GitHub Is Going To Start Charging You For Using Your Own Hardware (theregister.com) 47
GitHub will begin charging $0.002 per minute for self-hosted Actions runners used on private repositories starting in March. "At the same time, GitHub noted in a Tuesday blog post that it's lowering the prices of GitHub-hosted runners beginning January 1, under a scheme it calls 'simpler pricing and a better experience for GitHub Actions,'" reports The Register. "Self-hosted runner usage on public repositories will remain free." From the report: Regardless of the public repo distinction, enterprise-scale developers who rely on self-hosted runners were predictably not pleased about the announcement. "Github have just sent out an email announcing a $0.002/minute fee for self-hosted runners," Reddit user markmcw posted on the DevOps subreddit. "Just ran the numbers, and for us, that's close to $3.5k a month extra on our GitHub bill." [...]
"Historically, self-hosted runner customers were able to leverage much of GitHub Actions' infrastructure and services at no cost," the repo host said in its blog FAQ. "This meant that the cost of maintaining and evolving these essential services was largely being subsidized by the prices set for GitHub-hosted runners." The move, GitHub said, will align costs more closely with usage. Like many similar changes to pricing models pushed by tech firms, GitHub says "the vast majority of users ... will see no price increase."
GitHub claims that 96 percent of its customers will see no change to their bill, and that 85 percent of the 4 percent affected by the pricing update will actually see their Actions costs decrease. The company says the remaining 15 percent of impacted users will face a median increase of about $13 a month. For those using self-hosted runners and worried about increased costs, GitHub has updated its pricing calculator to include the cost of self-hosted runners.
"Historically, self-hosted runner customers were able to leverage much of GitHub Actions' infrastructure and services at no cost," the repo host said in its blog FAQ. "This meant that the cost of maintaining and evolving these essential services was largely being subsidized by the prices set for GitHub-hosted runners." The move, GitHub said, will align costs more closely with usage. Like many similar changes to pricing models pushed by tech firms, GitHub says "the vast majority of users ... will see no price increase."
GitHub claims that 96 percent of its customers will see no change to their bill, and that 85 percent of the 4 percent affected by the pricing update will actually see their Actions costs decrease. The company says the remaining 15 percent of impacted users will face a median increase of about $13 a month. For those using self-hosted runners and worried about increased costs, GitHub has updated its pricing calculator to include the cost of self-hosted runners.
The enshitification of GitHub continues apace (Score:5, Informative)
Re: The enshitification of GitHub continues apace (Score:2)
Re: The enshitification of GitHub continues apace (Score:5, Informative)
Gitlab and Forgejo are both open-source and self-hostable.
Re: The enshitification of GitHub continues apace (Score:2)
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For self-hosting, try Fogejo instead. It should be a lot easier to host and administer, and has a nice "smoothness" to it. (I used to use it back when it was still Gitea...)
Re: The enshitification of GitHub continues apace (Score:2)
Re: The enshitification of GitHub continues apac (Score:2)
I know that anecdotes aren't data, but I've never seen a properly installed GitLab, except for the official GitLab.com. Every instance I've worked with so far (about 4, spread across 3 different organizations and 2 decades) suffers from occasional random timeouts when authenticating.
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For self-hosting, try Fogejo instead.
I appreciate the tip. I've been self-hosting Gitea for three or four years, and have spent the last year wondering about some of the changes.
T
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+1 for Forgejo. Small and efficient and likely to be everything you need - yes, there are CI/CD use cases that it doesn't work with, so it might not be what you need, but 99% of people and orgs will find it is just fine.
Gitlab isn't bad - it's more advanced in places than Forgejo, but also a memory hog - but Gitlab's maintainers are giving off serious enshittification-is-just-around-the-corner vibes right now. The mandatory AI account (I forget the name) even on self hosted instances would be one example. W
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Its not limited to physical contact.
Also, it's not microsoft per-se - it's any gigantic company being chased by a ravenous zombie horde of hungry investors.
Everything turns to shit as they desperately try to avoid being eaten.
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Microsoft ruins everything they touch.
