I'm happy for competition, but this seems a bit foul since we users aren't getting anything tangible beyond the promise of improvements and investments that I don't need.
Given that GitHub runners are still slow as ever, it actually is a point in our favor even compared to self-hosting on aws etc. However, it makes the value harder to communicate <shrug>.
I'm sure we'll feel it too at https://sprinters.sh, but probably a bit less than others as our flat $0.01 per job fee for runners on your own AWS account will still work out to about 80% average savings in practice, compared to ~90% now when using spot instances.
Of course, if you can just fence in your competition and charge admission, it'd be silly to invest time in building a superior product.
> Actions is down again, call Brent so he can fix it again...
Not sure if a Phoenix Project reference, but if it is, it's certainly in keeping with Github being as fragile as the company in the book!
The only self-hosted runners I've used have been for internalized deployments separate from the build or (pre)test processes.
Aside: I've come to rely on Deno heavily for a lot of my scripting needs since it lets me reference repository modules directly and not require a build/install step head of time... just write TypeScript and run.
When you've got many 100s of services managing these in actions yaml itself is no bueno. As you mentioned having the option to actually be able to run the CI/CD yourself is a must. Having to wait 5 minutes plus many commits just to test an action drains you very fast.
Granted we did end up making the CI so fast (~ 1 minute with dependency cache, ~4 minutes without), that we saw devs running their setup less and less on their personal workstations for development. Except when github actions went down... ;) We used Jenkins self-hosted before and it was far more stable, but a pain to maintain and understand.
Scheduling jobs, actually getting them running, is virtually instant with GitLab but it's slow AF for GitHub for no discernable reason.
Using GitHub actions to coordinate the Valhalla builds was a nice-to-have, but this is a deal-breaker for my pull request workflows.
A lot of it is wasted in build time though, due to a lack of appropriate caching facilities with GitHub actions.
[0] https://github.com/Barre/ZeroFS/tree/main/.github/workflows
tl;dr uses a local slot-based cache that is pre-warmed after every merge to main, taking Sidecar builds from ~10-15 minutes to <60 seconds.
SlateDB, the lower layer, already does DST as well as fault injection though.
I’m definitely sure it’s saving me more than $140 a month to have CI/CD running and I’m also sure I’d never break even on the opportunity cost of having someone write or set one up internally if someone else’s works - and this is the key - just as well.
But investment in CI/CD is investing in future velocity. The hours invested are paid for by hours saved. So if the outcome is brittle and requires oversight that savings drops or disappears.
I’m also someone who paid for JetBrains when everyone still thought it wasn’t worth money to pay for a code editor. Though I guess that’s again now. And everyone is using an MS product instead.
This is like if Dropbox started charging you money for the files you have stored on your backup hard drives.
(People seem to object to this comment. I genuinely do not understand why.)
Perhaps that isn't most use of it; the big projects are really big.
Fundamentally, yes, what you run in a CI pipeline can run locally.
That's doesn't mean it should.
Because if we follow this line of thought, then datacenters are useless. Most people could perfectly host their services locally.
There are a rather lot of people who do argue that? Like, I actually agree that non-local CI is useful, but this is a poor argument for it.
I'm not aware of people arguing for self-hosting team or enterprise services.
Actions let you test things in multiple environments, to test them with credentials against resources devs don't have access to, to do additional things like deploys, managing version numbers, on and on
With CI, especially pull requests, you can leave longer running tests for github to take care of verifying. You can run periodic tests once a day like an hour long smoke test.
CI is guard rails against common failure modes which turn requiring everyone to follow an evolving script into something automatic nobody needs to think about much
... Is nobody in charge on the team?
Or is it not enough that devs adhere to a coding standard, work to APIs etc. but you expect them to follow a common process to get there (as opposed to what makes them individually most productive)?
> You can run periodic tests once a day like an hour long smoke test.
Which is great if you have multiple people expected to contribute on any given day. Quite a bit of development on GitHub, and in general, is not so... corporate.
