7 ms·

GitHub postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions

157 points by coloneltcb 10mo ago

https://resources.github.com/actions/2026-pricing-changes-for-github-actions/ https://resources.github.com/actions/2026-pricing-changes-fo...

kevin061 10mo ago
"Postponing" means they will just do it later. The writing is on the wall. Up to you if you wish to continue using and trusting Microsoft.
- thomascountz 10mo ago
  "Postponing" means they will just do it later. For the record, planning to do something later than originally planned is the definition of "postpone." Nevertheless, coupling to any vendor is a form of technical debt, and it's always a good idea to take stock and evaluate if it's time to start repaying it.
otterley 10mo ago
This is the official message: https://x.com/github/status/2001372894882918548 https://x.com/github/status/2001372894882918548 "We’ve read your posts and heard your feedback. "1. We’re postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions to take time to re-evaluate our approach. "2. We are continuing to reduce hosted-runners prices by up to 39% on January 1, 2026. "We have real costs in running the Actions control plane. We are also making investments into self-hosted runners so they work at scale in customer environments, particularly for complex enterprise scenarios. While this context matters, we missed the mark with this change by not including more of you in our planning. "We need to improve GitHub Actions. We’re taking more time to meet and listen closely to developers, customers, and partners to start. We’ve also opened a discussion to collect more direct feedback and will use that feedback to inform the GitHub Actions roadmap. We’re working hard to earn your trust through consistent delivery across GitHub Actions and the entire platform."
- sltr 10mo ago
  Palmer's tweet said a similar thing and added, "we gave away 11.5 billion build minutes (~$184 million) to support OSS last year". $184M in profit or cost? It's called a loss leader, not a gift, and it's a marketing and adoption tactic. They already bought the machines which cost about as much to run idle as at 100% utilization. Might as well put that idle capex and opex to use. Or just collectively bill OSS the $184M and stop signaling virtue.
  - otterley 10mo ago
    We don’t know whether GitHub has idle capacity to spare. If they’re auto scaling their resources like a well-architected workload should, then they probably don’t. Even if they’re not downscaling their compute, they may prefer to run other low-priority jobs on it.
ChrisArchitect 10mo ago
Maybe update link to the post: Updates to GitHub Actions pricing https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/182186 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/182186
- baggachipz 10mo ago
  Yeah, could we please stop treating twitter as the canonical source of company communications? There is always a blog post or in this case, a github discussion.
- everfrustrated 10mo ago
  That update is from an anonymous "Admin". The X link is directly from the (presumed?) head of GitHub.
  - ChrisArchitect 10mo ago
    They've also updated the original resource page but a new url serves our purposes better https://resources.github.com/actions/2026-pricing-changes-for-github-actions/ https://resources.github.com/actions/2026-pricing-changes-fo...
ZeWaka 10mo ago
Probably caused by enterprises going after them, my normally dead company-wide global devops chat had a few hundred messages yesterday because of this.
IshKebab 10mo ago
> Although we gave away 11.5 billion build minutes (~$184 million) to support OSS last year Interesting, I was trying to estimate how much they spent on free actions per year. I thought it would be around $100m. This is the first actual number I've seen. I expect the $184 million figure is the sale price rather than the actual cost to GitHub, and given that competitors offer the same service for 3-10x less it's probably more like $80m overall I'd guess. Still a pretty huge amount of money that I don't think any competitors can really hope to match.
- blibble 10mo ago
  I wonder how much of that $80 million is garbage code like safe_sleep.sh
AndrewDucker 10mo ago
It does not seem unreasonable that if the locally-run actions are using some GitHub resources (for logging, maintenance,etc) then there's a cost to that. What a reasonable charge is, is open to discussion.
- estimator7292 10mo ago
  It sure as hell isn't a per-minute cost
  - jborean93 10mo ago
    per-minute is really just a way to express the cost in a human friendly name. Doing per-hour, per-second, per-day could all result in the same total value just at a different number. If anything per-minute is better than per-hour as you won't be charge for minutes you don't use.
    - whateveracct 10mo ago
      the issue is it's per-$DURATION it could be per-workflow, regardless of duration
    - tom1337 10mo ago
      But why not make it "per GB Logs ingested" or "per triggered job" (or both)? These should reflect the points where GitHub also has costs - but not per minute.
  - chippiewill 10mo ago
    per-minute isn't a crazy unreasonable proxy for it though: - logs are generally proportional to the length of the job - other artifacts also usually correlate to an extent - some of the cost for Github will be for the entire time the job is active: e.g. active connections for log streaming etc. - it's largely correlated to the value the end-user gets out of it - it's easy to bill for because they can already do billing that way on the hosted runners - the costs are easy to predict for end-users It's not like the rest of the Github platform is a per-user cost to run, but that's how Github charge for most features.
