| _______ __ _______ | |
| | | |.---.-..----.| |--..-----..----. | | |.-----..--.--.--..-----. | |
| | || _ || __|| < | -__|| _| | || -__|| | | ||__ --| | |
| |___|___||___._||____||__|__||_____||__| |__|____||_____||________||_____| | |
| on Gopher (inofficial) | |
| Visit Hacker News on the Web | |
| COMMENT PAGE FOR: | |
| GitHub will begin charging for self-hosted action runners on March 2026 | |
| hk1337 wrote 25 min ago: | |
| AWS code (build|deploy) supports GitHub actions workflow, gitlab does, | |
| gitea (codeberg, forgejo) too | |
| The biggest issue is the compatibility, forgejo doesnât have all the | |
| actions available that GitHub does nor some of the same functionality | |
| almosthere wrote 54 min ago: | |
| Well sounds like $40 per month more for us. Looked at CircleCI pricing, | |
| and mostly because of HOW they charge, it would be $3000, so Github it | |
| is. | |
| aaronds wrote 50 min ago: | |
| Is that because you have loads of users? (curious CircleCI employee | |
| here) | |
| almosthere wrote 32 min ago: | |
| Your pricing page seems to have changed intra-day. but now it's | |
| about $400ish. | |
| 30 users + 500 builds. | |
| However I don't know what counts as a build, since a typical commit | |
| to an open PR uses 10 GH runner machines simultaneously doing odd | |
| jobs like integration tests, releases, deploys, etc... | |
| aaronds wrote 23 min ago: | |
| Can you send a link to the page youâre looking at? Thanks! | |
| Pricing should mostly just be users + build minutes (for cloud | |
| runners) + storage. There is a few other optional, feature | |
| specific costs. Self hosted runners are free, but you need to | |
| self host caches/workspaces - our native ones have an egress bill | |
| to self hosted runners. | |
| almosthere wrote 21 min ago: | |
| [1] If self-hosted runners are free that would change our | |
| equation a bit. I'll talk to some folks here, I liked using | |
| this product at another company I worked at - but this would | |
| most likely shake out AFTER Github charges us the first time. | |
| [1]: https://circleci.com/pricing/build-your-plan/ | |
| lrvick wrote 54 min ago: | |
| I would remind everyone that lots of free solutions like Forgejo exist | |
| with much better security posture. | |
| Sytten wrote 58 min ago: | |
| Maybe with this "investment" will get an actual solution for Github | |
| Actions sh*t version management of actions[1] after just closing the | |
| Immutable Actions issue with a "sucks to be you" comment[2]. AI-Native | |
| Github action Agentic package management for Copilot /s [1] | |
| [1]: https://nesbitt.io/2025/12/06/github-actions-package-manager.h... | |
| [2]: https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/592 | |
| ozim wrote 1 hour 17 min ago: | |
| I guess Jenkins gets back in the game. | |
| umvi wrote 1 hour 31 min ago: | |
| Atlassian recently did this with BitBucket self hosted runners. Is | |
| there a CI/CD cartel or something? | |
| ed_blackburn wrote 1 hour 42 min ago: | |
| Microsoft are really sweating GitHub now aren't they? It wouldn't be so | |
| bad if it improving but there is certainly a perception that it is | |
| costing more for a poorer product, irrespective of the new features | |
| they're layering on. | |
| more_corn wrote 1 hour 50 min ago: | |
| Gitlab here I come | |
| davidpaulyoung wrote 1 hour 51 min ago: | |
| Why not just self-host Gitea? CI/CD, runners, all included. Freedom. | |
| Don't have the time do keep it going and safe? No worries, folks like | |
| [1] do that. | |
| [1]: https://federated.computer | |
| janc_ wrote 1 hour 4 min ago: | |
| Forgejo might be a better option for that now. | |
| Someone1234 wrote 1 hour 55 min ago: | |
| I really enjoy how they list the price PER MINUTE to make it sound like | |
| this isn't absurdly expensive. A lot of people leave their self-hosted | |
| runners running 24/7 because, after all, they're self-hosted. | |
| This is $2.88/day, $86.4/month, $1051.2/year. For them to do | |
| essentially nothing. | |
| Most notably, this is the same price as their hosted "Linux 1-core" on | |
| a per-minute basis. Meaning they're charging you the same for running | |
| it yourself, as you'd pay for them to host it for you... | |
| hoppp wrote 30 min ago: | |
| How can they charge for something self hosted per minute? Thats very | |
| weird to me. If I run the software I should pay a single time only, | |
| if I don't own it then why self-host im the first place? | |
| Maybe this is designed to scare people away from self-hosting | |
| altogether? | |
| Someone1234 wrote 2 min ago: | |
| I do believe, this is to disincentivize self-hosting for | |
| smaller-medium workloads. In essence, they're saying that if you're | |
| small, you should just use their Linux 1-Core, but if you're | |
| medium-to-large you won't care about the high cost. | |
| It is a way of increasing lock-in for smaller-medium clients, | |
| without driving away their medium-large ones. | |
| PunchyHamster wrote 50 min ago: | |
| You can get far bigger VM for that per month. It's ridiculus. | |
| Of course entirely expected after MS buyout, if anything I'm | |
| surprised it took that long | |
| lta wrote 19 min ago: | |
| Yup. Took wayyy longer than I actually expected as well. But the | |
| change of top management and closer integration with the whole MS | |
| behemoth is likely to make those kind of things accelerate now | |
| liamkinne wrote 59 min ago: | |
| $1k per year if you run an action 24/7. How many minutes per month do | |
| you actually use? How does that compare to the cost of the machines | |
| being used as runners? | |
| The real mistake was GH not charging anything for self-hosted runners | |
| in the first place, setting an expectation. | |
| danpalmer wrote 1 hour 36 min ago: | |
| > For them to do essentially nothing. | |
| Orchestration, logging, caching, result storage. | |
| It's not nothing. Whether it's worth it to you is a value judgement, | |
| and having run a bunch of different CI systems I'd say this is still | |
| at least competitive. | |
| PunchyHamster wrote 53 min ago: | |
| They are charging for storage separately already! Why are you lying | |
| ? | |
| echoangle wrote 37 min ago: | |
| Lying implies intent, I don't think the person you're replying to | |
| is necessarily lying, even though they might be wrong on this | |
| specific point. | |
| soothaa wrote 1 hour 51 min ago: | |
| Wait.. is this how they're billing it?? Not the duration of runs?? | |
| Factor1177 wrote 1 hour 44 min ago: | |
| It is duration of runs. He was just highlighting the absurde cost | |
| if you were to run it 24/7 like some people with their own self | |
| hosted runners do. | |
| dijit wrote 1 hour 35 min ago: | |
| I am not understanding something. | |
| If its the price of runs, then its not always running. | |
| If its price of the agent to exist, then thats not paying per | |
| runs- then youâre right that people tend to leave their runners | |
| online 24/7- but Iâve never worked anywhere that had workers | |
| building 24/7. | |
| beAbU wrote 50 min ago: | |
| I guess some people just always have something running since | |
| it's owned hardware. Daily builds of popular OSS projects or | |
| constant vuln scans or whatever? | |
| manquer wrote 1 hour 11 min ago: | |
| OP means to say he has many jobs in the merge queue that the | |
| runners are always busy 24/7. | |