I don't deny there are use cases for this sort of thing. But people on HN talking about "hosting things locally" seem to describe a culture utterly foreign to me. I don't, for example, use multiple computers throughout the house that I want to "sync". (I don't even use a smartphone.) I really feel strongly that most people in tech would be better served by questioning the existing complexity of their lives (and setups), than by questioning what they're missing out on.
- github copilot PR reviews are subpar compared to what I've seen from other services: at least for our PRs they tend to be mostly an (expensive) grammar/spell-check
- given that it's github native you'd wish for a good integration with the platform but then when your org is behind a (github) IP whitelist things seem to break often
- network firewall for the agent doesn't seem to work properly
raised tickets for all these but given how well it works when it does, I might as well just migrate to another service
The runner software they provide is solid and I’ve never had an issue with it after administering self-hosted GitHub actions runners for 4 years. 100s of thousands of runners have taken jobs, done the work, destroyed themselves, and been replaced with clean runners, all without a single issue with the runners themselves.
Workflows on the other hand, they have problems. The whole design is a bit silly
been working to move all our workflows to self hosted, on demand ephemeral runners. was severely delayed to find out how slipshod the Actions Runner Service was, and had to redesign to handle out-of-order or plain missing webhook events. jobs would start running before a workflow_job event would be delivered
we've got it now that we can detect a GitHub Actions outage and let them know by opening a support ticket, before the status page updates
In my experience gitlab always felt clunky and overly complicated on the back end, but for my needs local forgejo is better than the cloud options.
Part of this is fair since there is a cost to operating the control plane.
One way around this is to go back to using check runs. I imagine a third party could handle webhooks, parse the .github/workflows/example.yml, then execute the action via https://github.com/nektos/act (or similar), then post the result.
It’s been awhile since I looked. What’s a good alternative?
Jenkins has been rock solid, we are trying to migrate to Argo Workflows/Events, but there are a complaints (like deploying argo workflows with helm, such fun!)
- runs locally
- has a language server: python, typescript, go, java, OR elixer
- has static typing
- the new caching mechanisms introduced in 0.19.4 are chef's kiss
I do not work for dagger and pay for it using the company credit card. A breath of fresh air after the unceasing misery and pain that is Gitlab and GHA.
-- Winston Churchill (probably)
https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core/blob/master/docs/spindl...
(no affiliation)
---
Blog post about Tangled's CI: https://blog.tangled.org/ci
https://bsky.app/profile/tangled.org
There looks to be a blog post here: https://blog.tangled.org/ci
I'm not a fan of nix and would have picked containers regardless for a git forge CI offering
I get that self-hosted runners generate huge egress traffic, but this is still wild. Hope it pushes more companies to look into self-hosted Gitea / Forgejo / etc.
Holy s***
That's more expensive than an m8i.large.
What on earth.
I realise 100% utilisation isn't realistic, but that still sounds very expensive when you're already BYOB.
It's worse than unrealistic. It's ludicrous. Any company running more than an hour of actions workflows per week on GitHub can afford a few dollars a month for infrastructure. The per-minute charge is less than the cost of a millisecond of engineering labor time.
Now the only alternative is to move builds, CI, etc. off of GitHub's platform entirely, and maybe your source control as well. In other words, a big pain. Github seems to have entered peak encrapification: the point where they openly acknowledge rent-seeking as their product approach, fully deprecating "building the best, most reliable, trustworthy product." Now it's just "Pay us high margins because the effort to migrate off is big and will take too long to break even."
Basically the modern day Heroku business model.
GitHub still supports e.g. PR checks that originate from other systems. We had PR checks before GHA and it's easy enough to go back to that. Jenkins has some stuff built in or you can make some simple API calls.
It's not as convenient, but it works just fine.
From this perspective this is a huge price jump, but self-hosting to save money can still work out.
Honestly, GitHub Actions have been too flaky for me and I'm begrudgingly reaching for Jenkins again for new projects.