gherkinnn 10mo ago
Unrelated to Actions. Jared Palmer, the author of this Tweet, has done well for himself. I remember him as the author of Turborepo which Vercel gobbled up a few years ago. https://jaredpalmer.com/about https://jaredpalmer.com/about
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
Shadowmist 10mo ago
Oh good I have a little bit more time to migrate away.
j45 10mo ago
Hm, still too late, and still leaving. Maybe I don't understand something, but self-hosted GitHub Actions cost more resources than GitHub Actions hosted with them? There might be some creative uses of GitHub Actions, it seemed that getting users into the platform was valuable.
ChrisArchitect 10mo ago
Related: initial development and reactions: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46291156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46291156
julius-fx 10mo ago
Not gonna wait 30seconds to read the bloody article, when it says "5seconds ad".
greazy 10mo ago
this is a better link: https://github.blog/changelog/2025-12-16-coming-soon-simpler-pricing-and-a-better-experience-for-github-actions/ https://github.blog/changelog/2025-12-16-coming-soon-simpler...
- HelloUsername 10mo ago
  Or https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/182186 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/182186
techterrier 10mo ago
from the tweet [1]: "We’ve read your posts and heard your feedback. 1. We’re postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions to take time to re-evaluate our approach. 2. We are continuing to reduce hosted-runners prices by up to 39% on January 1, 2026. We have real costs" ^ theres more in the actual tweet, but the preview that gets unfurled on discord cuts off there. That last lines a killer, poor olde microsoft 1. https://x.com/i/status/2001372894882918548 https://x.com/i/status/2001372894882918548
- bilekas 10mo ago
  > We have real costs" Am i wrong or didn't they have a bug in the action runners that would basically cycle the CPU infinitely ? > https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/2380 https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/2380 > https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792 https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792 Didn't they take years to fix this ? Or its unrelated ?
  - Narretz 10mo ago
    They are talking about the cost to run the Actions control plane and the scheduler that is not executed on the runner itself.
    - codeflo 10mo ago
      They have all kinds of costs hosting GitHub, which is why there's per seat pricing for companies. If those prices are too low, they can always increase them. Charging on top of that per minute of using your own infrastructure felt greedy to me. And the fact that this was supposed to be tied to one of the lesser-maintained features of GitHub raised eyebrows on top of that.
bilekas 10mo ago
> GitHub stated that it has canceled the price increase after reviewing developer feedback. It added that it will take time to listen to customers and partners. I get the feeling they got the feedback that their runners are not as indispensable to developers as they thought and realized they would lose a significant amount of users. Now if only they would listen to the feedback about windows 11 and their forced copilot we might be onto something.
- anothernewdude 10mo ago
  I've already jumped ship. Switching source control host was actually pretty easy. Builds still working just fine.
  - thomasnno 10mo ago
    Great! Who did you jump to ?
    - embedding-shape 10mo ago
      The most obvious "all-in-one" package is GitLab, if you have the hardware for it and don't mind bit of bloat but all the needed features in one package. Personally, for smaller scale projects that still require collaboration over the web, Gitea/Forgejo + Woodpecker CI has been a really simple, lightweight and easy to maintain solution.
      - germandiago 10mo ago
        I am self host8ng forgejo. What can other CIs do that I could potentially need that is absent?
        embedding-shape 10mo ago
        If you're using the built-in Actions/CI/whatever it's called, and it works for you, then that's great, don't try to change :) I guess I'm mostly still with Woodpecker because of having used it for years already, don't think there is anything major missing with either approaches, but was a while ago I looked deeper into it, maybe someone else here knows more (recent) details.
top_sigrid 10mo ago
See also: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46304379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46304379 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46305216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46305216
Daviey 10mo ago
Oh good, I can postpone my migration for personal projects.
- redrove 10mo ago
  Or, rather, you have more time to execute it. They _will_ rug pull again, this is Microsoft ffs.
  - KJBweb 10mo ago
    That's the signal I'm getting here and they're not even being coy about it, they're just postponing some form of inevitable price increase.
  - duskdozer 10mo ago
    It's the classic strategy of floating an extreme change, "listening to feedback", and then coming back later with the price they intended to charge all along.
tom-9999 10mo ago
1. Announce price increase generating bad publicity. 2. Kill bad publicity with blog pretending to be understanding and taking on feedback while "pausing" the increase. 3. Implement price increase a few months later when the bad publicity wave is over, and its old news so wont generate new headlines.