| This is not uncommon in some orgs - less number of concurrent | |
| runners, slow builds, loads of jobs because of automation or | |
| how hooks for the runners are setup. | |
| In the context of discussion that doesn't matter, OP's point | |
| distills to that they use minimum of 720 hours / month of | |
| orchestration time or some multiple of that on self hosted | |
| runners running 24x7. | |
| Github will now charge $84 extra per month for single | |
| self-hosted runner running 24x7 - i.e. that is the cost for | |
| 43,200 build minutes for only their orchestration alone. | |
| In a more typical setup that is equivalent to say 5 self-hosted | |
| running running ~4.5 hours a day(i.e 144/hours/runner/month) | |
| folmar wrote 50 min ago: | |
| If you have a lot of not very time sensitive jobs, e.g. large | |
| merge trains, it was reasonable to have a not very fast | |
| runner run close to full utilization. Now that you'd pay by | |
| the run-minute, it'll be cheaper to move to a faster runner | |
| and run it at 10%. | |
| throwaway150 wrote 2 hours 2 min ago: | |
| 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 but were community-developed, community-maintained and | |
| libre. | |
| The writing is in the wall. First it was UX annoyances. Then it was | |
| GitHub Actions woes. Now it is paying money for running their software | |
| on your own hardware. It's only going to go downhill. Is it a good time | |
| now to learn from our mistakes and convince our teams and management to | |
| use community-maintained, libre alternatives? They may be inferior. | |
| They may lack features. But they're not going to pull user hostile | |
| tricks like this on you and me. And hey, if they are lacking features, | |
| maybe we should convince our management to let us contribute time to | |
| the community to add those features? It's a much better investment than | |
| sinking money into a software that will only grow more and more user | |
| hostile, isn't it? | |
| skilning wrote 59 min ago: | |
| Have any suggestions to those community-developed and maintained | |
| options? | |
| ukd1 wrote 4 min ago: | |
| Gitea. Gitlab (ish?). | |
| Nextgrid wrote 1 hour 6 min ago: | |
| Takes like these do not account for the value you gained by using the | |
| software in the meantime. Here are 2 scenarios: | |
| 1) company uses exclusively free software, spends more time dealing | |
| with the shortcomings of said software than developing product, | |
| product is half baked and doesn't sell well, company dies. | |
| 2) company uses proprietary but cheap/free (as in beer) software that | |
| does the job really well, focuses on developing product, product is | |
| good and sells well, company how has a ton of money they could use to | |
| replicate the proprietary product from scratch if they wanted to. | |
| A purist approach like in scenario 1 leaves everyone poor. A | |
| pragmatic approach like scenario 2 ends up earning enough money that | |
| can be used to recreate the proprietary software from scratch (and | |
| open-source it if you wanted to). | |
| In this case the problem isn't even the proprietariness of the | |
| software, it's the fact that companies are reliant on someone else | |
| hosting the software (GH being FOSS wouldn't actually change anything | |
| here - whoever is hosting it can still enforce whatever terms they | |
| want). | |
| FOSS alternatives already exist, it's just that our industry is so | |
| consumed by grifters that nobody knows how to do things anymore | |
| (because it's more profitable for every individual not to); running | |
| software on a server (what used to be table stakes for any shop and | |
| junior sysadmin) is nowadays lost knowledge. Microsoft and SaaS | |
| software providers are capitalizing on this. | |
| bdangubic wrote 55 min ago: | |
| or alternative hire right people that know what they are doing and | |
| donât need a whole lot of junk to work on and deploy. I have been | |
| coding 31 years now and donât have the slighest clue why anyone | |
| would ever need a âgithub actionâ | |
| embedding-shape wrote 1 hour 1 min ago: | |
| > A purist approach like in scenario 1 leaves everyone poor. | |
| That depends, not always. Sometimes the employees of said company | |
| manages to contribute back upstream, on the dime of the company. If | |
| the "free software" they used and contributed to have a lot of | |
| users, it's certainly not "leaves everyone poor" but rather "helps | |
| everyone, beyond monetary gain". | |
| Sure, you can make the argument that it isn't that great for the | |
| company, and you may be right. But the world is bigger than | |
| companies making money, killing a few companies along the way to | |
| make small iterative steps on making free software for absolutely | |
| everyone is probably a worthwhile sacrifice, if you zoom out a bit. | |
| foobarian wrote 1 hour 52 min ago: | |
| > alternatives that were inferior | |
| Actually there were alternatives that were far superior (seriously, | |
| no way to group projects?) but also more than 2x as expensive. If GH | |
| "fixes the glitch" then it will be plan B time. | |
| nikeee wrote 2 hours 11 min ago: | |
| Given that I can dump hundreds of TBs into the private container | |
| registry without paying anything I'm pretty surprised that they now | |
| charge for what is basically providing log streaming and retention. | |
| QuiCasseRien wrote 2 hours 20 min ago: | |
| More than 6 years users of OneDev (onedev.io). | |
| - Git repo | |
| - Ticketing, Kaban | |
| - Full helpdesk | |
| - Complete and full CI/CD | |
| - everything links via custom workflow | |
| - self hosted | |
| I still dont know why everyone hasn't switch yet to that banger. | |
| jamesu wrote 1 hour 20 min ago: | |
| I really wanted to like it but the UI always put me off. Also tending | |
| to prefer a more open development model these days. Thankfully at | |
| least for dev gitea and forgejo have both come a long way and the CI | |
| is pretty decent now (though they still dont have a gui workflow | |
| builder!). | |
| j45 wrote 2 hours 24 min ago: | |
| This customer will be leaving GitHub action runners for punishing | |
| self-hosting. | |
| GitLab CI and others seem to be perfectly serviceable. | |
| templar_snow wrote 2 hours 29 min ago: | |
| Absolutely ridiculous. Just absolutely abhorrent and downright abusive | |
| move on Microsoft's part. | |
| manquer wrote 57 min ago: | |
| > abhorrent and downright abusive move | |
| Is it that egregious?. I read it as they are redistributing the | |
| costs. It is in combination dropping the managed runner costs by a | |
| good margin and charging for the orchestration infrastructure. The | |
| log storage and real time streaming infra isn't free for them (not | |
| $84/month/runner expensive perhaps but certainly not cheap ) | |
| We don't need to use the orchestration layer at all, even if we want | |
| to use rest of the platform, either for orchestration or runners. | |
| Github APIs have robust hooks(not charged extra) and third-party | |
| services(and self-hostable projects) already provide runners, they | |
| will all add the orchestration layer now after this news. | |
| -- | |
| Competition is good, free[2] kills competition. Microsoft is the | |
| master of doing that with Internet Explorer or Teams today. | |
| Nobody was looking at doing the orchestration layer because Github | |
| Actions was good enough at free[1], now the likes of BuildJet, | |