[1] https://instances.vantage.sh/aws/ec2/m7i.large?currency=USD&...
> Hosted Agents > > 2,000 minutes/month
:-o
8h job is definitely more expensive to them than a 1 minute one, but I'd guess that the actual reason is that this way they earn more money, and dissuade users from using a third party service instead of their own runners.
the only rational outside rationale is this has the best financial projections, equitability with the customer be damned
gotta make up for those slumping ai sales somehow, amiright?
This isn't aimed at people actually self-hosting; it's aimed at alternative hosted runners providers. See this list
It seems GitLab has a much better experience in this department, but their pricing is hard to justify for us...
Genuinely curious if folks here had better experiences or recommendations for a smooth CI/CD experience.
The GitHub encrapification finally affects me. I am militantly unwilling to pay per minute to use my own computer. Time to leave. I can trigger and monitor builds myself thank you very much.
What an incredibly silly accusation to make of a company/service that streams movies and television. Like you understand it is possible to dilute the concept of civic responsibility right?
Companies don't care about society, unless it affects profit. Companies are not people, they are cold machines that through different means try to reach the same purpose, make more money.
No one should anthropomorphize companies. They might look like they have human qualities, same way like the T800 in the Terminator looked human.
Now it's none of those three. Once again, choosing not to pirate is just an objectively wrong choice. It's a worse experience, with worse quality, worse availability, and at a higher price tag.
Choosing not to pirate and not to consume simultaneously is not necessarily a wrong choice. A difficult one? Yes. But I propose that it could be beneficial for your mental (and maybe physical) health.
It'll be interesting to see how this affects third party companies providing GitHub runners.
Now the playing field is more level, yay. Fun for those who choose to migrate away.
Charging per minute for self-hosted runners seems absolutely bananas!
to top it all off, they round up to the nearest whole minute instead of billing for actual usage which i assume they'll use for this new charge.
Earthly did not work out, and dagger had the problem of we support everything but but nothing is great
Today it's possible to spin up a company that sells GitHub Actions runners with a lower price and higher performance than GitHub's own hosted runners. These new fees will make that a lot less economically viable.
1. Services like WarpBuild (I'm the founder) are still cheaper than GitHub hosted runners, even after including the $0.002/min self-hosting tax.
2. The biggest lever for controlling costs now is reducing the number of minutes used in CI. Given how slow Github's runners are, or even the ones on AWS compared to our baremetal processor single core performance + nvme disks, it makes even more sense to use WarpBuild. This actually makes a better case for moving from slow AWS instances running with actions-runner-controller etc. to WarpBuild!
3. Messaging this to most users is harder since the first reaction is that Github options make more sense. After some rational thought, it is the opposite.
https://docs.github.com/en/actions/reference/workflows-and-a...
(Which, yes, has implications for energy use/climate change too for sure).
It doesn't look like i currently have access to the usage data on any of the lots-of-runners-lots-of-PRs projects I currently work on (which are still probably way less than some large companies).
Any "large companies" don't give a shit about things at this cost level. They spend more on the time it takes you to open the door. The number of CI minutes could be astronomical and it still wouldn't rate above the threshold of caring. The time people in this thread have spent wringing their hands is way more expensive.
On my larger organization, we have on average 20 to 30 *active* runners during business hours. Assuming 5 on the off-hours, my napkin math says it comes down to about 10 fully-utilized-runners per month, so about 864$/mo. For the size of my organization that is honestly totally acceptable.
This is assuming 0.002$ per minute of job being actively executed. If it turns out to be 0.002$ per minute of *runner being registered* on the control plane, it would increase quite a bit. We are still using the old HorizontalRunnerAutoscaler with actions-runner-controller, with quite a pool of prewarmed runners idling to pick up a job. It would be a strong reason to use the new RunnerScaleSet (to take advantage of the reactive webhook-based scaling) and keep a very lean pool of prewarmed runners.