Right now GitLab is a potential alternative and you can even host it in your own network.
Actions were only added by Microsoft (Score:2)
GitHub didn't have a CI service before MS took over, so there's no point for comparison. Given a lot of people just use GitHub as free hosting for stuff that isn't even open source (seriously, people use it for web site hosting and download hosting for closed source software, or just random personal web sites), the money to run it has to come from somewhere.
Well, that was quick (Score:5, Funny)
"UPDATED Following publication of our original article, GitHub reversed its decision. The Microsoft-owned developer site has taken to X to admit it might have made a mistake by unilaterally announcing plans to charge people for using their own hardware to host runners."
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Utterly hilarious that X is so powerful that it can make Microsofties making long term price plans (which must have passed multiple committees)... just surrender and cancel their plans within a day.
Granted they're "re-evaluating our approach" so they'll try again later. But it's still funny.
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Xitter.
Don't refer to Xitter as "x".
And remember, it's pronounced "Shitter".
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Sadly no commitment to never be quite so dickish again, though.
IMHO, that they ever *thought* this was a possibility that the consumer would accept is entirely the problem. This idea should have been shot down by the lowest levels of the crap filtering inside Github/MS. The executive shouldn't even have heard about it. As it was, top to bottom they all agreed it would be okay, and to go ahead. These people seem to live in an entirely different world to the rest of us.
Reversed or none, this is another remind
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for now...
Uhm... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Uhm... (Score:2)
Essentially it is.. (Score:4, Informative)
Essentially it is a means for GitHub to spin up processes or scripts on machines(VM/physical) to do "stuff" when certain things happen in a GitHub repo.
Most common uses would be stuff like building and deploying software after a push to main.
You push(update) main(branch of your application code) and it triggers a runner, a GitHub agent software running on a VM or physical machine. The runner(agent) executes commands like compiling the code, testing, deploying to your preferred location. It does these executions on the agent which may be in the cloud, or it may be on your own self-hosted environment.
It is commonly used in Continuous Integration/Continuous Deliver(CI/CD) devops environments.
Re: Essentially it is.. (Score:2)
It would help if there's a graphics presenting this.
If you run on your own hardware then you can as well ignore github and also self-host your git repo.
Re: Essentially it is.. (Score:4, Informative)
It would help if there's a graphics presenting this.
The general premise probably doesn't need a diagram. The idea is that when code is committed that it needs to be "integrated" / compiled and then the built artifacts and executables actually need to be "deployed" somewhere. So besides the storage part of Version Control and the collaboration part (bug tracker, review, merging), then there's the run some stuff like scripts part.
GitHub Actions are that run some stuff part and it's a fairly separate piece of architect (storage is very different than compute). And it's fairly pricy to run that stuff on someone else's servers if you are doing a lot of it.
If you run on your own hardware then you can as well ignore github
So then if someone does have their own hardware and doesn't want to run an entire platform, just wants to compile cheaply on their own kit. Then they could install the runner on their server. However since that runner has to check in to the rest of the platform, there's some minor costs in communicating between the platform and the fleet of runners. And for the vast majority of people, a drop in the bucket compared to user fees. But for that minority of people that are running at scale to have the vendor change pricing models would be very infuriating.
and also self-host your git repo.
There are alternatives, but there's nuance here. An alternative can be to just replace the CI/CD, CircleCI, TravisCI, ConcourseCI, CodeFresh, or even GitLab CI can all hook up to GitHub and then do the builds/deploys. The other alternative is to run the whole version control and collaboration stack, there's GitLab, Gitea, Forgejo, and BitBucket (all that have their own built-in CI/CD systems that for the most part can also be replaced previous list).
But all of that is a lot more work than just running the built-in one that works pretty well and can run on your own hardware to save costs (up until Microsoft tries to stick ya with more of a bill).
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Personally I'd even after all that stay out of Github. Not that I do any huge projects though.
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While it is undoubtedly vendor lock-in, it's not as strong as a lock as virtualization and it's the nature of a complex problem. And even here they aren't pulling the Broadcom of cutting SKUs or tripling costs.