| Namespace Labs etc are going to be. | |
| [1] Scheduler issues in Github Actions not withstanding, it was hard | |
| to compete against a free product that costs money to build and run. | |
| [2] i.e. bundled into package pricing, | |
| nhumrich wrote 2 hours 32 min ago: | |
| So, let me get this straight, the "platform fee" is baked into the | |
| runner cost, but, their cheapest runner is the _same price_ as the | |
| platform fee? So its the same price to have them run it vs have me run | |
| it? | |
| aeve890 wrote 43 min ago: | |
| It's seems like a solid plan to me: | |
| - charge the same you would pay for the GitHub runners | |
| - you have to factor YOUR server cost also, so self hosted will cost | |
| more than the platform option | |
| - you jump to the platform runners and save on servers, sysadmin, | |
| DevOps, etc. | |
| And then they grab you by the balls and raise the prices. | |
| r2vcap wrote 2 hours 44 min ago: | |
| This is a serious issue. How is it possible for GitHub/Microsoft to | |
| charge me for using my own machine as a self-hosted GitHub Actions | |
| runner? | |
| Bognar wrote 58 min ago: | |
| They're charging you for orchestration, log storage, artifact | |
| storage, continued development of the runner binary itself and | |
| features available to self-hosted machines. What would your own | |
| machine do without the runner and service it connects to? | |
| naian wrote 1 hour 27 min ago: | |
| For the same reason they charge you for running Word, even though | |
| you're the one who has to write, I guess? | |
| bdbdbdb wrote 2 hours 27 min ago: | |
| I'll be investigating gitlab tomorrow | |
| 000ooo000 wrote 2 hours 17 min ago: | |
| Have used all of the big 4 forges in anger over the last decade. | |
| GitLab isn't perfect, but I'd take it over GitHub any day of the | |
| week. | |
| kavaruka wrote 2 hours 42 min ago: | |
| it charges you to use the platform features that enable your use of | |
| self-hosted runners | |
| handfuloflight wrote 2 hours 42 min ago: | |
| They still have to manage state between their servers and yours. | |
| jbmsf wrote 2 hours 45 min ago: | |
| I assume they want us to pay for their orchestration and also push | |
| customers back to using their compute so everything is stickier. | |
| But nothing they've done in the last few years has demonstrated | |
| improvement in this area. As the person with both purchasing and final | |
| authority on these things in my org, it's hard to stomach. | |
| cdrnsf wrote 2 hours 48 min ago: | |
| This seems totally unreasonable. How can they justify charging you | |
| based on usage when it's running on and using your resources? | |
| sentrysapper wrote 2 hours 41 min ago: | |
| Postman pulled this same stunt in 2022, limiting how many times you | |
| can run your own API class from your machine. To this day I've never | |
| reconciled with them or their product management decisions. | |
| hd4 wrote 3 hours 6 min ago: | |
| Didn't see it mentioned yet but I like gitea and it's runner. It's all | |
| in Go so very low overhead. | |
| [1]: https://docs.gitea.com/usage/actions/act-runner | |
| croemer wrote 1 hour 56 min ago: | |
| Also supported by Forgejo actions: [1] - both based on | |
| [1]: https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/actions/quick-start/ | |
| [2]: https://github.com/nektos/act | |
| salzig wrote 2 hours 13 min ago: | |
| sadly they, afaik, do not implement the permission model. So no way | |
| to control the token permissions. | |
| (plz correct me if i'm wrong) | |
| coffeecoders wrote 3 hours 13 min ago: | |
| Charging by minute might push people toward shorter, noisier and more | |
| fragmented pipelines. It feels more like a lever to discourage | |
| selfhosting over time. | |
| It's not outrageous money today, but it's a clear signal about where | |
| they want CI to live. | |
| guluarte wrote 3 hours 16 min ago: | |
| it looks ms wants to kill all their IP, xbox, windows, now github | |
| tacticus wrote 2 hours 58 min ago: | |
| blanket 30% profit margin is great right? | |
| danra wrote 3 hours 16 min ago: | |
| Geez. This would've been much more agreeable had they bothered to fix | |
| years-old open bugs with self-hosted runners | |
| evanmoran wrote 3 hours 18 min ago: | |
| GitHub actions are expensive enough that self-hosted was the only real | |
| option. I can't imagine this will do anything other than push people | |
| from the entire ecosystem. | |
| eugercek wrote 3 hours 18 min ago: | |
| Companies like Ubicloud gives hosted actions faster and far more | |
| cheaper (5-10x) than Microsoft itself. | |
| Now Microsoft will charge "data plane usage" (CRUDing a row that | |
| contains (id, ts, state_enum, acc_id ...) in essence) 2.5 more than | |
| what Ubicloud offers for WHOLE compute. Also to have "fair pricing" | |
| they'll make you pay 2.5 more the compute's price for being able to use | |
| their data plane. | |
| cool. | |
| suryao wrote 3 hours 16 min ago: | |
| it's rather egregious that it is a "per minute" tax rather than a | |
| $0.002 per job. | |
| bellajbadr wrote 3 hours 19 min ago: | |
| If they charge me for my self-hosted runner i will just move to Gitlab. | |
| This is theft..or let's say this is microsoft. | |
| MrKitai wrote 3 hours 42 min ago: | |
| Seriously. They're charging me for using MY cpus? | |
| Forgejo incoming testing period.. | |
| vbezhenar wrote 1 hour 35 min ago: | |
| A lot of server software does that. People were paying absurd prices | |
| for fast Xeons to save on their Oracle bills. | |
| PunchyHamster wrote 46 min ago: | |
| Reminds me of a customer that had in their contract requirements | |
| GHz amount so after we won the contract we digged out some old P4 | |
| based Xeons (everything after for a long time had lower clocks) and | |
| they got their stuff ran on old junk because it would be breach of | |
| contact not to. | |
| It was govt thing and they are required to put a new bid every few | |
| years and their bid was EVIDENTLY "just list what our current | |
| hosting provider has, we can't be arsed to spend months migrating | |
| infrastructure every few years", but the clever weasels in the | |
| sales managed to get them. | |
| nrhrjrjrjtntbt wrote 2 hours 30 min ago: | |
| Like BYO wine I guess. | |
| rileymat2 wrote 2 hours 37 min ago: | |
| Itâs not unheard of, similarish to many core licensing schemes. | |
| Like mssql. | |
| gabrielgio wrote 1 hour 12 min ago: | |
| Not the same thing. The equivalent would be mssql charging by web | |
| server connections to it. | |
| chrisweekly wrote 3 hours 54 min ago: | |
| Personally, I quite liked GitLab CI when I used it circa 2021-23. Just | |
| now I did a quick search and found this article^1 suggesting (even | |
| before this GH pricing change) Gitlab CI may be a better choice than | |
| Github Actions. | |
| 1. | |
| [1]: https://medium.com/@the_atomic_architect/github-vs-gitlab-2025... | |
| nhumrich wrote 2 hours 34 min ago: | |
| I LOVE gitlab, but their new pricing is absurd. It feels like they | |
| are trying to shovelware their AI stuff. Their cheapest plan is more | |
| than 7x the cost of github, AND more expensive than github | |
| enterprise! And thats on the _cheapest_ non free gitlab plan. | |
| If you self host gitlab entirely, you can't even get | |
| branch/force-push protection. If they could bring their pricing to | |
| even just 2x github by having a NON-AI plan, I would purchase again | |