This is not new, not unexpected. This is ongoing. Nothing stops this because who wins elections? How do they pay for all that publicity. Certainly "contributing" to campaigns is much cheaper than paying your taxes.
Supposedly this is a place for hackers. Hackers can build a better alternative.
I suspect we'll be doing that sometime in January or February.
I guess forgejo is the easiest migration path? https://forgejo.org/
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.
I mean maybe https://github.com/rust-lang/bors is enough to fully replace Github Actions? (not sure)
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.
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=...
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.
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.
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
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.
If it is so easy why don’t you write your own orchestrator to run jobs on the hardware you own?
> 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 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.
Unless you're on the free org plan, they're hardly doing it "for free" today…
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
Nice profit margin…
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
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?
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?
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.
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
What color are you?
I'm sure I can find a company that supports ethnostates if you need that for your next project.
Where do you live that that seems like a bad idea?
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
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?
Would you keep charging the same rate per head?
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.
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.
Anyway, GitHub actions is a dumpster fire even without this change.
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:
1. Self-hosting runners is still cheaper than not Despite the $0.002/minute self-hosted runner tax, self-hosting runners on your cloud (aws/gcp/azure/...) remains the cheaper option.
2. Prefer larger runners If your workflow scales with the number of vCPUs, prefer larger runners. That ensures you spend fewer minutes on the runner, which reduces the GitHub self-hosted runner tax.
For example, using actions-runner-controller with heavy jobs running on 1 vcpu runners is not a good idea. Instead, prefer a 2vcpu runner (say) if it runs the job ~2x faster.
3. Prefer faster runners All else being equal, prefer faster runners. That ensures you spend fewer minutes on the runner, which reduces the GitHub self-hosted runner tax.
For example, if you're self-hosting on aws and using a t3g.medium runner, it's better to use a t4g.medium runner since the newer generation is faster, but not much more expensive.
4. Prefer fewer shards If you have a lot of shards for your jobs (example: tests on ~50 shards), consider reducing the number of shards and parallelizing the tests on fewer but larger runners.
5. Improve job performance This is not new advice, but it's now more important than ever because of the additional GitHub self-hosted runner tax.
6. Use GitHub hosted runners for very short jobs For linters and other very short jobs, it's better to use GitHub hosted runners.
Note: I make WarpBuild, where we provide github actions runner compute. Our compute is still cheaper than using github hosted runners (even with the $0.002/min tax) and our runners are optimized for high performance to minimize the number of mins consumed. I'm generally biased, but I think the points 1-6 apply irrespective of WarpBuild.
I hate GH Action runners with a passion. They are slow, overpriced, and clearly held together with duct tape and chewing gum. WarpBuild, on the other hand, was a breeze to setup and provided faster runners and lower prices.
This is a really shitty move.
Hey GitHub, your Microsoft is showing...
Given github ran 11.5 billion mins of actions in 2025, and most of them would've been on self-hosted runners, this move makes some sense from their POV.
However, this is still an... interesting... move, especially after bitbucket got all that hate a few weeks ago for doing something similar.
However, my experience with GitHub Actions was really poor. Some build that would run perfectly on my local machine and any other servers we have hosted would always time out on GitHub runners. I went back and forth from small runners to large runners and the result was always the same. Then I found that there are third-party companies just offering replacement runners for GitHub Actions at less than half the price for an amazing reliability and cost. It was a night and day difference.
Now... this move by GitHub is almost unbelievable. Charging folks to use their own machines
We currently self-host on kubernets/aws. The thing that really got to me isn't the new charge per se. It's the fact that GHA has a ton of problems. I can hold my nose and deal with them when it's free. But now that you're squeezing me, at least you could have created something like GHA 2.0 and added a charge for that. Instead, there are vague roadmap promises which don't even include things that I care about. Specifically:
- Jenkins had better kubernetes integration years ago. It's crazy that GHA can't beat that.
