Starting March 1, 2026, GitHub will introduce a new $0.002 per minute fee for self-hosted runner usage.
Posted by turniphat@reddit | programming | View on Reddit | 414 comments
MyStackOverflowed@reddit
The audacity to charge for SELF HOSTED compute
zzkj@reddit
Microsoft have only ever given stuff away with gritted teeth.
PotentialBat34@reddit
During his first years Satya earnestly gained my respect, and many people were like huh so MS is not that bad after all. Now they seem determined to undo that hard-earned legacy, kinda like how they ruined it during 2000s and 2010s.
the_bighi@reddit
That is a certainty of capitalism. Thing will go through enshittification.
KevinCarbonara@reddit
The last time we reversed enshittification, we had to build powerful, nation-wide unions
dmethvin@reddit
This time around, the billionaires don't even need Pinkertons. The feds will do it for them, no cost.
KevinCarbonara@reddit
"The feds" change dramatically with each administration. If you want them to behave differently, vote differently.
myhf@reddit
if you don't like the slavery party, you can simply vote for the megacorporation party
murderous_thumb@reddit
People seem to be missing the fact that the slavery party is also pro-megacorporation. So let's start with the megacorporation party, and pull it left.
PM_ME_DPRK_CANDIDS@reddit
Megacorp Democrats are losing control of their party to DSA/Socialist/Progressive types. vote in your local Democrat primaries.
CreationBlues@reddit
we love having 2 options: center-right and far right!
blazesquall@reddit
Yeah, they figured out how to get us to fund the very institutions designed to break our strikes and maintain our exploitation. Why would capitalists pay for private mercenaries when they can use the police and military to protect their profits on our dime?
crossctrl@reddit
Nice thing is we have competition. Sounds like a great opportunity for other services. Something turns to $hit, move on and support someone not M$.
yofuckreddit@reddit
Ah yes, communism has done such a good job leading the creation of software!
the_bighi@reddit
I agree. It really did.
Now join me in stopping capitalism and enshittification so we can all have better software.
One_Being7941@reddit
Cronyism. Caused by leftists. FTFY
PaintItPurple@reddit
Leftists caused Satya Nadella to make greedy decisions because of some nebulous concept of "cronyism"? That's just capitalism, man.
One_Being7941@reddit
His predecessor was Bill Gates bought in front of the justice department back in the day because Microsoft didn't have lobbyists. Oracle, Netscape and Sun did though.
PaintItPurple@reddit
You think Netscape and Sun were monopolies like Microsoft but got away with it thanks to lobbyists? That was not the case, and history had proven it by how those companies got stomped out of existence.
PotentialBat34@reddit
I don't know man, I mean maybe I am not that old (nearing 30) but never have I ever remember a time where I paid so much for goods and services yet received such less with subpar quality. It makes me feel like maybe conspiracy nutjobs who blamed everything on World Economic Forum and New World Order and all that jazz was up to something.
PaintItPurple@reddit
Why do you need a conspiracy to explain the results of bald-faced greed being carried out in the open? That's like seeing somebody get stabbed and theorizing that the person swinging the knife didn't stab anyone, and instead an unseen Rube Goldberg machine actually caused a second blade the exact same size as the knife to go in and then magically disappear just as the person was swinging their knife at the victim.
zackmedude@reddit
I am almost twice your age... and agree. Enshitifaction has reached new highs. From my vantage point, only way to break away from this is going back to the days of co-lo hosting or hybrid cloud. However, very few self hosted options are now available. And most of which cost just as much as cloudy versions....
ThisIsMyCouchAccount@reddit
I do not miss the days where my job as a programmer also included being some type of server admin. If I'm being honest - it was dangerous. I set up so many production servers with zero thought into anything other than getting the site to run.
At the same time I'll also never agree to my bosses decision to have to manage three containerized configurations because he wants to avoid vendor tie-in.
zackmedude@reddit
I OTOH maintain two - containerized scaffolding, and Debian package repos. Allows me to quickly deploy on hosted (physical or virtual environments and roll out as containers (deb pkg install in both cases). It's like never stopped being 2006 ;)
ThisIsMyCouchAccount@reddit
It's really the reasoning that bothers me. Not the result. I'm rarely annoyed by solutions that solve actual problems.
It's just unneeded in out case. We absolutely didn't need to go to the second provider and we are not leveraging anything it provides other than basic app hosting.
meltbox@reddit
“Just build it on the Azure, GCP, and AWS abstractions! I see no issue here.”
And this is why we now need tooling to in aggregate run tooling that preps environments. When I learned about terraform I wanted to cry.
All you need now is terraform, then ansible, then kubernetes, running docker, and finally below all this you can deploy your application. Elegance, truly. No unnecessary complexity here at all.
_BreakingGood_@reddit
It's because the US and much of the world has stopped giving a shit about enforcing anti-monopoly practices.
In the past, you couldn't enshittify too much, otherwise you'd open the market for competitors. Now, competitors are simply purchased and dismantled before they can make even the slightest rumble in the industry.
zackmedude@reddit
Yeah, I suppose. There were many more shitty options then and closed systems sucked just as much now as then, and so were the vendor lock ins... hmmmm crap, not much has changed
atehrani@reddit
The subscription model is more about locking in the customer to ensure they keep paying. Whereas when the customer had to only pay once, there was a lot of competition to entice the customer to purchase. Different incentive models.
Also the board and stockholders encourage enshittification. Driving up stock value does not mean providing customer benefit.
nshire@reddit
The difference is money isn't free anymore.
Interest-Desk@reddit
msft has been very cash positive for a really long time ..?
nshire@reddit
I'm talking about interest rates. They could previously borrow money for basically free to fund future development until the federal reserve had to increase rates due to inflation.
Interest-Desk@reddit
yea, msft (at least core) doesn’t borrow that much for its programmes, it mostly uses cash esp. for gh
KevinCarbonara@reddit
Oh, great. Is this a lead in to another one of those trickle-down economic arguments where you pretend that lowering interest rates is going to improve the industry for consumers?
_BreakingGood_@reddit
It was inevitable. The stock market demands that profit always increases. First, you do that by introducing new, innovative ideas and winning market share. When you're out of ideas, you start cutting costs. When you're out of costs to cut, you start raising prices.
What happens next? Well, that's the part we're finding out right now. What happens when the largest companies are out of ideas, can't cut any more costs, and consumer can't/won't accept any further price increases? How do you keep the line going up?
echoAnother@reddit
The next step is lobbying to mandate people to pay for your services and products.
Paradox@reddit
We already did that with the health insurance industry.
generateduser29128@reddit
The answer is obviously AI! /s
rpetre@reddit
Not sure if Microsoft invented it, but they surely perfected what's called the "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" tactic: enthusiastically join a community or technology or standard, add some proprietary quality-of-life extensions to it, and once they become a dominant player in that space, squeeze out the alternatives. It's both impressive and disgusting how often they'd pulled it off in several areas.
pheonixblade9@reddit
Microsoft is the poster child for "embrace, engulf, extinguish".
TooLateQ_Q@reddit
Took them a verry long time to gain trust. And threw it away within a year or 2
Beginning_Book_2382@reddit
'Trust is gained in drops and lost in buckets' as the old saying goes
therealhlmencken@reddit
Oh man I think it had a bounce back but that was despite everything satya did not because
RestInProcess@reddit
They need a good motive however you look at it. They’ve done a lot in the open source world, but the motive is selling Azure services and gaining a bigger user base. Right now they’re pushing for profitability, and selling you your own compute is one way to do that.
BeelzenefTV@reddit
this
agumonkey@reddit
sir, you're breathing air
fire_in_the_theater@reddit
that'll be $0.0001/L bro
jsebrech@reddit
That’s a steal for Perri-air!
alex-weej@reddit
tbf only for private lungs
hungryaliens@reddit
Sub to my onlylungs
sihat@reddit
I saw a youtube documentary/investigation about india's air recently.
The rich literally pay for unpolluted air, with filters everywhere, while the poor suffer from polluted air that is so bad. Little kids, have lungs as if they are 40 year old smokers.
Pollution laws in the states are changing for the worse. Combined with safety laws. With the occasional environmental disaster that negatively effects the health of locals.
And in Europe, the occasional environmental scandal, that effects the health of locals also happens. (Of some company doing stuff like that)
agumonkey@reddit
we're going total recall..
LegitimatePenis@reddit
Morpheus disagrees
smalltalker@reddit
How do the machines know how farts smell like?
SergioEduP@reddit
Morpheus makes a very good point.
agumonkey@reddit
morpheus slop
SmushBoy15@reddit
That’ll be 100% tariff the air blew in!
RoughSolution@reddit
Dude, the metadata is not free, someone need to foot the bill
bootstrapping_lad@reddit
If that's the reason, why is it charged per minute and not per build?