| in a heartbeat. | |
| notnullorvoid wrote 26 min ago: | |
| I had to go check to see what their pricing was, and I couldn't | |
| believe it. The base tier was $4/month, now that tier is gone and | |
| the premium tier is 2x what it used to be only 5 years ago. | |
| salzig wrote 2 hours 17 min ago: | |
| You mean "Protected branches"? Last time I checked that was part of | |
| the free tier, and the documentation[0] states the same. | |
| [0]: | |
| [1]: https://docs.gitlab.com/user/project/repository/branches/p... | |
| inchidi wrote 2 hours 41 min ago: | |
| used to self-host gitlab CI runners around the same year also for our | |
| long running CI's due to db migrations + prepared data loading for | |
| tests. | |
| we rent 7*4$ VPS, install gitlab CI runners on them, saving us from | |
| hundreds $$$ per month and 45mins/merge (with test running on main | |
| branch only) to 7*4$/month and 7-9mins/commit (yes, we run full test | |
| on each commit and let gitlab auto-cancel older one). | |
| with bonus: FE team get live version of their changes on each MR. | |
| * its 7 VPS because we separated the tests by modules and we have 7 | |
| major modules. | |
| * edit: formatting | |
| Arubis wrote 2 hours 48 min ago: | |
| GitLab CI is _excellent_. Github Actions has come a long way, but a | |
| few years back it was absolutely painful working with GA when I had | |
| GitLab CI for reference. | |
| esseph wrote 3 hours 42 min ago: | |
| GitLab CI is quite good. Have been using it for several years. | |
| pornel wrote 3 hours 2 min ago: | |
| I can't tolerate it. | |
| The split between tag and branch pipelines seems like intentional | |
| obfuscation with no upsides (you can't build non-latest commit from | |
| a branch, and when you use a tag to select the commit, GitLab | |
| intentionally hides all branch-related info, and skips jobs that | |
| depend on branch names). | |
| "CI components" are not really components, but copy-paste of YAML | |
| into global state. Merging of jobs merges objects but not arrays, | |
| making composition unreliable or impossible. | |
| The `steps` are still unstable/experimental. Composing multiple | |
| steps either is a mess of appending lines of bash, or you have go | |
| all the way in the other direction and build layered Docker images. | |
| I could go on all day. Programming in YAML is annoying, and GitLab | |
| is full of issues that make it even clunkier than it needs to be. | |
| opello wrote 1 hour 44 min ago: | |
| My ready example of a GitLab pain point is parallel matrix job | |
| names include the matrix variables and quite easily, in complex | |
| configurations, exceed the static 255 character limit of job | |
| names, preventing job creation/execution. | |
| There's been years of discussion about ways to fix it with | |
| nothing moving forward. [1] And the most recent tracking issue: | |
| [1]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/263401 | |
| [2]: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/285853 | |
| sangeeth96 wrote 2 hours 54 min ago: | |
| I have fond memories of using GitLab CI in 2018â2019 and I'm | |
| still pissed GitHub didn't just life and shift that kind of a | |
| model. Not sure about the particular issues you're running into | |
| but I remember GitLab supporting a lot of the YAML features | |
| missing in GitHub like anchors in order to build/compose stuff. | |
| Oh and turns out GitHub also has that now: [1] UPDATE: okay they | |
| botched it | |
| [1]: https://github.blog/changelog/2025-09-18-actions-yaml-an... | |
| [2]: https://frenck.dev/github-actions-yaml-anchors-aliases-m... | |
| pixelpoet wrote 3 hours 55 min ago: | |
| Zig's decision to ditch GitHub actions seems remarkably prescient, no? | |
| patrick4urcloud wrote 3 hours 45 min ago: | |
| yes ! i'm actually doing the same as i saw the safe_sleep.sh code on | |
| their runners ... insane story ... | |
| QuercusMax wrote 3 hours 5 min ago: | |
| Can you elaborate on what you're referring to? Sounds interesting. | |
| neb_b wrote 2 hours 57 min ago: | |
| [1] fun video on it: | |
| [1]: https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792 | |
| [2]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3_95BZYIVs | |
| QuercusMax wrote 2 hours 51 min ago: | |
| Wow, that's horrifyingly bad. Like "didn't think about it for | |
| more than 30 seconds before committing" bad. | |
| shevy-java wrote 4 hours 9 min ago: | |
| So Microsoft is slowly killing it. Not surprising. | |
| benced wrote 4 hours 13 min ago: | |
| Are there bring-your-own-agent CI platforms that don't have pricing | |
| structures like this? Buildkite and CircleCI do. | |
| olafmol wrote 2 hours 14 min ago: | |
| CircleCI does only charge for self-hosted runners generated egress | |
| and/or artifact storage: | |
| "Any Network Egress to CircleCI will be charged. At this current | |
| time, this includes CircleCI Caches, Workspaces, and Artifacts and | |
| will be charged at the normal rate according to your Usage Controls. | |
| The only network traffic that will result in billing is accrued | |
| through restoring caches and workspaces, and downloading artifacts to | |
| self-hosted runners. Retention of artifacts, workspace, and cache | |
| objects will result in billing for storage usage. | |
| Since your builds will not be running on CircleCI's Infrastructure, | |
| you will not be charged compute credits" [1] I think that's fair. In | |
| my personal opinion most people started using GitHub Actions because | |
| it âcame for free with the VCS and/or our MS contractâ and it was | |
| âgood enough for the jobâ. Now might be a good time to look | |
| around at the alternatives again. There is a reason that f.e. | |
| CircleCI is doing fully focused CI/CD for 10+ years and is still | |
| going strong. Plenty of businesses donât want to put all their eggs | |
| in one (MS) basket, for all kinds of reasons. I guess today one of | |
| these reasons became obvious. | |
| Disclaimer: I work at CircleCI. | |
| [1]: https://support.circleci.com/hc/en-us/articles/2064321965685... | |
| fishpen0 wrote 3 hours 34 min ago: | |
| gitlab | |
| perbu wrote 4 hours 15 min ago: | |
| The reason this makes sense, at least for Github, is because the only | |
| valid reason to run your own action runners is compliance. And if you | |
| are doing it for compliance, price doesn't really matter. You don't | |
| really have a choice. | |
| If you've been running your runners on your own infra for cost reasons, | |
| you're not really that interesting to the Github business. | |
| saagarjha wrote 1 hour 44 min ago: | |
| Not just compliance, we run CI against machines that they donât | |
| offer, like those with big GPUs. | |
| briHass wrote 2 hours 15 min ago: | |
| Maybe if everything you use is public-cloud-deployed. | |
| Self-hosted runners help bridge the gap with on-prem servers, since | |
| you can pop a runner VM inside your infra and give it the | |
| connectivity/permissions to do deployments. | |
| This announcement pisses me off, because it's not something related | |
| to abuse/recouping cost, since they could impose limits on free plans | |
| or whatever. | |
| This will definitely influence me to ensure all builds/deployments | |
| are fully bash/powershell scripted without GH Action-specific steps. | |
| Actions are a bit of a dumpster fire anyway, so maybe I'll just go | |
| back to TeamCity like I used before Actions. | |