- "Reintroducing multi-label functionality" - yeah, so they first broke it. They did supply "reasons", which looked like they never talked to a customer. [1]
- Still no SDK of any kind.
- "Actions Data Stream" - or you can just fix your logging.
There are dozens more complains, which are easy enough to find. This kind of an approach just makes me want to make sure that I don't use GHA again. Even if I end up paying another vendor, at least I'll be treated as a customer.
[1] - https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/160682#discuss...
"Thank you for your interest in this GitHub action, however, right now we are not taking contributions.
We continue to focus our resources on strategic areas that help our customers be successful while making developers' lives easier. While GitHub Actions remains a key part of this vision, we are allocating resources towards other areas of Actions and are not taking contributions to this repository at this time. The GitHub public roadmap is the best place to follow along for any updates on features we’re working on and what stage they’re in."
Apples to oranges, naturally, but like this, our infra-jenkins master would pay for itself in hosting in a week of ansible integration testing compared to what GHA would cost. Sure, maintenance is a thing, but honestly, flinging java, docker and a few other things onto a build agent isn't the time-consuming part of maintaining CI infrastructure.
And I mean sure, everything is kinda janky on Jenkins, but everything falls into an expectable corridor of jank you get used to.
Depending on your workplace, there's a whole extra layer of bureaucracy and compliance involved if you self-host things. I aggressively avoid managing any VMs for that reason alone.
Most modern development workflows should just pickup a host with some container engine and do their work in stateless containers with some external state mapped in, like package caches. It's much easier for both sides in a majority of cases.
Self-hosting Jenkins on an EC2 instance is probably going to result in a _better_ experience at this point. Github Cache is barely better than just downloading assets directly, and with Jenkins you can trivially use a local disk for caching.
Or if you're feeling fancy and want more isolation, host a local RustFS installation and use S3 caching in your favorite tools.
The runner configuration and registration process is unnecessarily byzantine. [1]
They can't cancel jobs cleanly. [2]
There are consistency problems everywhere. [3]
Their own documentations describes horrible things unless you use runners in JIT mode. Though JIT runners are not always removed after exit.
If there is a worse self-hosted CI runner, I haven't yet met it.
[1] https://docs.github.com/en/actions/how-tos/manage-runners/se...
The rest is correct. (Though you can hardlink the installation.) And you can disable self-update, though it does it by default.
Create/start/stop/terminate EC2.
I have cron jobs on several github projects that runs once a day and I have never been charged anything for it (other than my github membership). Should I expect to be charged for this?
Anyone using GitLab or any other VCM that you'd recommend? I'm absolutely done with Github. Or is everything else just as bad?
And the best (maybe?) part in your case is that the CI is based on GH Actions, so you can probably reuse your workflows without the need to adapt them.
For a company, I'd recommend self-hosting forgejo (which also has actions), which powers codeberg.
(forgejo started as a fork of gitea)
Alternatively, Forgejo, Gitea, or (based on praise I've seen from other people) maybe sourcehut.org.
I find GitLab's interface intolerable. Heavy reliance on javascript even for read-only access, nonintuitive organization, common operations hidden behind menus, mystifying icons... Every time I seek out a project's home and discover a GitLab instance, I find myself pausing to reconsider whether contributing to the project will really be rewarding enough to outweigh the unpleasant experience I'm about to have.
What does VCM stand for?
Particularly making a contribution should anyhow be trivial - you push the branch and it shows a banner in the repo asking if you want to open a MR for the recently pushed branch.
I don't know why anyone would use GitHub actions. They seem like a weird, less powerful version of the GitLab CI. Now they want to charge for runtime on your own runner.
And the entire solution just sucks. It's bad, bad software. It barely works a lot of the time.
The only reason they're doing this is because they can. Which is usually a really stupid reason. And here, it is. So, that's outrageous.
Sure, but there's a separate mechanism that you need to make it all work: the orchestration. Without that, you have only the capacity to run jobs -- it's potential energy, if you will, not doing real work.