A row in a database is about the cheapest possible unit of cloud resources.
RoughSolution@reddit
Yeah, the logs are sent to GitHub, even with self hosted. I think the per minute thing is just an approximation of log processing and storage cost. The longer you run the more logs you push kind of thing.
susanthenerd@reddit
Nah. That would equate to about 86$ for a whole month. If inserting into a db costs so much something must be wrong
Interest-Desk@reddit
You could run a hefty Jenkins server for that money, and run more than one job at once too! (since it’s presumably per minute per job and not per minute across the entire repo or account)
jasminUwU6@reddit
Why even approximate when the actual data is trivial to measure?
Keavon@reddit
I imagine it's because usually logs are streamed as a function on time, so more time building approximately means more bandwidth needed for logs. And just to keep the connection active for the duration is small probably not free.
0xe1e10d68@reddit
All of this costs far less than they charge
scheppend@reddit
Well, that's how people make money
ryobiguy@reddit
It's simple: greed.
On the plus side, maybe people will try to optimize their build times.
the_TIGEEER@reddit
Or per metadata size like..
Athas@reddit
I have some GitHub actions that use self-hosted runners to submit jobs to a slurm queue for our compute cluster. The slurm waiting time (which can be hours when the cluster is loaded) is counted as running time at the GitHub actions level - that could be quite expensive (although my repositories are public, so it seems like I will not need to pay anything).
thatsnot_kawaii_bro@reddit
Ahh the poor multitrillion dollar company. However will they pay for this metadata while they're trying to shove copilot into everything?
joshbuddy@reddit
It's like a corkage fee :P
Interest-Desk@reddit
Except GitHub charge it per ml and not per bottle
LostCharmer@reddit
It's corkage xD
double-you@reddit
CherryLongjump1989@reddit
Sounds to me like they're asking third party vendors to start subsidizing GitHub's runners instead, since they're charging you the same price as using one of GitHub's own runners.
rgbhfg@reddit
They incur expenses on their end. The issue is they are bait and switching. They should have always been charging
0xe1e10d68@reddit
Yes, they incur expenses on their end. But not in a way that would justify per minute charges, especially in that order of magnitude…
SanityInAnarchy@reddit
Is 12 cents an hour a lot? Especially for something only run periodically?
CherryLongjump1989@reddit
Yes. They are charging you the same rate as using their control plane plus their hosted runner. So we know for a fact that it does not cost nearly that much for them to receive a couple events from an external host.
This is an anti-competitive move because you're going to have to pay this fee even if you're paying for services from a third party vendor that is not hosted on GitHub. For some of these other companies, this well add up to tens of millions of dollars across all of their customers - if not more.
Manbeardo@reddit
On AWS, 12 cents per hour gets you 2 VCPUs and 8GiB of RAM. It’s a lot.
manymoney2@reddit
And AWS is absudly expensive. 2 cents an hour can get you a dedicated server instead
Mustard_Dimension@reddit
Unless you have a large project which runs tests or builds in parallel across 20 runners in parallel with a dozen people making PRs and running deployments, it adds up extremely quickly.
BenjiSponge@reddit
And you're using proportionally more of the control plane. This makes perfect sense to me.
tj-horner@reddit
Yeah, I think a per-run charge would be reasonable. What you are really paying for is the job orchestration and dispatching, so that would make more sense than a per-minute charge.
enp2s0@reddit
Yeah per minute is actually insane. You're essentially just charged more the slower your own hardware is which is beyond stupid.
Per run makes sense because you're paying for the orchestration which happens once per run and isn't affected by how long the tasks actually take.
KevinCarbonara@reddit
Ohh I missed that. I assumed they were charging for their hosted runners. I mean I read it, I guess I just assumed that it couldn't possibly mean what it meant.
Acceptable-Web3874@reddit
Still, doesn't gh actions act as a command and control panel?
BadlyCamouflagedKiwi@reddit
What? So you host your own runner to get around the considerable limitations of their service, and now you have to pay for that privilege?
This doesn't sound like simpler pricing at all, in fact it's more complex because they charge for a thing they didn't before. I would really like something more sensible in the caching space, I assume that is deeply unlikely to actually happen but that is what I'd consider a "better experience".
Emeraldaes@reddit
Can you elaborate on limitations?
fishpen0@reddit
For us, it is that self-hosted runners inside our network can access resources that cannot be reached from the internet or a GH hosted runner. It also runs on CPU/GPU architectures MS does not provide and uses caching features that are not available in the GH side. We saved almost $15k last year implementing our own caching vs how GHA caches. For a sense of scale, we run ~500k minutes worth of runs per month with a team of only ~20 engineers and see savings like that with straightforward tweaks to the runners.
big_trike@reddit
You're either building something really complex or you have a small project written in nodejs.
roynoise@reddit
hehe.
DarkLordAzrael@reddit
Thats roughly 2h/developer/week in CI time. Not at all unreasonable for a mature project with good test coverage and static analysis.
over_clockwise@reddit
Curious how you're getting to 2h/dev/week? 500k/20 devs is 25k mins per dev per month?
DarkLordAzrael@reddit
My rough math was to assume 4 weeks or 20 days per month. I appear to have missed a 0, starting with 50k instead of 500k, and then quoted the daily as the weekly figure. 2h/dev/day would still make some sense but be a lot. 20 hours per day per dev is indeed wildly too much.
-Memnarch-@reddit
Get yourself Gitlab and set that up internally. We have that running as our backend including an environment for pipelines to do builds, tests and such.
fishpen0@reddit
I’ve run gitlab at other orgs. To some degree we’re stuck which is exactly what MS knew when they implemented this originally. GitHub has dramatically better seat pricing than gitlab at our seat volume (not big enough for Gitlabs good volume discounts) and if we switched it would cost more unfortunately. Plus the ~250k of dev time to have us rewrite every pipeline again (5-6 devs full time for a full quarter) would take years to amortize
-Memnarch-@reddit
Seat pricing? For an instance you host on your own server at your company?
I didn't know that switching from the Community Edition which has no seat limits, just some limit in functionality, to the Enterprice Edition would introduce per seat or rather something that scales so horrible.
fishpen0@reddit
Yeah. Even the self hosted version charges per user at premium and enterprise (ultimate) tier. It’s actually exactly the same price as the cloud version. Generally because of that when I roll it out at an org I recommend a hybrid approach of using the cloud version with self hosted runners instead of taking on the operational overhead of self hosting the whole thing
meunomemauricio@reddit
There's a limited amount of minutes you can run on GitHub Actions infra. It's something like 1000 minutes for free accounts, 3000 for the Team plans and 50000 for Enterprise
Working_Bunch_9211@reddit
Isn't it unlimited for open source?
TheAnchoredDucking@reddit
Isn't this just the included free amount of minutes, and you just have to pay past that point?
https://docs.github.com/en/billing/concepts/product-billing/github-actions#using-more-than-your-included-quota
BadlyCamouflagedKiwi@reddit
Debuggability sucks. CircleCI is much better for that.
Caching is super coarse grained, as I mentioned later on. Tired of this dumb 'encode a cache key in YAML and remember to update it' nonsense. Also really sucks that it's allotted per repo (I think there's something a month ago where you can now pay for more, which has been long coming).
I'd just like a CI system where they're focused on actually making the primitives of it work well, to make my builds be faster, not a bunch of features they can put on blogs.
Paradox@reddit
There are some primitives that used to be common place in CI systems, that everyone seems to have forgotten about. Circle, being old, supports them, but they barely mention them on their features pages.
Things like being able to SSH into a test run to see what the hell is going on, per-test tracking (and repeating only the failed tests!) and parallelism.
A decade ago I moved a team off Travis and onto a self-hosted TeamCity, because we could have TC autoscale AWS nodes and run tests faster, while not eating resources when idle. I've yet to see many test experiences better than that.
BadlyCamouflagedKiwi@reddit
Yeah, I'm just a bit sad that Circle seem very focused on new features which always seem completely irrelevant to me, they never post anything that makes me think "oh good, I can use that to make my builds faster".
Maybe depot.dev is that? But AFAIK they are only a hosted runner, so with this announcement I'd be charged for them coming and going.
Paradox@reddit
Believe it or not, but Azure devops does support parallelism, ssh, test analytics, and more. But you're just walking from one lions den to another.
kgalb2@reddit
Founder of Depot here. I'm disappointed by this change much like everyone here. The fact that this fee is being charged for ALL runners, self-hosted or not, is jaw dropping.
We're focused on making your builds faster AND cheaper. GitHub doesn't appear to care about either.
Yes, running on Depot GHA runners would be subject to this new control plane fee. But at least our runners are ultimately faster and don't do weird billing tricks like round builds up to the nearest minute like GitHub.
