updated: Engineers cried foul over plan to charge $0.002/min.

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.

“We’ve read your posts and heard your feedback,” GitHub said. “We’re postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions to take time to re-evaluate our approach.”

The company said that it still intends to do something to help offset the “real costs” in running GitHub Actions via self-hosted runners, but “we missed the mark with this change by not including more of you in our planning.”

  • kindred@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
    19·
    19 hours ago

    “We’ll try again when you’re not paying attention/when can figure out how to force or trick you into it.”

  • bleistift2@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    25·
    1 day ago

    What “‘real costs’ in running GitHub Actions” are these dipshits even talking about? All they need to do is send a message to my runner. All the rest happens on my machine. Is the “real cost” pulling the latest changes?

    • slazer2au@lemmy.worldEnglish
      211·
      24 hours ago

      Storing the repo, keeping a TLS session open to the runner 24/7 so when you poke the run button it does it now, not when the runner checks in next.

      It costs fuck all but with millions of runners it does add up.

      I hope this move and despite the pullback means more people will move away from GitHub and over to Codeberg, or alternatively run Forgejo themselves which is the software behind Codeberg

    • FizzyOrange@programming.dev
      82·
      22 hours ago

      The real costs are the ~$100m they spend a year on developing GitHub and providing it for free to most people - including free CI.

      They charge 3x the cost price for runners so that they can actually make money. This change is so that they can’t get undercut by alternative hosted runner providers.

      I do think they could have just explained that and it probably would have been more palettable than their “we’re making it cheaper!” lie, but I guess there are also a lot of people that still think the only moral pricing is cost plus.