggregation, caching of artifacts, runner scheduling, implementing the runner software etc are non-trivial problems for any larger CI system.

So I’m actually fine with the proposed change since it also gives me the power as a customer to say “hey, I’m paying for this, fix it.”

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The problem is that they are charging a per-minute fee, and a fee at the same order-of-magnitude as actually running the tests. If you're offering cloud-hosted runners for $0.002/minute, asking that same $0.002/minute as an orchestrator fee for self-hosted runners is just insulting.

Charging for self-hosted runners is indeed not a huge deal, and I bet they wouldn't have gotten the same kind of backlash if they charged for it via a per-seat, per-run, per-gigabyte, or per-log-line fee. And if GHA hadn't been so poorly maintained...

Any model that charges for self-hosted runner is going to feel unfair to someone. Per seat pricing is better for small orgs with a lot of CI minutes, per-run pricing would be good for orgs with few, long runs, per minute pricing is nicer for orgs with many small runs.

In my observation the critisicm was strongly dominated by outrage over the actual fact.

I also think its fine and fair to charge for the general GHA infrastructure that one would also be using with self-hosted runners.

I suspect that they weren't looking to make money off of those charges, but rather use that as a forcing function to push more usage of their managed runner (which are higher margin) which didn't work out. Rather than everyone saying "damn that makes alternatives financially unattactive", a good chunk of the feedback was "sure I'll pay those charges as long as I don't have to use the shitty managed runners".

Depends if they are using another CI provider or running Jenkins themselves.

But also, Circle CI would be a known cost change. Right now, the only thing you know is that GitHub wants to start charging money. You have no idea what new pricing model they come up with.

Self-hosting all of your CI is yet another tradeoff. The software comes for free (if you're using Free Software, that is), but you now have operational overhead. I'm not saying it's an unreasonable move, but it's also not a free swap

The cost of the control plan for Github and the cost of their runners are not equal. Yet this new plan seems to say a self-hosted minute is counted the same as a hosted minute, since self-hosted minutes count towards the 2000 included minutes.

Gitlab enters the room, where self-hosted runners are as free as in free beer (maintenance yes, but no limit on runners and no pricing expect on a per-user basis).

Yet.

Gitlab has proven in the past perfectly happy to hike prices above GitHub, after attracting enough switchers.

Yes, gitlab does still have free self-hosted runners. OTOH, github has a free organisation plan and gitlab doesn't. So yes, strictly speaking self-hosted runners are free, but you're paying for the dev-seats.

> So I’m actually fine with the proposed change since it also gives me the power as a customer to say “hey, I’m paying for this, fix it.”

I’m paying for GitHub Action now and there is zero recourse (other than leaving). Giving them money doesn’t change anything.

I’d be more willing to pay if GH Actions wasn’t so flakey and frustrating (for hosted or self-hosted runners, I use both). At least self-hosted runners are way cheaper _and_ have better performance.

> I’d be more willing to pay if GH Actions wasn’t so flakey and frustrating (for hosted or self-hosted runners, I use both).

This is indeed a reason I do consider leaving GHA. The underinvestment into this part of the product shows. But they also did announce quite some investment into new and (for us relevant) features alongside the pricing change, so I'll have a look at how this changes with some sorely needed work on the product.

We already pay for the “control plane” for GHA, though.

You might as well say that we should be paying per PR and Issue because, well, that part can’t just be free, you know?

How do you pay? Because the basic organization plan is free and gives access to GHA and includes 2000 free minutes.

If you upgrade the plan, you get more minutes for free - which can be consumed by the cost for free runners. They haven't specified at which rate a self-hosted runner consumes the free minutes, but at least for us, the change will largely consume free minutes.

> You might as well say that we should be paying per PR and Issue because, well, that part can’t just be free, you know?

You're misrepresenting what I said. I said, I'm fine with this for these reasons. It's a statement about me, not about what you should do nor what you should consider fine.

I pay (quite a bit) for GH because I do receive a service that's worth it, at least for now. And I'd rather see that GHA is something that makes them money than become something that is second-rate and lingers, just as it did before they made this announcement.

Rent a dedicated server, install gitea on it, set up a gitea action runner. Private, secure, cheap git hosting with 99% compatible actions.

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