I'm always happy to answer questions or talk ideas! Feel free to DM me, respond here, or shoot me an email.
BadlyCamouflagedKiwi@reddit
Nice to hear from you!
I suppose even with this fee it's better if the task is significantly faster so I'm paying for less worker time. It's not very relevant at small scale when GHA is essentially just free, but you can reach the free limit remarkably quickly.
I'd not noticed the rounding trick you mentioned; I have found the interaction between runner minutes and caching really annoying (the cache sucks, the way they calculate the allowance for it sucks, and if it's not working your builds take longer so you spend more). Also the workers are super slow - there's definitely some value there when they're tracking wall clock minutes, but not all minutes of vCPU time are equal.
I think we might be needing an upgrade next year sometime, so will definitely be keeping Depot in mind!
jbmsf@reddit
It's slow. You can do way better if you run your own compute.
the_gnarts@reddit
“Simpler” as in: it’s simpler for Github to make a profit off of it.
m0nk37@reddit
Thats what monopolies do. Time for a replacement.
BadlyCamouflagedKiwi@reddit
I wouldn't say they're a monopoly, there are replacements (e.g. CircleCI, Cirrus CI, etc).
LLM-logs@reddit
is this going to be more sustainable path? https://docs.gitlab.com/ci/ci_cd_for_external_repos/github_integration/
CleverBunnyThief@reddit
They have already backtracked on this.
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1ppzbqx/github_walks_back_plan_to_charge_for_selfhosted/
Working_Bunch_9211@reddit
A remainder that vendorlock is bad
noninertialframe96@reddit
Is this a move to pay off the bill from AI investments?
SinghReddit@reddit
Charging for self-hosted runners felt backwards, but at least GitHub listened and paused. Hopefully the re-evaluation actually involves developers before another surprise announcement drops.GitHub clearly underestimated how sensitive CI pricing is. Even small per-minute fees can explode at scale, especially for teams optimizing builds with self-hosted runners.
SinghReddit@reddit
Charging for self-hosted runners felt backwards, but at least GitHub listened and paused. Hopefully the re-evaluation actually involves developers before another surprise announcement drops.
stipo42@reddit
Already started the conversation of leaving GitHub with my org
Wirbelwind@reddit
What are you looking at, Gitlab?
arbenowskee@reddit
Gitlab is far pricier than GitHub. It does offer more, but lowest tier is 20/month per person
drewsski@reddit
Both Gitlab CE and EE can be self hosted and not just the remote runners. We have been running CE in-house on bare metal for a 50+ dev/devOps team. Once the pipelines are set up, it's hustle free and billing free aside from the obvious server maintenance costs.
arbenowskee@reddit
I didn't know that. Tnx.
IgorGirkinStrelkov2@reddit
Teamcity + perforce + jira
stipo42@reddit
Yeah, it's come up quite a few times since Microsoft bought GitHub.
I've used it before and still use it for my personal projects and its great. The way they handle runners and pipelines is by far my preferred way of doing it.
gromain@reddit
At my company we are using Gitlab and as far as I can tell, everyone is happy with it.
TowerOutrageous5939@reddit
Something needs to pay for these AI costs
andrewvirts@reddit
Everything Microsoft owns goes to crap eventually
Worth_Trust_3825@reddit
I certainly hope that the people who argued that nothing bad will happen after microsoft acquires github are now enjoying their lunch.
lacronicus@reddit
I don't understand. GH actions didn't exist until the MS acquisition.
Worth_Trust_3825@reddit
Continue feigning ignorance.
bergice@reddit
Laughs in GitLab/Forgejo.
Worth_Trust_3825@reddit
yeah ive been using gitlab since 2015
Storm-BE@reddit
Looks like they're aborting the selfhosted worker tax for now: https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/182186
renrutal@reddit
Lol, the company I work for just moved from self-hosted to GitHub and GHA this year. And IBM just bought one of the cloud providers.
Repulsive-Hurry8172@reddit
I work for a startup that self hosted this year, thinking they'd be able to save with self hosting the runners.
supermitsuba@reddit
Good thing Gitea allows me to self host for free.
ElusiveGuy@reddit
As someone who currently uses GitLab (mostly in a company but also some personal), is there an advantage to Gitea or is it much the same? Is there anything that would make it worth migrating?
supermitsuba@reddit
Gitea started out as a github clone. For my homelab, it does a lot of heavy lifting like ci/cd process with actions. It's on my machine so no one is taking that. Sounds like forgejo is the successor of the project after it was bought by another company.
The only thing to draw you would be self hosting and maybe the ci/cd pipeline included
ElusiveGuy@reddit
Ah okay, in that case it sounds like much of what GitLab does for us already, but I'll keep it in mind in case this one goes down the drain too.
dividebyzero14@reddit
Try Forgejo, the actively developed community fork. Gitea is now legacy.
SalamiArmi@reddit
Wait when did gitea get abandoned? Should I not me using it any longer?
dividebyzero14@reddit
The for-profit company that owns the 'Gitea' name tried to seize control of the project and monetize it. The community that actively develops it forked to a new name, Forgejo, that is owned by the Codeberg nonprofit, whose mission is maintaining the openness of free software.
Next time you would update your Gitea install, migrate to Forgejo instead. They have a migration guide.
TwilightOldTimer@reddit
Only if its below a certain version of gitea, they stopped updating their migration system after a period of time. It's been a while so if you're running a latest version of gitea (within the last like 6 months i think), you're stuck doing it all manually.
Interest-Desk@reddit
Technically Forejo is independent, iirc it doesn’t have its own legal organisation so links with Codeberg for a few things. Forejo, at least the last time I checked, has no trademarks.
In practice they’re both under the same umbrella, since most people involved in one are also at least a little involved in the other.
OneInACrowd@reddit
this announcement made me glad I invested the time in setting up forgejo 6 months ago
thegreatpotatogod@reddit
Yep, my company switched to Forgejo, no need to pay a cent or worry about running out of runner-minutes halfway through the month, unlike with GitHub!
supermitsuba@reddit
Right on, thanks for the tip!
CaptainStack@reddit
There's also Codeberg for folks looking for a fully free and open source community governed git instance they don't need to self host.
axonxorz@reddit
Possibly in people's minds due to Zig's recent move
crossctrl@reddit
Django Allauth moved to Codeberg a year ago. Interesting the pushback in the comments. Probably feeling okay about it now.
https://www.reddit.com/r/django/comments/1fdq4rq/djangoallauth_has_been_moved_over_from_microsoft/
scavno@reddit
Curious. How do they cover their cost of infra?
AlexVie@reddit
Donations, mostly. Codeberg is a German e.V. (basically a registered association on a non-profit base).
Their resources are certainly limited, CI isn't comparable with what you get at GH or Gitlab. The git frontent (forgejo, a gitea fork) is pretty good.
Silveress_Golden@reddit
Not sure about codeberg but for forgejo the ci is fully compatable with gh actions
CaptainStack@reddit
They are funded through membership dues, which is how you become a part of their community governance board, and donations but all of their services are free.
piesou@reddit
How easy is it to run/maintain? I suppose it's a docker container with a db connection and volume mount?
deja-roo@reddit
I run Gitea at home. Once you get over the learning curve it's pretty straightforward. You docker compose up the Gitea stack, which starts up postgres database too, and do your normal configuration through a web interface.
Your compute in the build pipelines is limited to how many runner containers you want to add in the docker compose file. Then you need to register each of the runners with Gitea and everything past that is pretty much automagic. Queue up a job and it farms it out to the runner. Gitea uses Github actions (basically) so you can pretty much drop it in as a replacement.
nikomo@reddit
It's forked up-to-date Gogs, so dead-simple. If you're not looking at dealing with a huge amount of users, just use SQLite.
Here's the compose file I have deployed as a stack with Portainer:
supermitsuba@reddit
Same as github actions. Its just a glorified bash script to run on merge. For my usecases, it works.
notdedicated@reddit
For now :( bitbucket made this change 2 weeks ago, now GH, soon gitlab etc etc
FateOfNations@reddit
Unlike GitHub and Bitbucket, Gitea is open source.
OhMySBI@reddit
Being Open Source doesn't equate being a free service. GitLab CE is also open source. You're still going to have to host it somewhere.
PaddiM8@reddit
Well this is literally about self-hosted runners so
OhMySBI@reddit
As other comments have mentioned in enough detail, hosting your own git service is a whole other beast than hosting some runners. These changes aren't aimed at solo devs. Organisations aren't just going to pull out on a whim and switch over to something else in the blink of an eye. Hell, I know my company won't because it'd be ridiculous.