That orchestrator thus provides real value. And it's not like it's free for them to build, operate, and maintain.
Focus on the enterprise. Something like a 3000$ minimum yearly price. Direct customer support with real engineers no questions asked.
Need someone to setup your CICD, that's another fee, but on staff engineers will get it done.
Edit: I'd even imagine a company like this can bootstrap, I'd need help though. Would probably take 4 skilled SWEs about 6 months for an MVP.
I think most do. Or at least the infrastructure/compute costs are not coming from their own dept budget anymore ;)
* Codeberg https://codeberg.org/
* Sourcehut https://sr.ht/ [1]
As mentioned above — I am glad that they exist and do what they do. However, that doesn't mean I should ignore issues like this.
Don't get me wrong — I am glad that they are doing what they're doing, but it's a long way until it becomes a real alternative.
GitHub's log streaming also sucks. It's very laggy and chunked, whereas GitLab's is pretty much real-time.
I'm in the era of writing my own tools, not to share just for me or whatever group I'm working in. If you're going to charge me for something rife with annoying struggles, I might as well be annoyed by a tool I control.
Thanks, enshittification.
"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.
In 2010, people were saying it was very reasonable to start prioritizing publishers' ability to reach you over your organic contacts. After all, Facebook is providing this utility for free; shouldn't they be able to extract some additional revenue from their platform? And here we are in 2025...
To spell it out: jobs can hang forever because of some ridiculously bad code on their end, they have a 6 hour cap, so that's 6 hours of billable $$$ per-instance of the bug (assuming it wasn't manually canceled). I know I've seen jobs hang forever regularly over the course of my years using GitHub for work.
Note: pretty sure this has been resolved.
We will continue to do our best to provide the fastest GHA runners and keep them cheaper than GitHub-hosted runners.
i think it should be illegal or otherwise extremely damaging to do this kind of thing
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!
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?
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?
and you expect it to stay this way?
> I would still make the same decision to purchase or abandon based on its value to me.
If you've been running your runners on your own infra for cost reasons, you're not really that interesting to the Github business.
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.
There are multiple competitors in this space. If you are (or were) paying for Github runners for any reason, you really shouldn't be.
Performance is the primary lever to pay less $0.002/min self hosting tax and we strive to provide the best performance runners.
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.
"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"
https://support.circleci.com/hc/en-us/articles/2064321965685...
I think that's fair. In my personal opinion most people started using GitHub Actions because it “came for free with the VCS and/or our MS contract” and it was “good enough for the job”. 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 don’t 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.
To solve the problem, I created a simple vm in Google Cloud with a lot of CPU and memory that runs Ubuntu. I installed enough stuff on it to be able to check out code and run our build script (a jvm and gradle basically). And then I modified the Github action to 1) start the vm, 2) trigger the build script via ssh 3) pause the vm so we don't get billed for it. That vm runs for maybe an hour per month or so. It would probably cost us hundreds of euros per month if we ran it 24/7. But 1/3600th of that barely registers on our bills. And it's nice and fast.
This has been working flawlessly for a few years now. The Github action takes about 3 minutes. That includes starting the vm, running the script, and shutting the vm down again.
Wonky in a way. But also simple and robust enough. People over engineer/over think this stuff for the wrong reasons. For example, I could of course automate the provisioning of that vm. But I haven't. Because I only ever touch it once a year or so to run a quick apt-get update. I rebuilt it a few weeks ago in a different region. That was like a 20 minute job. Terraform or Ansible for vms you only create once every few years is redundant and might take more time than you would save. I can always do that when that stops being true.
I've been running this startup on the freemium layer in Github for five years now. It's great as a free service. I would actually pay for it if I needed to. I did actually pay for it before MS acquired Github in a previous startup when business usage wasn't free. But so far, there's no need for me to do that. I also run some monitoring scripts as Github actions. Simple curl jobs against our servers that trigger alerts when they fail. That has to run somewhere. It might as well be Github actions. But if/when that becomes inconvenient, I can improvise other solutions.
fun video on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E3_95BZYIVs
1. https://medium.com/@the_atomic_architect/github-vs-gitlab-20...
