But it is not for hardware you own. It is for the use of GutHubs coordinators, which they have been donating the use of to you for free. They have now decided that that service is something they are going to charge for. Your objection to GitHub "extracting usage-based rent from me" seems to ignore that you have been getting usage of their hardware for free up to now.

So, like I said, the question for you is whether that $140/month of service is worth that money to you, or can you find a better priced alternative, or build something that costs less yourself.

My guess is that once you think about this some more you will decide it is worth it, and probably spend some time trying to drive down your minutes/month a bit. But at $140 a month, how much time is that worth investing?

No. It is not worth a time-scaled cost each month for them to start a job on my machines and store a few megabytes of log files.

I'd happily pay a fixed monthly fee for this service, as I already do for GitHub.

The problem here is that this is like a grocery store charging me money for every bag I bring to bag my own groceries.

> But at $140 a month, how much time is that worth investing?

It's not $140/month. It's $140/month today, when my company is still relatively small and it's just me. This cost will scale as my company scales, in a way that is completely bonkers.

> The problem here is that this is like a grocery store charging me money for every bag I bring to bag my own groceries.

Maybe they can market it as the Github Actions corkage fee

> It is not worth a time-scaled cost each month for them to start a job on my machines and store a few megabytes of log files

If it is so easy why don’t you write your own orchestrator to run jobs on the hardware you own?

> The problem here is that this is like a grocery store charging me money for every bag I bring to bag my own groceries.

This is an odd take because you're completely discounting the value of the orchestration. In your grocery store analogy, who's the orchestrator? It isn't you.

Do you feel that orchestration runs on a per-minute basis?

As long as they're reserving resources for your job during the period of execution, it does.

Charging people to maintain a row in a database by the minute is top-tier, I agree.

If you really think that's all it is, I would encourage you to write your own.

It would be silly to write a new one today. Plenty of open source + indy options to invest into instead.

For scheduled work, cron + a log sink is fine, and for pull request CI there's plenty of alternatives that don't charge by the minute to use your own hardware. The irony here, unfortunately, is that the latter requires I move entirely off of GitHub now.

so they are selling cent of their CPU time for a minute's worth

> My guess is that once you think about this some more you will decide it is worth it, and probably spend some time trying to drive down your minutes/month a bit. But at $140 a month, how much time is that worth investing?

It's $140 right now. And if they want to squeeze you for cents worth of CPU time (because for artifact storage you're already paying separately), they *will* squeeze harder.

And more importantly *RIGHT NOW* it costs more per minute than running decent sized runner!

I get the frustration. And I’m no GitHub apologist either. But you’re not being charged for hardware you own. You’re being charged for the services surrounding it (the action runner/executor binary you didn’t build, the orchestrator configurable in their DSL you write, the artefact and log retention you’re getting, the plug-n-play with your repo, etc). Whether or not you think that is a fair price is beside the point.

That value to you is apparently less than $140/mo. Find the number you’re comfortable with and then move away from GH Actions if it’s less than $140.

More than 10 years of running my own CI infra with Jenkins on top. In 2023 I gave up Jenkins and paid for BuildKite. It’s still my hardware. BuildKite just provides the “services” I described earlier. Yet I paid them a lot of money to provide their services for me on my own hardware. GH actions, even while free, was never an option for me. I don’t like how it feels.

This is probably bad for GitHub but framing it as “charging me for my hardware” misses the point entirely.

feels like a new generation is learning what life is like when microsoft has a lot of power. (tl;dr: they try to use it.)

I was born in 1993. I kind of heard lots of rumbling about Microsoft being evil as I grew up, but I wasn't fully understanding of the anti trust thing.

It used to suprise me that people saw cool tech from Microsoft (like VSCode) and complain about it.

I now see the first innings of a very silly game Microsoft are going to start playing over the next few years. Sure, they are going to make lots of money, but a whole generation of developers are learning to avoid them.

Thanks for trying to warn us old heads!

ABuse it.

Feels like listening to Halo generation being surprised MS fucks them over, because they thought they were Good Guys, coz they Made Thing They like