PaddiM8@reddit
Hosting your own git service is the most normal thing ever and was the norm before GitHub became popular. I have worked at a company that hosted their own.
mamwybejane@reddit
If you’re already self hosting runners, why not self host gitlab or similar?
blisteringbarnacles7@reddit
It’s much more effort to host Gitlab than a runner.
mamwybejane@reddit
Does running another docker compose take more effort from you?
VerifiedMyEmail@reddit
If you need docker-in-docker in your gitlab-ci.yml file... yes.
dr1fter@reddit
I played this game at home recently. Setting up a self-hosted gitlab isn't miserable but it's more work than you're making it out to be.
Nevertheless, of course this fee structure is just all the more reason to self-host gitlab.
EntroperZero@reddit
But upgrading a self-hosted gitlab, now THAT's miserable.
AcidShAwk@reddit
As a one man team that runs his own Gitlab on $10 a month hardware at DO. Not really.
abandonplanetearth@reddit
Cool so as a one man team you get to skip all the hard problems with self hosting.
chucker23n@reddit
Yes, really. It took us several person-weeks (and counting) to migrate Azure DevOps Server to GitHub Enterprise Server, and we’re a fairly small team.
ClassicPart@reddit
As a one-man football team it’s easy to put a shot into the open, keeper-less net.
Wait, why does this suddenly become harder when you add more players? Why is this goalkeeper suddenly introducing friction to my workflow?!
crysisnotaverted@reddit
Well, no shit, right?
_predator_@reddit
Now try supporting it for an entire organisation.
coolcosmos@reddit
It's always easy when it's a one man team. It's not comparable to running a production service used by others in all sorts of ways at all sorts of time.
ffiw@reddit
Wrong, you can choose to self host gitlab runner only, which isn't that hard.
dr1fter@reddit
That sounds like a good middle ground if you need something equivalent right away. Personally, if I'd been burnt once and needed to switch, I'd be looking at how to switch off that kind of model once-and-for-all. But a self-hosted runner is a good start that might make it easier to finish the job (hopefully sooner than later).
ffiw@reddit
it's good to be cautious. but github and gitlab business models are entirely different. if they ever make self hosted runner not free, they first have to stop contributing to oss version of their product which I don't think will happen as long as they are in 2nd position.
dr1fter@reddit
I still think, if you're the kind of person/business who will invest in making the switch instead of just paying this cost to GitHub, you're better served by something you know you can manage in perpetuity. You already paid (at least in "time") to get started on GitHub, and now you'll do it again to switch? How many more times will you have to migrate? Pay the price of lock-in or learn your lesson, those are your only choices.
ffiw@reddit
yes, you are right.
lifeequalsfalse@reddit
*It's much more effort to host gitlab and a runner than just a runner. Runner setup is a huge pita
SikhGamer@reddit
Self hosting runners is like 1/10 skill level, self hosting GitLab/GitHub is much more involved. It can require an entire team of people. We have both; and the self hosted GitHub needs an entire team.
lacronicus@reddit
Because if my janky, 8 year old macbook fails while I'm using it as a self-hosted runner, it's fine.
If it fails while im using it to host my orgs code repositories, we're all fucked.
peetabear@reddit
Doesn't gitlab have self hosted runners?
Worth_Trust_3825@reddit
It does. it's one of the oldest ci+git integrated platforms in the market.
AdvancedSandwiches@reddit
I can confirm that it does. I use them all the time.
o5mfiHTNsH748KVq@reddit
GitHub is much more than Actions.
Farados55@reddit
LLVM has plenty of self-hosted bots but lives on GitHub.
ouaibou@reddit
My GitHub Actions bill will go from $0 to over $700 per month using some self-hosted runners that run 24/7.
That’s a pretty depressing realization. GitHub Actions is great, but this new pricing for self-hosted runners makes it hard to justify staying. At this point, I no longer feel I can trust GitHub as a long-term platform.
pragmojo@reddit
What's the use-case for a runner that's running 24/7?
ouaibou@reddit
Crawling, continuous datasets building, etc.
coolbho3k@reddit
This was a purely business decision, and it was because services like Blacksmith and Depot were eating their lunch.
These services host managed self-hosted runners, charge exactly half Github does for runners, use faster compute, and switching is trivial (one find and replace line per job).
Instead of competing properly on price and performance, Github chose to go the anticompetitive route and simply add an artificial price hike to self-hosted runners.
Leading_Pay4635@reddit
They will unfortunately, continue to increase their revenue/profit even at the expense of lost customers from this change.
FlorpCorp@reddit
God forbid we have some healthy competition.
iamdestroyerofworlds@reddit
The enshittification of everything continues.
We're firmly in the enshittocene.
Nasuadax@reddit
github was bought by microsoft right? right!
rokd@reddit
Everyone called it out when MS bought Github, and then they kinda did actually make it better after a while, and now we're getting to the part where they're really going to start getting their money back. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
standing_artisan@reddit
Competition is always good for consumers.
surya_oruganti@reddit
With these changes, three things hold:
Services like WarpBuild (I'm the founder) are still cheaper than GitHub hosted runners, even after including the $0.002/min self-hosting tax.
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!
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.
pataoAoC@reddit
Nice! How does Warpbuild compare to e.g. Depot?
surya_oruganti@reddit
A few differences: - We run baremetal amd64 hosts with high single-core performance as that is most important for build-test-type workloads predominant in CI. They have directly attached nvme drives for max performance. - We run arm64 instances from aws because they are the highest performance arm instances (only behind apple silicon). - We support macos on M4 pros - We support a BYOC model where you can connect your aws/gcp/azure accounts where we serve as the orchestrator and not as the infra provider. - We support all the other essential features that other providers do and generally have an equivalent, if not richer, set of capabilities. - We don't charge any "subscription fee". - We raised lower money and did fewer sponsored marketing campaigns (:
Interest-Desk@reddit
Out of curiosity, as someone who only half “gets” hyperscale cloud, what’s the advantage to BYOC? So that way an organisation can keep the build (logs, resources, secrets) all within their virtual perimeter and give you a ‘visitors pass’?
surya_oruganti@reddit
Precisely. There are other adjacent benefits like eliminating data transfer fees, better resource access control and permissions etc.
13steinj@reddit
Assume I am dumb here, you mean because these services host runners at better performance / less price / both?
I get charging a fee for what Blacksmith and Depot are doing, do Blacksmith and Depot, hell, there are software licensing structures that let you use it free if you're an organization, but if all you do is re-sell the product, need a different (and expensive license).
But some organizations completely self-host runners on their own infrastructure for IP protection / compliance reasons, and this decision screws those individuals. Some people on my team wanted to switch to GH Actions, and now we... can't.
I think it was a dumb idea anyway, I don't consider yaml-based CI a good thing, and GH Actions always seemed to fit a subset of all our CI needs. But now, can't fit any of the needs.
_BreakingGood_@reddit
The marketing speak on these announcements always sends me up a wall.
Eyes rolled out of my head at justifying this as "simpler pricing"
bawiddah@reddit
Half of marketing is a company telling you what to think about a given topic.
Fewer staff? We're improving the experience. Lower quality? We're focusing on reliability. Increased price? We're delivering greater value.
It's frustratingly effective, too.
brogam3@reddit
the reason this stuff is effective is because most cannot believe how people are psychotically willing to lie to your face. I made that mistake for the longest time in my life. It's too shocking to believe when you yourself are a decent, honest person. A person/company/friend will literally say one thing for a decade but in their heart believe and do the exact opposite later. Unbelievable, who would be so spineless, who would risk becoming my hated enemy over so little? Well, it turns out that this world is filled with psycho people who see nothing wrong with this behavior.
MartY212@reddit
Treating people without inherent trust is a pretty bleak alternative though. We just have to look past this BS when it comes to corporations.
CreationBlues@reddit
why would anyone care about your ire. "risk becoming my hated enemy" get checked for middle school syndrome bro. Chuunibyou.
InsurmountableMind@reddit
Most people never become self-aware. And a lot who do won't care. Genuinely good people are rare.
hardboiledhank@reddit
Sir this is a Wendys
/s
I agree with you
i8noodles@reddit
i always found the greater value arguments weird. how do u say it gives greater value when u offer the same thing but at a higher price. it is literally worst value.
the only case u can really say that is if u add a feature that is legitimately useful
bawiddah@reddit
Greater value for them? :P
zombiecalypse@reddit
It's not all that effective at telling people what to think, but it is quite effective at telling people what to think about. If you say "we're delivering greater value" but you're shipping the same crap, people will actually get annoyed and probably more so than if you hadn't said anything. If you say the same thing in an announcement on a price hike and bundle it with a small feature release, your customers are more likely to focus on that instead of the prices.
tRfalcore@reddit
I was on an old verizon plan, worked perfectly fine, they kept hounding me to switch to "my plan" for a better experience. It's the same fucking thing for the same price. Which I guess I'm not too upset about but still
iamapizza@reddit
A very common example I often see: companies to roll out a product and call it beautiful. That's literally them telling us what to think, and treating us like utter morons. Definitely agree that it works... beautifully.
twigboy@reddit
It's the same as the "new recipe!" label on any snack box
Always ends up being shrinkflation or cheapening of ingredients
spilk@reddit
I'll eat my own dick the day Microsoft ever has "simpler" pricing for anything. I want to jump out the window any time i'm asked to figure out how they charge for anything.
tofagerl@reddit
Price: Whatcha got?!
