alt Hacker NewsPricing Changes for GitHub Actions
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I got contacted by our rep a couple weeks ago, who informed me of this news. I thought it was a disaster and it really pissed me off. The rep couldn't even explain the reasoning well. It basically summed up to "because we can" and "where are you going to go?". He was shocked to find out that I didn't like it.
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...
Introducing a separate charge specifically targeting those of your customers who choose to self-host your hilariously fragile infrastructure is certainly a choice.. And one I assume is in no way tied to adoption/usage-based KPIs.
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.
> We are introducing a $0.002 per-minute Actions cloud platform charge for all Actions workflows across GitHub-hosted and self-hosted runners.
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-...
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...
That's not a move of a company that thinks it can still grow. That's a Netflix "we have 90% of the market, let's squeeze them" move. This is the beginning. We have all seen this pattern over the last 5+ years. You know their next few moves.
> Self-hosted runners: You will be charged for using the GitHub Actions cloud platform from March 1, 2026
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.
Getting acquired by Microsoft is a death sentence for any product.
The only variable is how long after acquisition before they gut it. It's almost never right away. GitHub was acquired 7 years ago, but it started showing symptoms perhaps 2 years ago.
With this I think it's clear the wound was fatal. GitHub will stumble on for a few more years with ever-decreasing quality, before going the way of Skype.
So, I guess we're all migrating to gitlab? Or is it time to launch gittube? Githamster?
This is my first comment on HN despite being a user for over a decade -- this is one of the most outrageous pricing changes I've encountered - I couldn't believe it when I read the email earlier (I run self-hosted runners).
Anyone using GitLab or any other VCM that you'd recommend? I'm absolutely done with Github. Or is everything else just as bad?
>In the past, our customers have asked us how GitHub views third-party runners long-term. The platform fee largely answers that: GitHub now monetizes Actions usage regardless of where jobs run, aligning third-party runners like Blacksmith as ecosystem partners rather than workarounds.
It does? I feel like it implies that they want third-party runners like Blacksmith out of the ecosystem, which is why they're now financially penalizing customers who use them.
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. https://medium.com/@the_atomic_architect/github-vs-gitlab-20...
Yikes! They seem to be gunning for services like WarpBuild, which we've used for a couple years to keep our costs low. The $0.002 per minute on top of WarpBuild's costs is exactly GitHub's new pricing scheme.
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.
Tangled has a nix based workflow engine that looks very similar, if you are into nix and self-hosting runners
https://tangled.org/tangled.org/core/blob/master/docs/spindl...
(no affiliation)
---
Blog post about Tangled's CI: https://blog.tangled.org/ci
Seriously. They're charging me for using MY cpus? Forgejo incoming testing period..
Zig's decision to ditch GitHub actions seems remarkably prescient, no?
Absolutely ridiculous. Just absolutely abhorrent and downright abusive move on Microsoft's part.
If this gives you pause, consider these hosted alternatives as another option:
* Codeberg https://codeberg.org/
* Sourcehut https://sr.ht/ [1]
I was born in 1993. I kind of heard lots of rumbling about Microsoft being evil as I grew up, but I wasn't fully understanding of the anti trust thing.
It used to suprise me that people saw cool tech from Microsoft (like VSCode) and complain about it.
I now see the first innings of a very silly game Microsoft are going to start playing over the next few years. Sure, they are going to make lots of money, but a whole generation of developers are learning to avoid them.
Thanks for trying to warn us old heads!
I’m genuinely excited about this. The GitHub actions platform is genuinely bad compared to circle or Travis but they’ve been totally crowded out because GitHub was just so easy to use. This has led to plenty of security issues and a general lack of innovation in the ci space. Hopefully by this pricing structure change we’ll see more investment in ci tooling across the industry
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?
This seems backwards. Why charge for me to run the thing myself instead of them?
> 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
Why would the self-hosted runner fee be per-minute instead of per-job? I don’t get it.
Here are the practical implications and considerations to optimize for cost, given the new pricing. These are generic and ensure you think through your workflows and runners before making any changes.