- redrove 10mo ago
  Sounds like Chat Control.
- Uehreka 10mo ago
  Nah, that doesn’t work when the substance of the change is this intense and has an actual effect on peoples’ bottom lines. If they wait a few months and try again, people will see their bills go up immediately and they’ll all get mad again. I don’t know what GH will do next, but if they try to do that, it will definitely backfire.
  - arlcode 10mo ago
    sounds like it's time to increase their vendor lock in then an make sure they are not as compatible with other solutions. I fear this would be the obvious conclusion.
  - beaker52 10mo ago
    You might be surprised at how much you’re willing to surrender if someone gave you some time to come to terms with it. It’s just a question of giving you enough time to move on from anger/shock/fear to toward acceptance. It’s like magic and is used all the time. > Nah, that doesn’t work when… Sounds like it could be another well known stage of the process called denial. Denial is when you tell yourself that something isn’t possible which makes you feel safer, when in fact you’re already moving toward acceptance - acceptance that you’re going to leave, or pay the price.
  - lbreakjai 10mo ago
    When they eventually roll it out (And they will, they always do), everyone will have had plenty of time to run the numbers and either come up with a plan, or just swallow the pill. If you still complain in a few months then that's on you, because you've been warned.
denismi 10mo ago
Outside of work, I'm a very sporadic coder. On some side-projects where I'm using Actions, I'll have an inspired few days of progress followed by completely idle weeks/months/quarters. Losing free Actions doesn't particularly bother me, and I have no issue with paying what is most likely a negligible amount, but I don't really want to have a credit card on file which could be charged some unbounded amount if somebody gets into my account. I've shut down my personal AWS for similar reasons. Is there any way of me just loading up a one-time $20? That will probably last well into 2027, and give me the peace of mind that I can just let it run. If my account's compromised, or I misconfigure something that goes wild, I am perfectly happy to write off that amount and have my incredibly-low-stakes toy projects fail to build.
- embedding-shape 10mo ago
  Setup something like CircleCI that mainly relies on paid users of their main product, and has a free plan. Microsoft currently seem to be in the process of figuring out how to lower the costs of GitHub for free users, since I'm guessing they make their actual money on other segments and products.
- hi_hi 10mo ago
  I just want to say I found this quite an insightful comment. I similarly would love to use a pay-as-you-go pricing model as a way of safely trying out various SaaS services. Unfortunately I feel it is not in the SaaS businesses interests, who want to replicate the gym membership model where the 70% who don't use the service are supplementing the other 30% who use it frequently.
- spockz 10mo ago
  There are several “virtual credit card” providers that allow you to generate additional cards, set limit on them like amounts and who can charge the CC. The availability varies per geography.
  - rjmunro 10mo ago
    The problem with that is you might still get a huge bill if something goes wrong, then they try to charge it to your card at the end of the day/week/month/whatever, and it fails. Now you still owe them the money, but haven't paid, so they tell you to pay on another card. If you refuse, they start debt collection against you and you could end up with your credit rating being affected, and maybe court cases and so on. I want give the company an amount of money, then know that it's run out and I have to pay for more. You can set monthly limits (https://github.com/settings/billing/budgets https://github.com/settings/billing/budgets), but if you are like me and have personal projects that you work on for a week or two a few times a year, that doesn't really work.
egorfine 10mo ago
Who could've thought, really
dvh 10mo ago
There's one thing I don't understand. Isn't GitHub action just "take a repo, do something with it, save something somewhere". So how is it different than writing a bash script that "clones the repo, do something with it, pushes the changes back"? If actions became paid feature, wouldn't that just generated myriads of show hn posts like "I recreated GitHub actions in xyz"?
- CafeRacer 10mo ago
  It's like bash scripts, but with ability to debug them.
  - Kinrany 10mo ago
    There are few things less debuggable than Github Actions. Bash scripts isn't one of them
    - CafeRacer 10mo ago
      Apologies, I realized I had a typo. It should be "It's like bash scripts but WITHOUT the ability to debug them". I am personally not a fan of GHA and I think unsuperwised claude code could have produced a better CI system.
- 000ooo000 10mo ago
  Where does one get to suffer YAML hell then??
  - muixoozie 10mo ago
    Hand roll something on k8s. Yaml seems unavoidable in that ecosystem. :)
- benterix 10mo ago
  Yes, in theory any CI/CD (whether Github, Gitlab, Jenkins etc,) is just a shell script with some warpping. But this wrapping matters because it's convenience: how you integrate with the repo, how you deal with variables, secrets, caching, deployment security and so on. Some people roughly figured this out and proposed some ways which other people learned, so switching is always a bit of a pain in various ways. But it is definitely possible - I did quite a lot of pipeline migration in my life and this is definitely not a blocker for a project of small to medium to biggish-size.