BenjiSponge@reddit
I don't think this is anti-competitive behavior, and I'll justify it through an imperfect restaurant metaphor.
GitHub at the moment is like a restaurant that lets anyone come in and use their silverware and washes it after. Self-hosted runners like Blacksmith and Depot are restaurants next door who offer a better menu at cheaper prices, but they don't have silverware or dishwashers; they just tell people to go next door and borrow silverware each time. GitHub actually has encouraged this because it gets people in the door and they think they can upsell you to at least buy an appetizer (which does work, often).
Starting to charge money for the silverware is a little greedy but entirely reasonable. But, more than that, it's a signal that they're making silverware rental (in this case, the CI/CD control plane) a standalone, successful part of their business. The solution everyone wants is for GitHub to start offering silverware by the door so you don't have to walk in and be upsold. They can't do that if the silverware is free.
So it's the opposite of vertical integration, and it seems like a signal to me that they're investing in GitHub actions as merely a CI/CD system that is profitable on its own without trying to sell their (terrible) compute workers.
Catenane@reddit
Everything about your metaphor is stupid. Here's a better metaphor. The restaurant wants to sell you silverware with your delivery order. You already have silverware at home, so you say no thank you. The restaurant charges you a "silverware service convenience fee" for choosing not to buy silverware you don't need at a price that's already stupidly expensive.
BenjiSponge@reddit
If you don't use GitHub actions at all, you don't pay a fee. This is a fee for using GitHub actions but not their runners. "Silverware at home" would be something like Jenkins or CircleCI.
nicholashairs@reddit
Despite the down votes this isn't a bad analogy.
I don't like this being done, but I don't think your analysis is particularly wrong.
Firecracker048@reddit
So instead of improving their product, they are just price hiking?
Venthe@reddit
So, you are implying that their decision will only help their competition? Because your line of reasoning points to GH shooting themselves in the foot in favour of Blacksmith/depot
TheSameTrain@reddit
I think what they're saying is those services underlying architecture would be using self hosted runners. So either blacksmith & depot start eating the cost or have to raise their own prices to compensate
JPJackPott@reddit
It’s just going to encourage these platforms to offer a fire and forget model that uses GitHub’s APIs to post back status rather than driving it from GH self hosted runner engine.
BenjiSponge@reddit
This would be a CI/CD system like Jenkins or CircleCI. GitHub probably will not mind you using this; it was around before GitHub actions. They're just now charging a bit for using GitHub actions as purely a CI/CD system, which in my humble opinion is entirely reasonable.
dagbrown@reddit
It’s almost like GitHub is owned my Microsoft or something crazy like that.
Outlandishness-Motor@reddit
We use Depot and can’t recommend it enough. Putting aside the compute cost, they have much better optimized Action Cache performance as well as much better IO than any of the hosted stuff Github provides.
Ironically the process of using Github hosted runners for sizes larger than ubuntu-latest is simpler on Depot than natively from Github. Kind of insane how that’s possible.
Knavy2@reddit
This resonates with me. I run a sharded build setup and the math gets expensive fast.
**My configuration:**
- 16 self-hosted runners (\~$48/month VPS)
- Each build is sharded across all 16 runners
- \~30 min per runner per build
- 80-160 builds/month
**The calculation:**
- Per build: 16 runners × 30 min = 480 compute-minutes
- Low: 80 builds × 480 min = 38,400 min - 2,000 free = 36,400 × $0.002 = **$72.80/month**
- High: 160 builds × 480 min = 76,800 min - 2,000 free = 74,800 × $0.002 = **$149.60/month**
So I'm looking at potentially tripling my CI/CD costs.
**What's particularly interesting:**
For self-hosted runners, GitHub provides orchestration (job queue, API coordination) but not the actual infrastructure—that's my hardware, storage, and bandwidth.
Per-minute pricing makes sense for GitHub-hosted where they provide everything. For self-hosted, their costs are more fixed (orchestration overhead) rather than scaling linearly with runtime. The pricing model feels misaligned with the actual cost structure.
**The timing is noteworthy:**
- January 2026: 39% reduction in GitHub-hosted runner costs
- March 2026: New charges for self-hosted
I can see how this makes managed self-hosted services like Blacksmith and Depot (that you mentioned) less economically attractive relative to GitHub-hosted runners.
**For regulated industries:** Organizations with compliance requirements (HIPAA, data sovereignty, air-gapped networks) can't easily switch to GitHub-hosted. They're somewhat locked into the new pricing.
**Evaluating alternatives:**
- **Gitea Actions** (claims GitHub Actions compatibility)
- **Forgejo Actions** (community fork)
Has anyone evaluated these for sharded build workloads?
Full analysis with cost breakdown: https://blog.aiaugmentedsoftwaredevelopment.com/posts/github-self-hosted-runner-pricing/
Trying to decide if this is worth reconsidering platform choices or just the cost of doing business.
preludeoflight@reddit
“Cost of doing business”? Big words for a big ole GPT generated post.
FlyingBishop@reddit
GitHub Actions is basically just rebranded Azure Pipelines 2.0. The pricing is very similar.
jbmsf@reddit
Well now I just want to look at these other solutions.
I already did the hard work to run actions on our own compute. You think the switching cost is going to stop me?
MooseBoys@reddit
In what world is charging more for something anti-competitive? Charging less for something, especially below cost in an effort to bankrupt competition, is anti-competitive.
coolbho3k@reddit
You’re confusing "predatory pricing" with "anticompetitive behavior." They’re not the same thing. Anticompetitive behavior isn’t limited to selling below cost.
GitHub both controls the Actions platform *and* competes with these third-party runner providers. When a dominant platform raises the cost of using competing services without a cost justification, that’s classic anticompetitive behavior. They've used their dominance to raise their rivals' costs arbitrarily to benefit themselves.
GitHub didn’t lower prices, improve performance, or compete on merit:
They likely cannot compete on costs or merit because they're probably chained to whatever massive amount of Azure compute already budgeted to them. Smaller rivals have an advantage here because they can scale out compute to demand more gradually.
They changed platform pricing in a way that selectively penalizes users who don’t use GitHub-hosted runners, even though managed self-hosted runners are currently cheaper and faster.
axonxorz@reddit
A form of rent-seeking
MooseBoys@reddit
I didn't realize that self-hosted runners were using a competing product. This does indeed sound anti-competitive. Especially if the "per minute" usage is just to trigger the tasks and doesn't include local runtime, they can't possibly be making any significant money off of this, so it seems purely like they are deliberately adding friction.
SwagFartUnicorn@reddit
In this case it is, because they are making their competition not a viable option.
They offer a service for a fee or you can “self-host”/get the service from a different provider for a better price/perf proposition. Instead of improving their own offering they are adding an arbitrary fee if you opt to use their competitors services.
someonesaveus@reddit
It seems to me that folks love to be outraged by such changes but are often not impacted. For those of you here are you actually affected by it? How?
Reading the actual update I suspect an incredibly small amount of users will be impacted by this but I’d be curious to see what the reality is.
Big_Combination9890@reddit
Macrocrap continuing on the path to constant enshittification of everything they touch.
thelehmanlip@reddit
At least they're charging less for their runners. i want to get off our damned self hosted runners that suck so maybe this will convince our team.
there is SOME amount of compute that github still needs to do for managing a connection to a third party machine, so charging something for it makes some amount of sense to me.
but overall yeah this is still dumb.
Worth_Trust_3825@reddit
you're the one responsible to make them not suck. it's in the name - self hosted. you manage it yourself.
thelehmanlip@reddit
yes, correct, my infrastructure team does suck. and thats what makes my servers suck. lol. not up to me personally
surya_oruganti@reddit
We do this at WarpBuild (I'm the founder). Even after the $0.002/min self hosting tax, we are cheaper. Plus, we are way faster so you'll be consuming fewer minutes anyway. I'd love for you to give us a try.
thelehmanlip@reddit
i'll take a look, thanks!
XeNoGeaR52@reddit
Let's all switch to Forgejo
neppo95@reddit
In other news: A large amount of github users are switching to alternatives.
