alt Hacker NewsGitHub Actions for self-hosted runners price increase postponed
Comments
> GitHub stated that it has canceled the price increase after reviewing developer feedback. It added that it will take time to listen to customers and partners.
I get the feeling they got the feedback that their runners are not as indispensable to developers as they thought and realized they would lose a significant amount of users. Now if only they would listen to the feedback about windows 11 and their forced copilot we might be onto something.
1. Announce price increase generating bad publicity.
2. Kill bad publicity with blog pretending to be understanding and taking on feedback while "pausing" the increase.
3. Implement price increase a few months later when the bad publicity wave is over, and its old news so wont generate new headlines.
Outside of work, I'm a very sporadic coder. On some side-projects where I'm using Actions, I'll have an inspired few days of progress followed by completely idle weeks/months/quarters.
Losing free Actions doesn't particularly bother me, and I have no issue with paying what is most likely a negligible amount, but I don't really want to have a credit card on file which could be charged some unbounded amount if somebody gets into my account. I've shut down my personal AWS for similar reasons.
Is there any way of me just loading up a one-time $20? That will probably last well into 2027, and give me the peace of mind that I can just let it run. If my account's compromised, or I misconfigure something that goes wild, I am perfectly happy to write off that amount and have my incredibly-low-stakes toy projects fail to build.
There's one thing I don't understand. Isn't GitHub action just "take a repo, do something with it, save something somewhere". So how is it different than writing a bash script that "clones the repo, do something with it, pushes the changes back"? If actions became paid feature, wouldn't that just generated myriads of show hn posts like "I recreated GitHub actions in xyz"?
this is a better link:
https://github.blog/changelog/2025-12-16-coming-soon-simpler...
from the tweet [1]:
"We’ve read your posts and heard your feedback.
1. We’re postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions to take time to re-evaluate our approach.
2. We are continuing to reduce hosted-runners prices by up to 39% on January 1, 2026.
We have real costs"
^ theres more in the actual tweet, but the preview that gets unfurled on discord cuts off there. That last lines a killer, poor olde microsoft
From the horses mouth as it were: https://resources.github.com/actions/2026-pricing-changes-fo...
The outcry against this move was much larger than Microsoft anticipated. While there is some logic for charging for self-hosted, it just doesn't make sense for the consumers.
Not gonna wait 30seconds to read the bloody article, when it says "5seconds ad".
Glad I moved to GitLab 7 years ago.
The utter rent-seeking audacity of charging by the minute for action runners you run on your own server...
Charge a flat fee per Action, sure. There is a tiny cost on GitHub's part associated with the API calls for starting and stopping, but if my build takes 8 hours on a self-hosted runner there is no more cost to GitHub than it taking 10 seconds.
That's the whole point of self-hosted runners.
Maybe there was more outrage elsewhere, but I was frankly confused at the seeming lack thereof here on Hacker News.
Just as cloud agnosticism means you should be able to bootstrap your infra in different clouds, that also includes your ci/cd. As a greybeard sysadmin, my advice is to start separating your ci/cd from the platforms you run on.
https://www.slingacademy.com/article/git-post-receive-hook-a...
Another of my tricks is to tie in your containerization there too, system-nspawn is what I'm using at the moment, but it can apply to others.
Who could've thought, really
My theory: Some manager's KPI is to increase the number of sold GitHub runner minutes. So they did some market research -- not enough to have a clear picture, but barely enough to be dangerous -- and found that some companies use self-hosted runners for cost reasons. So they deploy a two-pronged strategy: lower the cost of GitHub runners, and charge for the use of self-hosted runners, to incentivize switching.
This fails for several reasons that someone who actually uses the product might have intuited:
(a) For some use-cases, you can't switch to GitHub's runners. For us, it's a no-go for anything that touches our infrastructure.
(b) Switching CI providers isn't hard, we had to do it twice already. Granted, most of our CI logic is in a custom build script that you can run locally, and not in the proprietary YAML file. But to be honest, I'd recommend that sort of setup for any CI provider, as you always want the ability to debug things locally.
(c) GitHub Actions doesn't get the amount of love you'd expect from something billed as a "premium service". In fact, it often feels quite abandoned, barely kept working. Who knows what they're brewing internally, but they didn't coordinate this with a major feature announcement, and didn't rush to announce anything now that they got backlash, which leads me to believe they don't have anything major planned.
(d) Paying someone -- by the minute, no less -- to use my own infrastructure feels strange and greedy. GitHub has always had per-user pricing, which feels fair and predictable. If for some reason they need more money, they can always increase that price. The fact that they didn't do that leads me to believe this wasn't about cost per se. Hence the KPI theory I mentioned above: this wasn't well-coordinated with any bigger strategy.