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.
Oh and turns out GitHub also has that now: https://github.blog/changelog/2025-09-18-actions-yaml-anchor...
UPDATE: okay they botched it https://frenck.dev/github-actions-yaml-anchors-aliases-merge...
There's been years of discussion about ways to fix it with nothing moving forward.
https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/263401
And the most recent tracking issue:
* its 7 VPS because we separated the tests by modules and we have 7 major modules. * edit: formatting
[0]: https://docs.gitlab.com/user/project/repository/branches/pro...
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.
As far as I can tell from that article, these changes will not affect me; it says "Standard GitHub-hosted or self-hosted runner usage on public repositories will remain free" and another section says "This will not impact Actions usage in public repositories". Hopefully, this information would behelpful for other people who use GitHub Actions. However, I don't know if I missed something else that is important, from the article.
For private repositories, each GitHub account gets 2000 free minutes of runtime per month. Both self-hosted runners and GitHub-hosted runners count against that quota.
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.
It's not outrageous money today, but it's a clear signal about where they want CI to live.
(plz correct me if i'm wrong)
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.
- 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.
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,
GitLab CI and others seem to be perfectly serviceable.
- 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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
The first checks I setup are build and test. The rest is “extra”.
My org sadly has a lot of github actions workflows, even after this it's not expensive enough to justify migrating away, but with all their downtime and bugs they are really pushing us closer and closer.
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...
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 you’re right that people tend to leave their runners online 24/7- but I’ve never worked anywhere that had workers building 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)
Either way, we will likely pay 8-hours4-pipelines5-days=160 hours per week, just shy of 168-hours for true 24/7. This currently costs $0 just for context.
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.
The real mistake was GH not charging anything for self-hosted runners in the first place, setting an expectation.
Of course entirely expected after MS buyout, if anything I'm surprised it took that long
Maybe this is designed to scare people away from self-hosting altogether?
It is a way of increasing lock-in for smaller-medium clients, without driving away their medium-large ones.
[1] https://nesbitt.io/2025/12/06/github-actions-package-manager... [2] https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/592
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...
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.
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.
The biggest issue is the compatibility, forgejo doesn’t have all the actions available that GitHub does nor some of the same functionality
Arcuru•7h ago
Charging for self-hosted runners is an interesting choice. That's the same cost as their smallest hosted runners [1]
[1] - https://docs.github.com/en/billing/reference/actions-runner-...
tom1337•7h ago
Edit: Confused GitLab and Bitbucket
nstart•7h ago
I don't know if it's worth the amount they are targeting, but it's definitely not zero either.
acdha•6h ago
xp84•6h ago
franktankbank•6h ago
jeduardo•7h ago
tom1337•6h ago
jeduardo•6h ago
swatcoder•6h ago
ZIRP ended, its remaining monopoly money has been burnt through, and the projected economy is looking bleak. We're now in the phase where everything that can be monetized is being monetized in every way that can be managed.
Free tiers evaporate. Fees appear everywhere. Ads appear everywhere, even where it was implied they wouldn't. The lemons must be squeezed.
And because everybody of relevance is in that mode, there's little competitive pressure to provide a specific rationale for a specific scheme. For the next few years, that's all the justification that there needs to be.
wiether•5h ago
I thought that "Bitbucket" was in your original post and you added only your edit message to say that it was, in fact, Gitlab and not Bitbucket that added cost for self-hosted runners.
thewisenerd•6h ago
(ofc, that'd only mean they stop updating the status page, so eh)
teach•6h ago
https://downdetector.com/status/github/
falsedan•4h ago
IshKebab•6h ago
https://github.com/neysofu/awesome-github-actions-runners
jononor•1h ago
sylens•6h ago
NewJazz•5h ago
Really Dianne?