Charging for something that isn't even theirs. I'd love a lawyers opinion on this.
liamraystanley@reddit
Except even when using self-hosted runners, you're still using a huge portion of their infrastructure, previously for free? Orchestration, networking, storage (logs), etc.
neppo95@reddit
"Huge portion"? Sure, there is some usage. Around the same as just browsing github, which is pretty much none at all.
not_a_novel_account@reddit
There's literally nothing on the market which offers a similar SaaS control plane for free with unlimited self-hosted runners.
If you want the free solution, you host your own control plane.
neppo95@reddit
Weird, GitLab does have exactly that.
pragmojo@reddit
inb4 VSCode starts charging for pushing to repos not hosted on github when using the built-in version control gui
eracodes@reddit
https://forgejo.org/
this may be of some interest if you're already self-hosting runners
BotOrHumanoid@reddit
Why choose forgejo over gitea now that’s its an hard fork?
eracodes@reddit
https://forgejo.org/compare-to-gitea/
BotOrHumanoid@reddit
Thanks. But I’ve read it and there’s no complete list of differences.
No there isn’t. So I’m curious if anyone have an opinion or experience using both.
craigrileyuk@reddit
The main difference is philosophy at present. Gitea is controlled by a for-profit company and will inevitably follow the same road of enshittification.
keremimo@reddit
We use this. We were just using the runners but I guess I’ll nudge our lead to make the full leap :)
menckenjr@reddit
enshittification
pragmojo@reddit
EEE
__konrad@reddit
EEEE - Embrace, extend, enshitify, extinguish
Eosis@reddit
Yes! Exactly this.
craigrileyuk@reddit
Didn't take long for the enshittification to begin after the AI department took over.
CrazySouthernMonkey@reddit
i don’t understand. Are they charging for polling their servers from time to time?
BenjiSponge@reddit
They're charging for the control plane and orchestration features that has previously been included for free. It's substantially more than "polling their servers from time to time". You can implement your own CI/CD system that just watches your GitHub for changes and reacts accordingly if you really want.
Ja_win@reddit
Wdym by control plane and polling? GitHub actions uses Webhooks to trigger. It's not a continuously running process.
It's super straightforward and not complex at all.
BenjiSponge@reddit
The "actions" section of the GitHub website showing the status of actions and runners, logs, etc. is essentially a fully featured SaaS offering. It's backed by databases which store your run history and automatically call the runners based on the webhooks. It uses straightforward webhooks (like any web software product), which use compute time, as well as storing your logs, serving the frontend, updating the statuses of PRs and calling integrations, etc. Whether you think it's complex doesn't really factor into it.
If you wanted, you could never touch the "actions" feature of GitHub and just integrate another CI/CD solution which handles the webhooks and offers a control plane (dashboard with actions statuses).
(I didn't say "polling", the comment I responded to did)
CrazySouthernMonkey@reddit
Thanks for answering. My mental model was the Gitlab Runner architecture. One selfhosts a gitlab runner instance that polls (updates) the state of the current git repository periodically. If it finds changes the runner executes the ci-cd pipeline. In this case, all code including the pipeline is self hosted. The runner only polls the upstream git server.
L0rdenglish@reddit
you forgot to mention one of the downsides of jenkins: it's jenkins
utkarsh_aryan@reddit
Microsoft being Microsoft 😐
vanstinator@reddit
While I'm not thrilled with this change, I think it's disingenuous to suggest that Github has no right to collect a fee when it's their systems orchestrating the CI pipeline, streaming back logs from the self hosted runners, etc. It's not like running 100% of your jobs on self hosted runners means Github has 0 compute costs of their own.
WhitelabelDnB@reddit
Yeah. It's a bit much to suggest that they incur no cost for offering this service. $0.002 is a tiny amount. It's $80 ish if you have an action running 24/7 for a whole month.
This post also conveniently avoids the other headline in the article: they are reducing the cost of cloud hosted runners. For our enterprise, the benefits of that are going to outweigh the cost of our self hosted actions, to the point where the comparison is silly.
Big_Tomatillo_987@reddit
Thanks for actually reading the article!
What jobs are people running on self hosted runners 24/7, that require integration with Github Actions? Would it ruin the DevX to just have the server do its thing?
OffbeatDrizzle@reddit
and for us it's not... so what's your point? "it doesn't affect me so therefore it's ok"
WhitelabelDnB@reddit
Less that and more that they're providing a service and it's reasonable to charge for it.
PlaidDragon@reddit
Maybe you could start to make this argument if the they weren't charging the same price as their smallest runner.
babige@reddit
Has anyone built an opensource github yet?
Big_Tomatillo_987@reddit
I've lost count of the open source code hosting wrappers over Git I stumble across, whenever checking out an open source dependency that I notice isn't on Github. You just have to host them for free, and take responsibility for your own back ups etc
j4vmc@reddit
There are multiple alternatives for GitHub as open source.
ECrispy@reddit
any bets when Github will start charging for private repos?
free private repos was one of the big draws of MS buying Github.
eracodes@reddit
charging? probably not
training language models on all that juicy data, however...
pragmojo@reddit
oh they have been doing that for years
sudosussudio@reddit
I’m worried they’ll start charging for github pages where I host a bunch of my retro gaming stuff
mshiltonj@reddit
That's a great way to enhance shareholder value! Thanks for the idea!
Blood-PawWerewolf@reddit
That’s definitely down the line
MrStricty@reddit
This smells like Microsoft.
cesarbiods@reddit
It reeks! I fucking hate how they are slowly eshittefying GitHub.
rokd@reddit
Everyone called it out when MS bought Github, and then they kinda did actually make it better, adding features and whatnot, GHA is not actually a horrible product. But now we're getting to the part where they're really going to start getting their money back. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
Maybe we'll see another surge to GitLab again. I literally just set up ARC last night for my own Github, but if I'm now going to be charged to do that, then I'm going to swap over to Gitlab, set up my own runners there. Although, they're now in talks to get bought by DataDog, so... Yeah, enshittification of everything continues.
Interest-Desk@reddit
GitLab feels like a better product than gh, but its pricing is ridiculous. https://about.gitlab.com/pricing/ It charges more than GitHub Enterprise for its standard team plan. And I’m pretty sure its enterprise plan was $99 per user per month before they switched to “contact us” (ie we’ll squeeze as much as we can).
If GL is bought by Datadog, this will only get worse. The product will probably start to suffer then.
Sirz_Benjie@reddit
Oh I sincerely hope that Gitlab isn't bought by Datadog. I really dislike them. Did you see the PEP they put forward? Datadog gives off the impression of being pretty corporate-biased and deaf to the communities they interact with.
Here's the example that first made me think negatively of them: A PEP that they sponsored
The first discuss about it, which went about as awful as you would expect: https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-752-package-repository-namespaces/61227
And a second discuss, which went even worse: https://discuss.python.org/t/pep-755-implicit-namespace-policy-for-pypi/63191
(Note they're all professional).
I really dislike Datadog. I hope that they have corrected course since these instances, but I am jaded enough to doubt so.
HavicDev@reddit
This is why I always scoff when I read "Microsoft has changed!!" comments. Sooner or later, theyre gonna do what Microsoft does best.
ItIsTooMuchForMe@reddit
Ms never changes
AASB2000@reddit
I've never once saw a single comment in the last decade saying Microsoft has changed
HavicDev@reddit
Oh, okay. Then I guess I imagined the comments I read, you're, of course, the authority on everything everyone else reads.
Pretend-Guide-8664@reddit
You sound delightful
HavicDev@reddit
I’d rather be me than the other guy who thinks the world revolves around his experience or you.
AASB2000@reddit
Take your Latuda buddy, you've imagined an entire scenario in your head
nanomanx2@reddit
That's roughly 85$ per month just for licencing a service they introduced themselves. Why would you do that? Don't people could just switch to self hosting again? Why do we need GitHub? As if there was such a lack of Tools for CI/CD and Code-Versioning.
Athas@reddit
Note that runners for public repositories remain free, so the impact of this may be limited for most people. I don't think I even have runners at all for my few private repositories.
JustLTU@reddit
I'm not sure random hobbyists are the target here.
Athas@reddit
I'm not sure whether I am random, but I am a research scientist, and all my academic work makes use of public repositories and both self-hosted and GitHub-hosted runners. I think this is fairly common among academics.
ThisRedditPostIsMine@reddit
I'm an academic too and I have both private and public repos, and have used self hosted runners as well. The GH provided runners are simply too slow to build large C++ codebases efficiently.
With this change I will definitely be moving all of my work to Codeberg and seeing if my lab will self-host a Forgejo or Gitlab instance.
JustLTU@reddit
Fair enough. I imagine the ones hit by this the most will be the thousands of private companies hosting their reoos on github.