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'm happy to see they're investing in Actions — 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!
Didn't see it mentioned yet but I like gitea and it's runner. It's all in Go so very low overhead.
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.
I wonder how much they made from engineering practices such as https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792.
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.
The $0.002 per-minute for self-hosted runners will definitely change the unit economics for a lot of 3rd party runner providers.
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.
Time to get off for good. We're moving to https://forgejo.org/. With downtime and this, screw them.
Related: Github Actions control plane is no longer free https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46291500 https://www.blacksmith.sh/blog/actions-pricing
I use GitHub Actions for only one thing, which is to automatically assign any issues to myself (by using the "gh" program), and I am not paying anything for it. Furthermore, the repositories that use this are all public (I do not have any private repositories on GitHub, and due to various things I will not do that).
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.
Microsoft has started raising prices on many of their products. I suppose they decided that their current customers need to pay the increased CapEx for AI;) New motto - AI pay for it whether you use it or not.
Earlier this year I priced out AWS's on-demand m7i.large instances at $0.002/minute [1]. GitHub's two-core costs $0.008/minute today so it was a nice savings. But it looks like this announcement doubles the self-hosted cost and reduces their two-core system pricing to $0.006/min.
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&...
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 https://federated.computer do that.
a per-job cost instead of per-minute cost for non-compute "control plane" for CI would have made more sense and seemed more reasonable to me -- but don't really know if customers would have liked it better/worse or paid more/less under it.
(I work exclusively on public repo open source at the moment, and get Github actions for free).
Could this change mainly be about competition with their own hosted runners?
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.
Our current GitHub bill is $90/month, this would add an additional $700/month. I don't see how this doesn't cause a mass outflux.
I guess it was only a matter of time...
Part of this is fair since there is a cost to operating the control plane.
One way around this is to go back to using check runs. I imagine a third party could handle webhooks, parse the .github/workflows/example.yml, then execute the action via https://github.com/nektos/act (or similar), then post the result.
I didn't find a single example of any of the upcoming features, should I follow them in github to read release notes?
I guess I’ll start to look at an alternative to GitHub self hosted runners.
It’s been awhile since I looked. What’s a good alternative?
Pay even more to bring your own hardware? Well, that's new.
I get that self-hosted runners generate huge egress traffic, but this is still wild. Hope it pushes more companies to look into self-hosted Gitea / Forgejo / etc.
Just two weeks back BitBucket Pipelines also went the same route - https://www.atlassian.com/blog/bitbucket/announcing-v5-self-... .
I do not know what route are these companies taking. Microsoft has been crazy for past 2-3 years, but it is sad to see BitBucket and other alternatives also taking similar route :/
The email I received from them this morning claims that this will be cheaper for 96% of users...
I have cron jobs on several github projects that runs once a day and I have never been charged anything for it (other than my github membership). Should I expect to be charged for this?
There has to be a VC in this thread, go ahead and fund a GitHub competitor that offers a flat monthly(yearly?) rate.
Focus on the enterprise. Something like a 3000$ 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.
This seems totally unreasonable. How can they justify charging you based on usage when it's running on and using your resources?
I wonder if players like Depot could sidestep GHA by using webhooks instead of acting as a custom runner, in other words build their own compatible control plane. I guess it would probably break a lot of workflows.
What I'd really like to see is some new CI/CD systems though. Actions is garbage in multiple dimensions. Can't somebody do something clever and save us from this flaky insecure YAML hell?
That makes me genuinely curious about the internal hosted vs. self-hosted usage ratio they're seeing. I'd have guessed the bulk of the cost/volume was on hosted, but clearly that can't be the case
The way Github, Xamarin and other acquisitions have gone down, it is quite clear that the Satya charming phase is sadly gone.
We're microsoft. We don't care. We don't have to care, we're microsoft. Lock in? Embrace, expand, extinguish? Anti-competive? Anti-trust? We don't care. We don't have to care. Pay taxes? We don't have to pay taxes (https://www.propublica.org/article/irs-microsoft-audit-back-...). We're ... etc.
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.
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?