| zamalek wrote 3 hours 37 min ago: | |
| Github runners are slow. We're using WarpBuild and they are still | |
| cheaper per-minute, even with all the changes Github has made. Then | |
| there's the fact that the machines are faster, so we are using fewer | |
| minutes. | |
| There are multiple competitors in this space. If you are (or were) | |
| paying for Github runners for any reason, you really shouldn't be. | |
| Sytten wrote 1 hour 7 min ago: | |
| We also use WarpBuild and very happy with the performance gain. | |
| This changes nothing except maybe it should signal to WarpBuild to | |
| start supporting other providers than Github. We are clearly | |
| entering the enshitiffication phase of Github. | |
| suryao wrote 1 hour 5 min ago: | |
| thanks for the love! we are actively considering supporting other | |
| providers. | |
| suryao wrote 3 hours 35 min ago: | |
| Thanks for the WarpBuild love! | |
| Performance is the primary lever to pay less $0.002/min self | |
| hosting tax and we strive to provide the best performance runners. | |
| esseph wrote 3 hours 40 min ago: | |
| Performance and data locality. | |
| You can throw tons of cores and ram locally at problems without any | |
| licensing costs. | |
| Your data may be local, makes sense to work with it locally. | |
| CafeRacer wrote 3 hours 59 min ago: | |
| I needed arm64 workers, because x86 would take ~25 minutes to do a | |
| build. | |
| normie3000 wrote 2 hours 12 min ago: | |
| TIL amd64 is also called x86-64. | |
| llimllib wrote 3 hours 40 min ago: | |
| if it's useful, they do actually have arm workers now for linux and | |
| mac: | |
| [1]: https://github.com/actions/runner-images/tree/main?tab=rea... | |
| justincormack wrote 3 hours 42 min ago: | |
| They have these now. | |
| CER10TY wrote 3 hours 37 min ago: | |
| Only for public repos though - if you're in an org with private | |
| repositories you don't get access to them (yet). | |
| Marsymars wrote 3 hours 5 min ago: | |
| You do, you just have to set them up at the organization level. | |
| Windows/Linux/macOS are all available. | |
| peterldowns wrote 4 hours 17 min ago: | |
| I'm happy to see they're investing in Actions â charging for it | |
| should help make sure it continues to work. It's a huge reason Github | |
| is so valuable: having the status checks run on every PR, | |
| automatically, is great. Even though I'm more of a fan of Buildkite | |
| when it comes to configuring the workflows, I still need something to | |
| kick them off when PRs change, etc. | |
| Charging a per-workflow-minute platform fee makes a lot of sense and | |
| the price is negligible. They're ingesting logs from all the runners, | |
| making them available to us, etc. Helps incentivize faster workflows, | |
| too, so pretty customer-aligned. We use self-hosted runners (actually | |
| WarpBuild) so we don't benefit from the reduced default price of the | |
| Github-hosted runners, but that's a nice improvement as well for most | |
| customers. And Actions are still free for public repos. | |
| Now if only they'd let us say "this action is required to pass _if it | |
| runs_, otherwise it's not required" as part of branch protection rules. | |
| Then we'd really be in heaven! | |
| fishpen0 wrote 2 hours 58 min ago: | |
| This pricing model will continue to incentivize them internally to | |
| not fix the hundreds of clearly documented issues that causes CI to | |
| be incredibly slow. Everything from their self-inflicted | |
| bottlenecking of file transfers to the safe_sleep bug that randomly | |
| makes a runner run forever until it times out. All of it now makes | |
| them more money | |
| Bjartr wrote 3 hours 37 min ago: | |
| > charging for it should help make sure it continues to work | |
| It's there a particular reason you're extending the benefit of the | |
| doubt here? This seems like the classic playbook of making something | |
| free, waiting for people to depend on it, then charging for it, all | |
| in order to maximize revenue. Where does the idea that they're really | |
| doing this in order to deliver a more valuable service come from? | |
| peterldowns wrote 2 hours 59 min ago: | |
| I appreciate being able to pay for a service I rely on. Using | |
| self-hosted runners, I previously paid nothing for Github Actions | |
| â now I do pay something for it. The price is extremely cheap and | |
| seems reasonable considering the benefits I receive. They've shown | |
| continued interest in investing in the product, and have a variety | |
| of things on their public roadmap that I'm looking forward to | |
| (including parallel steps) â [1] . | |
| Charging "more than nothing" is certainly not what I would call | |
| maximizing revenue, and even it they were maximizing revenue I | |
| would still make the same decision to purchase or abandon based on | |
| its value to me. Have you interacted with the economy before? | |
| [1]: https://github.com/orgs/github/projects/4247?pane=issue&it... | |
| blibble wrote 2 hours 47 min ago: | |
| > The price is extremely cheap | |
| and you expect it to stay this way? | |
| peterldowns wrote 2 hours 26 min ago: | |
| > and seems reasonable considering the benefits I receive. | |
| > I would still make the same decision to purchase or abandon | |
| based on its value to me. | |
| asmor wrote 3 hours 33 min ago: | |
| Yeah. This is a reaction to providers like blacksmith or | |
| self-hosted solutions like the k8s operator being better at | |
| operating their very bad runner then them, at cheaper prices, with | |
| better performance, more storage and warm caches. The price cut is | |
| good, the anticompetitive bit where they charge you to use | |
| computers they don't provide isn't. My guess is that either we're | |
| all gonna move to act or that one of the SaaS startups sue. | |
| NewJazz wrote 3 hours 41 min ago: | |
| I don't think it makes sense to charge per minute just for logs. If | |
| they want to charge for log retention, sure, go ahead. But that is | |
| pennies, let's be real. | |
| tensegrist wrote 4 hours 24 min ago: | |
| > Coming soon: Simpler pricing and a better experience for GitHub | |
| Actions | |
| i think it should be illegal or otherwise extremely damaging to do this | |
| kind of thing | |
| msm_ wrote 3 hours 0 min ago: | |
| Come on, editorializing the post title is against HN guidelines, but | |
| making it illegal is a bit too harsh. | |
| some_furry wrote 4 hours 49 min ago: | |
| Oh great. I finally get used to GitHub Actions after Travis CI shat the | |
| bed, and now I have to find something else. | |
| Thanks, enshittification. | |
| EatFlamingDeath wrote 3 hours 39 min ago: | |
| Hey man, that's not fair. They cannot enshittify what has always been | |
| shit to begin with. | |
| vrosas wrote 2 hours 41 min ago: | |
| Oh you sweet summer child | |
| matthewmacleod wrote 4 hours 7 min ago: | |
| What part of this is âenshittificationâ? Itâs just a company | |
| starting to charge for a formerly free service. Hardly seems like | |
| that aggressive a move. | |
| ok123456 wrote 3 hours 2 min ago: | |
| They're squeezing their customers after locking in to juice their | |
| margins, having become a monopoly/monopsony. This is the classic | |
| enshitificaton playbook. | |
| matthewmacleod wrote 1 hour 18 min ago: | |
| Nobody is locked in (unless they made some incredibly bad | |
| decisions) and this is a tiny fee in exchange for a useful | |