A company I worked at had hundreds of repos on github, thousands of jobs running constantly, mostly on self hosted runners.
The current company just self hosts gitlab.
Farados55@reddit
There are plenty of enterprise and larger orgs that probably use Github to host their proprietary codebases.
HavicDev@reddit
Yes, we are one of those enterprises. But, we are a Microsoft partner so the company will eat it up and convince themselves it is a good thing.
zacker150@reddit
If you use GitHub hosted runners, this is a very good thing. 31% drop in prices.
fukijama@reddit
zip file backups work just fine here
beyphy@reddit
Even for orgs that will need to pay, the impact will likely still be small. With their current pricing, even if you ran a pipline for every minute in an entire day, the total cost would be less than $3. And most companies are likely running their pipelines daily for far less time than that.
xome@reddit
Organizations do
Athas@reddit
I would not be surprised, but where do you see this? The press release states:
I don't see anything about organisations.
Weak-Career-1017@reddit
You've clearly misread the parent comment.
Athas@reddit
Oh, I see, so it is not "organization" in the GitHub sense? I did misunderstand that. I do work for an "organization" (a big and old one too), which also has a GitHub "organization", and since most of our repositories are public (and the closed ones we have do not use runners), I hope this will not affect us.
UpsetKoalaBear@reddit
It hits GitHub Enterprise Cloud though, so a lot of orgs will be affected by this especially if you use services like AWS CodeBuild.
Potato-9@reddit
Companies once again actively devaluing the time we spend proactively using their shit. They let me into the something they are doing anyway (action control plane) and I spend my time working with their docs and bringing the compute.
A. They get free insights into what people actually want from their services but aren't offering. B. We gain appreciation for what the hosted runners are hosting.
This is rent seeking not service providing :/
tibbe@reddit
So \~$1050/year for every self-hosted runner (our Mac Minis run roughly 24/7). Basically the price of a new computer, every year.
PoisnFang@reddit
BotOrHumanoid@reddit
So my private repos on GitHub now doesn’t have free actions anymore?
PoisnFang@reddit
They still have the free tier limits
Techman-@reddit
What an insane, asinine change. People are often using their own hardware for personal or compliance purposes. Charging them an anti-competitive fee to use their own stuff is a great incentive to stop using GitHub Actions altogether.
liamraystanley@reddit
Except you're not just using your own hardware when you're using self-hosted runners. Truly running your own hardware would be running the entire git CI solution yourself, including the orchestration, storage for logs, etc.
zackyd665@reddit
So then GitHub runnings are always more costly than self hosted due to less GitHub resources used? Do those resources get used at a per minute model like the runner or it is more of cost per runner?
liamraystanley@reddit
not sure what you mean?
all of the orchestration compute/networking, logs storage, etc, would, in most cases, scale based on the length of time that the runner is running for, some of it isn't. I do still think the self-hosted cost should be lower than $0.002, but it's definitely reasonable that there is a fee; otherwise, all other users who use other GH services would be offsetting the cost associated with self-hosted runners cost.
zackyd665@reddit
Logically it makes sense for those that use more GH services to pay more then those that self host? Since they consume more resources then self hosted. The cost structure should only be related to resources used and not used to move use of other GH services as that isn't good faith
liamraystanley@reddit
You're using resources even with self-hosted, which is my point. You may not be directly running workloads on their compute, but you're using their resources for orchestration/logging/etc. The more resources you use (e.g. non-self-hosted), it should definitely cost more. I'm not a huge fan of the $0.002 pricing, I think it should be a little bit less because the smallest non-self-hosted actions runner is also $0.002/min, which is silly, since in that situation, they would also be running the compute, not just orchestration.
I'm just saying that it shouldn't be free, and if it were free, it would have to be subsidized by something else. It previously was subsidized, I assume, by the non-self-hosted runners, which they now reduced the price of by quite a bit, due to this change.
zackyd665@reddit
But what's the end goal to move people off self hosted? If they are simply charging self hosted to make hosted cheaper, why are public repos still free?
nemesiscodex1@reddit
Ok, ~2 months to move out of GitHub. How is Gitlab looking nowadays?
arbenowskee@reddit
Gitlab was always great, but it is pricier than GitHub if you are an organisation
BotOrHumanoid@reddit
Personally I would recommend gitlab for organizations and gitea for homelab usage. Gitea and forgejo uses the same actions so mirroring would be as easy as that and updating your origin.
Gitea has everything a small org needs. Cache, package repo, releases. It’s «identical» to GitHub where even the api is pretty close as well.
surya_oruganti@reddit
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Paradox@reddit
Thanks ChatGPT
No_Blueberry4622@reddit
Seems like WarpBuild/Blacksmith/Depot etc could make themselves massively advantageous over GitHub's runner by going to something smaller than per min billing. Even per 10 seconds or something would be massive.
surya_oruganti@reddit
The $0.002/min tax from GitHub would remain to be charged per minute irrespective any change we could make.
The biggest lever we have is performance so users can consume fewer minutes and have lower self hosting tax.
Our runners are about 30-50% faster per vcpu.
Riday2001@reddit
What if you change your architecture slightly to allow kind of decoupled architecture? Like the CI will be separate from GitHub actions, but you can use the GitHub API for webhooks and update the commit checks for CI test results.
Basically, move to a full CI since you’re already doing most of it?
surya_oruganti@reddit
It's an idea we keep coming back to but it might be time to consider it more seriously.
No_Blueberry4622@reddit
I am running loads of small jobs around 1/2/3 mins. So the rounding up of my jobs mins is increasing my bills by like 25%+. Not sure if only a small percentage of customers would have usage patterns like me, but smaller than per min billing would be amazing for me.
surya_oruganti@reddit
Makes sense. I'll look into that.
I've also put together a note for our users on how they can optimize costs: https://www.warpbuild.com/blog/github-actions-price-change#optimizing-for-cost
Hope this helps
Streetrip@reddit
C’mon Google. Launch a competing git platform and compete please! Antigravity IDE and Git and they’ll eat up microsofts share of devs! Another Gemini channel! (Although keep that optional please)
Paradox@reddit
Lmao. Google had an entry in this space, and let it die.
DurianDiscriminat3r@reddit
But it'll be abandoned in 2 years
bvierra@reddit
Yes, this sucks. But let us look at what this means...
All public repos are still 100% free. So open source / personal / etc for the most part remain free.
For those that do get charged, if you ran 1 runner the entire month with no breaks, it's < $90.
Bekwnn@reddit
Didn't Zig move off of github because github actions were a buggy neglected mess?
Among other things.
TitleVisual6666@reddit
“Do you recognize there’s a difference between .002 dollars and .002 cents”
gallifrey_@reddit
permanently etched into my memory. one of the most frustrating pieces of journalism that's ever been published lol
OffbeatDrizzle@reddit
...... no
FreshInvestment1@reddit
Wait... Why? YOU'RE hosting it. Any my company is switching OVER to GitHub from gitlab... Ffs.
liamraystanley@reddit
You're only hosting the compute where the job runs, not the orchestration, logs, etc. It's disingenuous to say it doesn't cost GH anything -- maybe not $0.002/min, but not nothing.
OffbeatDrizzle@reddit
so then why not charge for it from the very beginning? it's because microsoft think they've locked everyone in and now is the time they've chosen to squeeze
liamraystanley@reddit
It's a corporation, so who really knows, but it's definitely not easy to calculate all of that super early on, before people are actually using the product. Can't get everything 100% the first try, business or not. Additionally, many of the features have changed over time, have totally different infrastructure requirements, etc.
It's very likely that they expected that self-hosted costs would be subsidized by non-self-hosted compute (and assumed not many would actually use the self-hosted functionality); however, other businesses like RunsOn have made it super easy to hook up non-github compute to their orchestration platform, for very large customers, sort of taking advantage of the orchestration and other infrastructure, reducing the ability to subsidize.
Adding pricing to things that used to be free is a double-edged sword, even if you have the best intentions. Things are never actually free -- people can abuse it (some people running jobs 24/7, streaming logs non-stop, for example), assumptions going in can lead to being incorrect (being able to subsidize), and if you don't add pricing after the fact, because it's a business, they would just completely cut it otherwise.
I still think it should be less than $0.002/min, though, fwiw.
clvx@reddit
I mean you can always run your own jenkins instance but then they will start charging you for cloning the repo.
OffbeatDrizzle@reddit
so then host your own repo locally...
oh shit we've come full circle... again...
needs more AI
_Odaeus_@reddit
Great! We can go back to Jenkins.