donatj 10mo ago
The utter rent-seeking audacity of charging by the minute for action runners you run on your own server... Charge a flat fee per Action, sure. There is a tiny cost on GitHub's part associated with the API calls for starting and stopping, but if my build takes 8 hours on a self-hosted runner there is no more cost to GitHub than it taking 10 seconds. That's the whole point of self-hosted runners. Maybe there was more outrage elsewhere, but I was frankly confused at the seeming lack thereof here on Hacker News.
- ClikeX 10mo ago
  Yeah, the per minute pricing is what really does it. It makes me think they've gone with the worst option first, so people will swallow the new adjusted workflow they'll come up with.
- franktankbank 10mo ago
  I don't even understand how they could do it. You own the servers that are giving them responses to determine the start/end times, so fudge the numbers fuck them, maybe you could find bugs in their shitty code so they start crediting you. I think they kinda fucked themselves 3 concrete ways (among the nerds which may not be a problem for them): 1) this whole thing 2) the infinite running jobs issues which called attention to how poorly managed the GHA system is 3) zig et al announcing their departure and all the positive conversation around that
brodo 10mo ago
https://archive.ph/3nsGi https://archive.ph/3nsGi
bearjaws 10mo ago
Glad I moved to GitLab 7 years ago.
arminiusreturns 10mo ago
Just as cloud agnosticism means you should be able to bootstrap your infra in different clouds, that also includes your ci/cd. As a greybeard sysadmin, my advice is to start separating your ci/cd from the platforms you run on. https://www.slingacademy.com/article/git-post-receive-hook-a-practical-guide-with-examples/ https://www.slingacademy.com/article/git-post-receive-hook-a... Another of my tricks is to tie in your containerization there too, system-nspawn is what I'm using at the moment, but it can apply to others.
N_Lens 10mo ago
The outcry against this move was much larger than Microsoft anticipated. While there is some logic for charging for self-hosted, it just doesn't make sense for the consumers.
codeflo 10mo ago
My theory: Some manager's KPI is to increase the number of sold GitHub runner minutes. So they did some market research -- not enough to have a clear picture, but barely enough to be dangerous -- and found that some companies use self-hosted runners for cost reasons. So they deploy a two-pronged strategy: lower the cost of GitHub runners, and charge for the use of self-hosted runners, to incentivize switching. This fails for several reasons that someone who actually uses the product might have intuited: (a) For some use-cases, you can't switch to GitHub's runners. For us, it's a no-go for anything that touches our infrastructure. (b) Switching CI providers isn't hard, we had to do it twice already. Granted, most of our CI logic is in a custom build script that you can run locally, and not in the proprietary YAML file. But to be honest, I'd recommend that sort of setup for any CI provider, as you always want the ability to debug things locally. (c) GitHub Actions doesn't get the amount of love you'd expect from something billed as a "premium service". In fact, it often feels quite abandoned, barely kept working. Who knows what they're brewing internally, but they didn't coordinate this with a major feature announcement, and didn't rush to announce anything now that they got backlash, which leads me to believe they don't have anything major planned. (d) Paying someone -- by the minute, no less -- to use my own infrastructure feels strange and greedy. GitHub has always had per-user pricing, which feels fair and predictable. If for some reason they need more money, they can always increase that price. The fact that they didn't do that leads me to believe this wasn't about cost per se. Hence the KPI theory I mentioned above: this wasn't well-coordinated with any bigger strategy.
- dirkc 10mo ago
  I agree with (c) - I can't quite pinpoint it, but I've had that feeling myself several times.
- altmanaltman 10mo ago
  "Hey ChatGPT, how do I increase the number of GitHub runner minutes? DO NOT suggested anything illegal, research hard"
- g947o 10mo ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46189692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46189692 from a few days ago pretty much tells me that any company that slightly cares about security cannot possibly depend on GitHub runner for their CI (except maybe the smallest/simplest projects). It is just one compromised package away from ruining everything.
6LLvveMx2koXfwn 10mo ago
From the horses mouth as it were: https://resources.github.com/actions/2026-pricing-changes-for-github-actions/ https://resources.github.com/actions/2026-pricing-changes-fo...
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
ryandvm 10mo ago
Seems like a year with record downtime for them is not a great time to announce a price increase...
smivan 10mo ago
I ended up prototyping self hosted https://woodpecker-ci.org/ https://woodpecker-ci.org/ on my k8s cluster. Ended up taking just a few hours of AI time (Claude Code). Woodpecker has a helm chart, can connect to Github and post status checks to commits. Open to feedback or tips and tricks on this, but so far it's looking promising. Curious how other folks experience has been.
ath3nd 10mo ago
[dead]