| service. Iâm just baffled by the response to this. | |
| some_furry wrote 3 hours 43 min ago: | |
| From [1] "Here is how platforms die: First, they are good to their | |
| users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their | |
| business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to | |
| claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die." | |
| We are on step 2: then they abuse their users to make things better | |
| for their business customers. | |
| [1]: https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-platforms-cory-doctorow... | |
| matthewmacleod wrote 1 hour 20 min ago: | |
| It is not abuse to charge what amounts to a relatively small fee | |
| for a useful service. | |
| defraudbah wrote 5 hours 11 min ago: | |
| this is the third article about it, we know, good times are over, will | |
| start migrating towards something else | |
| shevy-java wrote 4 hours 6 min ago: | |
| It definitely adds to frustration for some people; this can not be | |
| denied. | |
| sallveburrpi wrote 4 hours 27 min ago: | |
| donât lie youâll just bitch and moan and keep using it anyway | |
| bdbdbdb wrote 5 hours 30 min ago: | |
| This seems backwards. Why charge for me to run the thing myself instead | |
| of them? | |
| vbezhenar wrote 1 hour 28 min ago: | |
| Because charging you brings more profits than not charging you. | |
| IshKebab wrote 1 hour 37 min ago: | |
| Because they make money from charging way over cost price for | |
| per-minute CI runners, and they don't want people using much much | |
| cheaper alternative providers. | |
| They don't care about people actually self-hosting. They care about | |
| people "self hosting" with these guys: | |
| [1]: https://github.com/neysofu/awesome-github-actions-runners | |
| vsl wrote 2 hours 23 min ago: | |
| Because GHA was stagnant and expensive and multiple services like [1] | |
| popped up, with better performance and much lower price. Looks like | |
| they ate enough of GHâs lunch⦠| |
| [1]: https://www.warpbuild.com/ | |
| suryao wrote 1 hour 28 min ago: | |
| Hey, WarpBuild founder here. | |
| While it makes it harder for us to communicate this, we're still, | |
| we're still faster and cheaper even after the $0.002/min self | |
| hosting tax. | |
| Overall costs go up for everyone but we remain the better option. | |
| baq wrote 4 hours 10 min ago: | |
| The scheduler isnât free, I always wondered how the financials work | |
| on this one. Turns out they didnât ;) | |
| Anyway, GitHub actions is a dumpster fire even without this change. | |
| naikrovek wrote 4 hours 51 min ago: | |
| Because they host the artifacts, logs, and schedule jobs which run on | |
| your runners, I assume. | |
| falsedan wrote 4 hours 14 min ago: | |
| they charge you for artifacts and logs separately, already | |
| progval wrote 4 hours 17 min ago: | |
| Then why do they charge by the minute instead of gigabytes and | |
| number of events? | |
| gaigalas wrote 4 hours 59 min ago: | |
| I develop software, I also test and run it. All in my machines. | |
| 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? | |
| palata wrote 2 hours 16 min ago: | |
| But I get to read all your code and use it for training my AI, | |
| right? | |
| gaigalas wrote 1 hour 50 min ago: | |
| My projects are public anyway. If you respect the license and | |
| make the AI comply to valid license reuse, I'm game. | |
| bdbdbdb wrote 2 hours 28 min ago: | |
| It sounds like a bad deal right? | |
| 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 | |
| gaigalas wrote 1 hour 53 min ago: | |
| If you do it all, you can optimize the whole supply chain. Maybe | |
| you can put some expensive capacity you built to use and leverage | |
| it when otherwise impossible, etc. | |
| 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. | |
| janc_ wrote 29 min ago: | |
| This is actually about abusing Microsoft's market position to | |
| eliminate competitors in related markets, plain & simple. | |
| falsedan wrote 4 hours 12 min ago: | |
| if you were paying me a monthly license fee for each developer | |
| working on your repos, I'd probably consider it | |
| gaigalas wrote 3 hours 43 min ago: | |
| What happens if I am, and now my developers suddenly start to | |
| produce changes much faster? Like, one developer now produces the | |
| volume of five. | |
| Would you keep charging the same rate per head? | |
| falsedan wrote 3 hours 11 min ago: | |
| no, I'd cut the monthly seat cost and grow my user base to | |
| include more low-volume devs | |
| 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 | |
| gaigalas wrote 1 hour 51 min ago: | |
| Publishing the page is only the last step. It's orchestrating | |
| the stuff THEN publishing it. | |
| If you think that's easy, do it for me. I have some projects | |
| to migrate, give me the link of your service. | |
| janc_ wrote 22 min ago: | |
| There are several services I know who offer this for free | |
| for open source software, and I really doubt any commercial | |
| offerings of that software would charge you extra for what | |
| is basic API usage. | |
| mindcrash wrote 5 hours 4 min ago: | |
| Because they know Forgejo is starting to get attention from major | |
| players and thus becoming competitive, and hosting your own CI | |
| infrastructure will make completely moving away from GitHub all that | |
| easier - If you don't really care about the metadata all it pretty | |
| much takes is moving git repositories with their history. | |
| Or shortly summarized: lock in through pricing. | |
| Pretty sure this will explode straight in their faces though. And | |
| pretty damn hard. | |
| PunchyHamster wrote 44 min ago: | |
| Not sure why you think forgejo is competition and not Gitlab. | |
| > 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 | |
| ozim wrote 1 hour 14 min ago: | |
| I would keep repos on GH but use Jenkins though. | |
| selkin wrote 3 hours 9 min ago: | |
| I don't think Forgejo is competitive in the markets GitHub makes | |
| most of their money from, nor does it seem Forgejo developers want | |
| it to be. | |
| mindcrash wrote 2 hours 34 min ago: | |
| Representatives from the Dutch government recently had a chat | |
| with representatives from Forgejo because they are quite | |
| interested in migrating their SCM infrastructure from Github to | |
| Forgejo. | |
| 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. | |
| janc_ wrote 58 min ago: | |
| The Dutch government represenrative mentioned contacts with | |
| French colleagues about this also. | |
| dijit wrote 1 hour 30 min ago: | |
| Can confirm. | |
| I have seen this sentiment more and more, which is welcome to | |
| me as itâs a drum I have been banging for 15 years. | |
| I have never had so many empathetic conversations than I have | |
| recently. | |
| mindcrash wrote 1 hour 11 min ago: | |
| Sounds familiar! | |
| 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 :) | |
| parliament32 wrote 2 hours 49 min ago: | |
| Where does GitHub even make most of their money? Their compliance | |
| posture makes them a non-starter for any regulated industries | |
| (which is atypical for a Microsoft property, generally MS is the | |
| market leader for compliance in all of their products). | |
| sakisv wrote 2 hours 7 min ago: | |
| Given that a lot of places that deal with money use them, I | |
| find your comment quite interesting and would like to learn | |
| more :) | |