OffbeatDrizzle@reddit
we were forced to move our shit off jenkins into github like 3 months ago. it's taken weeks to re-integrate everything and we're still not finished - all because "1 guy maintaining jenkins is costing us too much time and money"... so they made dozens of engineers spend weeks migrating instead (the cloud is known for its cost effectiveness...)
whatever... it keeps me employed. it would be funny if it weren't for the fact that layoffs are right around the corner, and shit like this directly contributes to it
blademaster2005@reddit
No please no. I hate Jenkins so so much
fuckthiscode@reddit
Looks like I'm going to be adding Jenkins to my resume soon along with Github Actions, Azure Pipelines (ugh), and Teamcity moving further down all for this same kind of shit.
ItsRainbow@reddit
Uh, sure…
GaijinKindred@reddit
After leaving Microsoft, I have exactly one response.
Eat my entire ass.
Brb, migrating to gitlab (or something I created) now.
zackel_flac@reddit
Really time to move outside of GitHub, what are some good alternatives?
Really pisses me off something like GitHub did not become public somehow. Private companies tend to ruin everything they touch, it's sad.
Riday2001@reddit
Gitlab has a complete self hosted solution and they’re the closest to Github in terms of features
Luvax@reddit
Somehow that's even worse than Oracle asking you to pay per CPU core.
Density5521@reddit
Nothing to see here. Just Microsoft trying to make back those billions they gained by firing several thousand employees earlier this year to free up AI budget – and that they lost on everybody ignoring Copilot.
matjam@reddit
Embrace and extend
It’s a tired playbook but it’s effective.
ThadeeusMaximus@reddit
Where this really hurts is organizations like ours who are using slower but donated hardware to run our CI. Now the name of the game is all about speed, which means all that perfectly usable hardware is going to go to waste. Per minute is so bad here.
birdbrainswagtrain@reddit
Wow. Who's going to tell them they scheduled it a month too early?
demonstar55@reddit
How to solve this "problem" with no negative publicity: compete on price until you drive these services out of business, then raise prices.
PurpleYoshiEgg@reddit
Oh, that seems fair. I mean, they own the hardware, and it isn't f--
Wait, self-hosted?! Microsoft, this is garbage. There's a reason people are switching to Linux and Proton en masse after your Windows blunders.
Gendalph@reddit
Cool-cool-cool. I'll let my management know.
With the sh--show GitHub Actions are I would very much like to get rid of them.
BotOrHumanoid@reddit
Saw an interesting YouTube about the most «costly» bug in GitHub actions where the actions would just consume 100% CPU FOREVER. This would coincidentally make that bug quite an money cow for Microsoft.
smallduck@reddit
Hoping a JJForge / JJHub exists in the near future.
ricardo_sdl@reddit
Hello old friend:
micro$oft
jimbojsb@reddit
Shrug. We get so many hosted minutes with GH Enterprise Cloud I don’t know how we’d use them all anyway. Self-hosted runners are terrible any every time I’ve tried them to solve some specific problem they cause more harm than good.
RoyalGSC@reddit
Jenkins renaissance
mafga1@reddit
So 1051,2$/year.
Exac@reddit
https://imgur.com/a/WVHVbq6
philprimes@reddit
It would bother me less if their runner images wouldn‘t be so bad:
We recently switched to CirrusLabs in one of our public repositories because it was unbearable. 40% flakiness in main branch, but never fails locally. Switched to CL and flakiness dropped <4% without changing any tests.
Not advocating for CL here but after a year of trying to fix it with GHA this one is on GitHub.
funtimes-forall@reddit
If they can measure it, they will bill it.
tokaj-tide@reddit
At one of the companies I work for, we use GitHub with self-hosted runners. We have tons of projects and very complex pipelines, and we manage our entire infrastructure through Git, basically GitOps. We looked at our statistics and we’re using roughly 500 hours of CI per month, which, with the recent change from free to $0.002 per minute, comes out to about $720 per year. In comparison, even inflation-adjusted pay raises generate costs that are orders of magnitude higher per year.
The issue isn’t the price, and I actually like GitHub Actions quite a lot. My concern is that this feels like a gateway drug situation. I’m worried they’ll gradually start jacking up the prices, and overall I don’t think this is going to stop here. I’m afraid things may start going downhill with GitHub after this.
five5years@reddit
Another reason to migrate away from GitHub
mannsion@reddit
Yeah... guess I'm dumping all my self hosted runners and moving everything to jenkins or something.
MostTattyBojangles@reddit
Not a bad thing to have your VCS decoupled from your CI and CD. Lotsa decent CI options out there, self-hosted or managed. Hell, just a box that runs a shell script with on your commit and pings an API when it’s done.
mannsion@reddit
Yeah I actually started building my own runner a while ago on bun with typescript and I called it bunter..
I might just revisit that.
Most of the crazy bills I'm doing anyways usually require me to do a lot of custom crap anyways.
Like trying to isolate Depot tools to build Google Dawn for example...
Lachee@reddit
Literally anti on behaviour. Looking forward to the court case.
Fritzed@reddit
No it's not. They don't have any kind of monopoly here. They don't own Git, you could switch to another provider or self-host open source gitlab.
Lachee@reddit
They are undercutting competition massively by more than 30% and then adding a fee for said competition to actually exist.
How is that not anticompetitive?
devzevgor@reddit
Undercutting isn’t anticompetitive, it’s literally competitive
markehammons@reddit
Dumping is anticompetitive
sickhippie@reddit
...in no way is this Dumping.
devzevgor@reddit
That has nothing to do with this. Dumping is explicitly manipulating a foreign market to get a head start. That’s not what’s happening here at all.
EveryQuantityEver@reddit
If you are dropping prices below what is sustainable, for the purposes of driving competition out of the market, that is very anti-competitive.
ArdiMaster@reddit
There’s literally someone here in the comments who operates (or claims to operate) a third-party Actions Runners service saying that even after this price change, his service is still cheaper than GitHub’s own offering.
Lustrouse@reddit
I'm not quite sure how the infrastructure/integration between the runners and the API and/or event feed works, but couldn't this be just as easily framed as charging for the usage of that specific feature?
I personally believe this is a poor business decision that undermines the trust that Microsoft has spent the last decade restoring, but I don't think it's technically anti-competitive. If they want to squash the competition, I would much rather they release a better product with their absurdly large budget and workforce.
abandonplanetearth@reddit
Lol. It's extremely easy for them to justify the costs legally.
Lustrouse@reddit
Vendor Lock-In is a real thing that many businesses experience, but it's not the same thing as being anti-competitive.
imdibene@reddit
F#ck Microsoft
AtatS-aPutut@reddit
Pay to use my own hardware excuse you??
grumpyrumpywalrus@reddit
I see my decision to use gitlab.com and self host runners on both AWS spot instances and local homelab runners, is paying off
sviridoot@reddit
And this is why I chose to self host my own gitlab instance some time ago, and generally avoid cloud solutions whenever possible.
o5mfiHTNsH748KVq@reddit
Looks like Team City's back on the menu, boys.
bawiddah@reddit
Tech is returning to the classic telco-model of charging everything on a per-minute basis. We're doomed.
ggppjj@reddit
starting march 1, 2026, github will eat my ass
ToaruBaka@reddit
Glad I moved off GitHub last week lmao
flagbearer223@reddit
Wow, turns out one blog post is all it takes to switch me from "advise nearly everyone to use github actions" to "never use github actions again"
cptnringwald@reddit
Slow, bloated, outdated, overpriced. Need more? There is a reason people use self hosted and it's not because they're bored.
Tiwenty@reddit
I'm not surprise. My latest similar discovery on MS practices was when I learnt that you need to pay a fee to run selfhosted Azure DevOps in parallel...
nadseh@reddit
$3 per 24h of runner time. Writing a comment about this here probably cost your company more money than the runner fees
MudkipGuy@reddit
If you suddenly introduce a large subscription cost for self hosting, users will notice, evaluate alternatives, and consider migrating away.
A more effective way to do this is to instead introduce a very small cost initially, then slowly increase the subscription cost without gaining much notice. This is sometimes known as subscription creep. This works because similar to the story of the boiling frog experiment, there's no singular point where any sudden increase in price occurs.
Keeping with this analogy, while it's true that the pot isn't hot, the point of discussion is that the stove was turned on.
natelloyd@reddit
And there's NEVER been a case of someone starting to charge something small and then boiling the frog until it was fully cooked! NEVER I say, NEVER!
/s
Nadesh, the principle of the thing is wrong.
blueblackredninja@reddit
That's 1000 per runner per year. That's a lot of small businesses.
nadseh@reddit
It’s usage though, not runner uptime
Brisngr368@reddit
Oof looks like the hosted runners weren't being used enough guess you can't make money and train AI off the data if they just host it themselves
rom_romeo@reddit
“Squeeze Raban, squeeze harder…” - Baron Satya Nadela.