> Assuming the costs of a user paying for the cheapest Ubuntu CI runner to perform the same computation, this would be a use of approximately $103,000 of GitHub

> Assuming the costs of a user paying for the cheapest Ubuntu CI runner to perform the same computation, this would be a use of approximately $103,000 of GitHub’s resources. $103k at retail price != $103k of costs. Github's owned by Microsoft so presumably they have access to cheap Azure instances. The costs only go down when you consider that free tier CI workloads are small and fungible among regions and server types. > several thousand free accounts to earn $137 That sounds like it's getting close to the point where you'll show up in a simple random sample of user accounts. The engineering effort of setting this up and keeping it running seems like it's a lot more than $137 of developer time.