| newsoftheday wrote 3 hours 56 min ago: | |
| My view is it's their platform but it seems like a scummy move to | |
| tax selfhosters. | |
| I checked out Forgejo's site just now, they are kind of politically | |
| oriented instead of code oriented so I wouldn't use them: | |
| "Brought to you by an inclusive community under the umbrella of | |
| Codeberg e.V., a democratic non-profit organization..." | |
| Inclusive == Strike 1 | |
| democratic == Strike 2 | |
| ajford wrote 1 hour 36 min ago: | |
| Inclusivity and democratic governance of a project is a strike to | |
| you? Seems like perhaps your hat is showing... | |
| ted_dunning wrote 3 hours 29 min ago: | |
| Democratic organization is a strike? | |
| Where do you live that that seems like a bad idea? | |
| esseph wrote 3 hours 38 min ago: | |
| Inclusive is strike 1? | |
| What color are you? | |
| I'm sure I can find a company that supports ethnostates if you | |
| need that for your next project. | |
| sallveburrpi wrote 4 hours 30 min ago: | |
| How can you lock in through charging money? | |
| Seems itâs like the opposite and they are charging because people | |
| are already locked in and they can or am I misreading your comment? | |
| dragonwriter wrote 1 hour 45 min ago: | |
| If you make running your own runners as expensive as running on | |
| Github's runners on top of the cost of actually hosting the | |
| runners, then if you are currently on Github and not able to | |
| migrate off immediately, the price conscious decision is to | |
| migrate runners into Github. But then, its even harder if you | |
| ever decide to migrate your whole operation out. | |
| Now, if you are already looking at migrating, its also | |
| potentially a kick in the butt to do it now. But if you arenât, | |
| the path of least resistanceâor at least, the path of least | |
| present recurring costâis a path to a greater degree of | |
| lock-in. | |
| Vegenoid wrote 3 hours 59 min ago: | |
| The idea is that they let you stay locked in for free. They | |
| dissuade people from making their CI pipeline forge-agnostic by | |
| charging you if you if you take steps to not be dependent on | |
| them. This means they can keep charging in other areas, and keep | |
| people in GitHub so that it stays dominant. Dominance is | |
| something that can be used to keep people in the Microsoft | |
| ecosystem, keep GitHub as the place where code goes so they have | |
| training data for LLMs, and dominance can simply be cashed in | |
| down the line. | |
| I donât know if thatâs actually why theyâre doing this, b… | |
| it sounds plausible. | |
| mindcrash wrote 4 hours 10 min ago: | |
| Microsoft "suddenly" does not seem to want you to run your own | |
| CI, which is a key part of running your own SCM. And this | |
| decision miraculously happens the moment a lot of big orgs are | |
| looking at self-hosting a cost effective (because open source) | |
| near 1:1 alternative to GitHub (=Forgejo). | |
| 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. | |
| larkost wrote 5 hours 5 min ago: | |
| 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 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. | |
| skilning wrote 49 min ago: | |
| > is $0.002/minute a good price for this | |
| 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? | |
| ajford wrote 1 hour 28 min ago: | |
| Sure, but that shouldn't be a time-dependent charge. If my build | |
| takes an hour to build on GH's hardware, sure thing, charge me for | |
| that time. But if my build takes an hour to build on _my_ hardware, | |
| then why am I paying GH for that hour? | |
| 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? | |
| dragonwriter wrote 1 hour 29 min ago: | |
| > They have just decided that they are no longer going to do this | |
| for free. | |
| 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.) | |
| gen220 wrote 2 hours 9 min ago: | |
| Yeah, I'm no GitHub apologist, but I'll be one in this context. | |
| This is actually a not-unreasonable thing to charge for. And a | |
| price point that's not-unreasonable. | |
| 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 | |
| gallexme wrote 2 hours 11 min ago: | |
| I run about 1 action a day taking 18h running on 2 runners | |
| One being self hosted 24gb ram 8 core ARM vps and one being a 64gb | |
| 13900k x86 dedicated server | |
| 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 | |
| janc_ wrote 45 min ago: | |
| Somewhere around 0.00004$ probably. | |
| Nice profit margin⦠| |
| deathanatos wrote 3 hours 25 min ago: | |
| You know, one might ask what the base fee of $4k/mo (in my org's | |
| case) is covering, if not the control plane? | |
| Unless you're on the free org plan, they're hardly doing it "for | |
| free" today⦠| |
| numbsafari wrote 3 hours 18 min ago: | |
| Exactly this. Itâs not like they donât have plenty of other | |
| fees and charges. Whatâs next, charging mil rates for webhook | |
| deliveries? | |
| whynotmaybe wrote 3 hours 30 min ago: | |
| > is $0.002/minute a good price for this | |
| 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. | |
| saagarjha wrote 1 hour 47 min ago: | |
| Is it polling the runner, or is the runner sending it progress? | |
| ExoticPearTree wrote 1 hour 22 min ago: | |
| The runner sends progress info, polls for jobs and so on. The | |
| runners don't have to be accessible from GitHub, they just | |
| needs general internet access (like through a NAT device). | |
| featherless wrote 4 hours 20 min ago: | |
| As a solo Founder who recently invested in self-hosted build | |
| infrastructure because my company runs ~70,000 minutes/month, this | |
| change is going to add an extra $140/month for hardware I own. And | |
| that's just today; this number will only go up over time. | |
| 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. | |
| nebezb wrote 1 hour 32 min ago: | |
| I get the frustration. And Iâm no GitHub apologist either. But | |
| youâre not being charged for hardware you own. Youâre being | |
| charged for the services surrounding it (the action | |
| runner/executor binary you didnât build, the orchestrator | |
| configurable in their DSL you write, the artefact and log | |
| retention youâre getting, the plug-n-play with your repo, etc). | |
| Whether or not you think that is a fair price is beside the | |
| point. | |
| That value to you is apparently less than $140/mo. Find the | |
| number youâre comfortable with and then move away from GH | |
| Actions if itâs 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. Itâs still my | |
| hardware. BuildKite just provides the âservicesâ 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 donât like how it feels. | |
| This is probably bad for GitHub but framing it as âcharging me | |
| for my hardwareâ misses the point entirely. | |
| larkost wrote 3 hours 34 min ago: | |
| But it is not for hardware you own. It is for the use of GutHubs | |
| coordinators, which they have been donating the use of to you for | |
| free. They have now decided that that service is something they | |
| are going to charge for. Your objection to GitHub "extracting | |
| usage-based rent from me" seems to ignore that you have been | |
| getting usage of their hardware for free up to now. | |
| 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? | |
| PunchyHamster wrote 42 min ago: | |
| so they are selling cent of their CPU time for a minute's worth | |