And ultimately, orgs that are using any of the other available tools at scale including FOSS ones are locked in and migration would be painful.
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Basically it's the equivalent of Jenkins (https://www.jenkins.io/) which costs exactly $0 to self host.
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It's something that you could run on your own machine to build software but then github persuade people to instead run it on github hardware with an additional power-user option to run the thing you could run on your own machine... on your own machine whilst looping them in to give the opportunity to charge you money because they've not extracted enough value from trawling through your codebases.
It's small-minded really - any truly creative company would just have people spontaneously send them money explic
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GitHub has a feature called “GitHub Actions". You put a workflow in your repository. When the specified event happens, the workflow starts and executes whatever commands you put in there.
People use the workflows for various activities; typical tasks include compiling, testing, scanning, packaging, and deploying code whenever it changes. That way, developers make a change, push it to GitHub, and just wait for GitHub to do those tasks while the developer moves on to something else. The workflows are bas
README (Score:5, Informative)
Read the article. It has already been edited to announce that GitHub has reversed their decision, for now.
There will NOT be any charge for runners on your own hardware.
No charges for self-hosted Action runners. Until...
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No charges for self-hosted Action runners. Until...
Github has had no charges for actions runners for open source projects for some time (with various resource limits). If you wanted runners for your closed source projects, there has been a limited free tier, but except for the tiniest orgs, most needed to pay.
Preemtive manipulation (Score:5, Insightful)
I always love this ploy. "You are part of a small percentage of users whining about this, but our price changes are actually good for everyone else", as if you're supposed to take one for the good of humanity. Or Microsoft.
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On the other side this isn't as unreasonable as it sounds. Pricing structures may be setup in a way that a finite resource is abused to the detriment of all others.
Think back to the early days of crypto mining. What happened to free Amazon EC instances? Gone, because some people abused them to automatically spin them up, mine as much as the free case would allow, shut it down, rinse and repeat. Should paying users cover this cost?
Or what about public APIs? Many paid APIs are unlimited but the payment is sma
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Microsoft have a cost for the network requests and load - there's potentially lot of egress requests to the runners, and the jobs can potentially puke out a lot of data.
I don't think it's significant compared to all the other traffic, but still not totally unreasonable to meter that somehow.
However, maybe the price is a bit high and the price-model is a bit unfair for long running jobs that doesn't log much.
Is there a storage costs for action logs? I don't really know the price model tbh...
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I assume because they're charging by the minute they have to start up a VM or something to monitor it. They probably use the same process as any other "runner" except this one sshs to your machine and executes commands instead of doing it locally.
I don't see why someone who objects to this couldn't just replace it with their own system where their local machine does whatever it needs. Make a runner that pings your machine and then exits if you absolutely need to.
And so it starts (Score:5, Funny)
"GitHub claims that 96 percent of its customers will see no change to their bill, and that 85 percent of the 4 percent affected by the pricing update will actually see their Actions costs decrease. The company says the remaining 15 percent of impacted users will face a median increase of about $13 a month. For those using self-hosted runners and worried about increased costs, GitHub has updated its pricing calculator to include the cost of self-hosted runners. "
Later: I'm altering the deal: Pray I don't alter it further.
Fees expand under the name of increasing profitability. [Otherwise known as Enshittification]
Compatible FOSS alternative in 3,2,1 ... (Score:2)
Like this is going to stop _anyone_ from building and releasing a 100% compatible FOSS alternative within a few hours. Isn't actions just a runner for YAML / JSON based CI/CD scripts? A 10th-grader should be able to rebuild that without breaking a sweat.
Misleading headline (Score:2)
You can do on your own hardware whatever you want for free. GitHub changes to use an integration with their service. No idea if the fee is justified, but it is not for running your software, but for your software integrating with their service.
Gitea is Another Self-Hosting Option (Score:2)
Gitea can be used for either hosted or self-hosted Git repos.
"Open Source - Free, self-hosted Git service under the MIT license. Full control, unlimited users and repositories."
Our company uses it with Redmine for tickets.
Um, (Score:2)
TANSTAAFL