| > 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! | |
| featherless wrote 3 hours 27 min ago: | |
| No. It is not worth a time-scaled cost each month for them to | |
| start a job on my machines and store a few megabytes of log | |
| files. | |
| 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. | |
| __turbobrew__ wrote 1 hour 7 min ago: | |
| > It is not worth a time-scaled cost each month for them to | |
| start a job on my machines and store a few megabytes of log | |
| files | |
| If it is so easy why donât you write your own orchestrator | |
| to run jobs on the hardware you own? | |
| otterley wrote 2 hours 2 min ago: | |
| > The problem here is that this is like a grocery store | |
| charging me money for every bag I bring to bag my own | |
| groceries. | |
| 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. | |
| featherless wrote 1 hour 58 min ago: | |
| Do you feel that orchestration runs on a per-minute basis? | |
| otterley wrote 1 hour 56 min ago: | |
| As long as they're reserving resources for your job | |
| during the period of execution, it does. | |
| featherless wrote 1 hour 15 min ago: | |
| Charging people to maintain a row in a database by the | |
| minute is top-tier, I agree. | |
| otterley wrote 15 min ago: | |
| If you really think that's all it is, I would | |
| encourage you to write your own. | |
| featherless wrote 12 min ago: | |
| It would be silly to write a new one today. Plenty | |
| of open source + indy options to invest into | |
| instead. | |
| 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. | |
| breppp wrote 3 hours 20 min ago: | |
| > The problem here is that this is like a grocery store | |
| charging me money for every bag I bring to bag my own | |
| groceries. | |
| Maybe they can market it as the Github Actions corkage fee | |
| hugs wrote 3 hours 42 min ago: | |
| feels like a new generation is learning what life is like when | |
| microsoft has a lot of power. (tl;dr: they try to use it.) | |
| PunchyHamster wrote 40 min ago: | |
| Feels like listening to Halo generation being surprised MS | |
| fucks them over, because they thought they were Good Guys, coz | |
| they Made Thing They like | |
| janc_ wrote 49 min ago: | |
| ABuse it. | |
| j45 wrote 4 hours 33 min ago: | |
| Additionally, they could just self-host their code since code is | |
| data is a moat. | |
| mfcl wrote 5 hours 16 min ago: | |
| They still run the whole orchestration. | |
| 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. | |
| codeflo wrote 4 hours 59 min ago: | |
| One problem is that GitHub Actions isn't good. It's not like you're | |
| happily paying for some top tier "orchestration". It's there and | |
| integrated, which does make it convenient, but any price on this | |
| piece of garbage makes switching/self-hosting something to | |
| seriously consider. | |
| hadlock wrote 4 hours 30 min ago: | |
| Github being a single pane of glass for developers with a single | |
| login is pretty powerful. Github hosting the runners is also | |
| pretty useful, ask anyone who has had to actually manage/scale | |
| them what their opinion is about Jenkins is. Being a "Jenkins | |
| Farmer" is a thankless job that means a lot of on-call work to | |
| fix the build system in the middle of the night at 2am on a | |
| Sunday. Paying a small monthly fee is absolutely worth it to | |
| rescue the morale of your infra/platform/devops/sre team. | |
| 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 | |
| bigstrat2003 wrote 3 hours 54 min ago: | |
| I run Jenkins (have done so at multiple jobs) and it's totally | |
| fine. Jenkins, like other super customizable systems, is as | |
| reliable or crappy as you make it. It's decent out of the box, | |
| but if you load it down with a billion plugins and whatnot then | |
| yeah it's going to be a nightmare to maintain. It all comes | |
| down to whether you've done a good job setting it up, IMO. | |
| hadlock wrote 3 hours 15 min ago: | |
| Lots of systems are "fine" until they aren't. As you pointed | |
| out, Jenkins being super-customizable means it isn't strongly | |
| opinionated, and there is plenty of opportunity for a | |
| well-meaning developer to add several foot-guns, doing some | |
| simple point and click in the GUI. Or the worst case | |
| scenario: cleaning up someone elses' Jenkins mess after they | |
| leave the company. | |
| 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. | |
| QuercusMax wrote 4 hours 31 min ago: | |
| Yeah, it seems like a half-assed version of what Jenkins and | |
| other tools have been doing for ages. Not that Jenkins is some | |
| magical wonderful tool, but I still haven't found a reasonable | |
| way to test my actions outside of running them on real Github. | |
| bad_haircut72 wrote 5 hours 0 min ago: | |
| Everyone who has Actions built into their workflow now has to go | |
| change it. Microsoft just conned a bunch more people with the same | |
| classic tech lock-in strategy they've always pursued, people are | |
| right to be pissed. The only learning to take away is never ever | |
| use anything from the big tech companies, even if it seems easier | |
| or cheaper right now to do so, because they're just waiting for the | |
| right moment to try and claw it back from you. | |
| baobun wrote 3 hours 1 min ago: | |
| > Microsoft just conned a bunch more people with the same classic | |
| tech lock-in strategy they've always pursued, people are right to | |
| be pissed | |
| 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. | |
| nextaccountic wrote 5 hours 12 min ago: | |
| Can someone share a Github bot that doesn't depend on actions? | |
| I mean maybe [1] is enough to fully replace Github Actions? (not | |
| sure) | |
| [1]: https://github.com/rust-lang/bors | |
| reissbaker wrote 5 hours 0 min ago: | |
| You can use webhooks to replace Github Actions: [1] Listen to | |
| webhooks for new commits + PRs, and then use the commit status | |
| API to push statuses: | |
| [1]: https://docs.github.com/en/webhooks/about-webhooks | |
| [2]: https://docs.github.com/en/rest/commits/statuses?apiVers... | |
| masklinn wrote 4 hours 24 min ago: | |
| Yep, this mostly works fine (and can be necessary already in | |
| some setups anyway), the main issues are that each status | |
| update requires an API call (over v3, AFAIK updating statuses | |
| was never added to v4) so if you have a lot of statuses and PR | |
| traffic you can hit rate limits annoyingly quickly, and github | |
| will regularly fail to deliver or forward webhooks (also no | |
| ordering guarantees). | |
| jjice wrote 5 hours 7 min ago: | |
| We have internal integrations with GitHub webhooks that will hit | |
| our server to checkout a branch, run some compute, and then post | |
| a comment on the thread. Not sure if you can integrate something | |
| like that to help block a PR from being merged like Actions CI | |
| checks, but you can receive webhooks and make API calls for free | |
| (for now). Would definitely result in some extra overhead to | |
| implement outside of Actions for some tasks. | |
| masklinn wrote 4 hours 17 min ago: | |
| > Not sure if you can integrate something like that to help | |
| block a PR from being merged like Actions CI checks | |
| 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. | |
| dinosor wrote 6 hours 14 min ago: | |
| related: | |
| [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46291156 | |
| <- back to front page |