157 points by coloneltcb 10mo ago

https://resources.github.com/actions/2026-pricing-changes-for-github-actions/ https://resources.github.com/actions/2026-pricing-changes-fo...

kevin061 10mo ago

"Postponing" means they will just do it later. The writing is on the wall. Up to you if you wish to continue using and trusting Microsoft.

thomascountz 10mo ago
"Postponing" means they will just do it later. For the record, planning to do something later than originally planned is the definition of "postpone." Nevertheless, coupling to any vendor is a form of technical debt, and it's always a good idea to take stock and evaluate if it's time to start repaying it.

otterley 10mo ago

This is the official message: https://x.com/github/status/2001372894882918548 https://x.com/github/status/2001372894882918548 "We’ve read your posts and heard your feedback. "1. We’re postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions to take time to re-evaluate our approach. "2. We are continuing to reduce hosted-runners prices by up to 39% on January 1, 2026. "We have real costs in running the Actions control plane. We are also making investments into self-hosted runners so they work at scale in customer environments, particularly for complex enterprise scenarios. While this context matters, we missed the mark with this change by not including more of you in our planning. "We need to improve GitHub Actions. We’re taking more time to meet and listen closely to developers, customers, and partners to start. We’ve also opened a discussion to collect more direct feedback and will use that feedback to inform the GitHub Actions roadmap. We’re working hard to earn your trust through consistent delivery across GitHub Actions and the entire platform."

sltr 10mo ago
Palmer's tweet said a similar thing and added, "we gave away 11.5 billion build minutes (~$184 million) to support OSS last year". $184M in profit or cost? It's called a loss leader, not a gift, and it's a marketing and adoption tactic. They already bought the machines which cost about as much to run idle as at 100% utilization. Might as well put that idle capex and opex to use. Or just collectively bill OSS the $184M and stop signaling virtue.
- otterley 10mo ago
  We don’t know whether GitHub has idle capacity to spare. If they’re auto scaling their resources like a well-architected workload should, then they probably don’t. Even if they’re not downscaling their compute, they may prefer to run other low-priority jobs on it.

ChrisArchitect 10mo ago

Maybe update link to the post: Updates to GitHub Actions pricing https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/182186 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/182186

baggachipz 10mo ago
Yeah, could we please stop treating twitter as the canonical source of company communications? There is always a blog post or in this case, a github discussion.
everfrustrated 10mo ago
That update is from an anonymous "Admin". The X link is directly from the (presumed?) head of GitHub.
- ChrisArchitect 10mo ago
  They've also updated the original resource page but a new url serves our purposes better https://resources.github.com/actions/2026-pricing-changes-for-github-actions/ https://resources.github.com/actions/2026-pricing-changes-fo...

ZeWaka 10mo ago

Probably caused by enterprises going after them, my normally dead company-wide global devops chat had a few hundred messages yesterday because of this.

IshKebab 10mo ago

> Although we gave away 11.5 billion build minutes (~$184 million) to support OSS last year Interesting, I was trying to estimate how much they spent on free actions per year. I thought it would be around $100m. This is the first actual number I've seen. I expect the $184 million figure is the sale price rather than the actual cost to GitHub, and given that competitors offer the same service for 3-10x less it's probably more like $80m overall I'd guess. Still a pretty huge amount of money that I don't think any competitors can really hope to match.

blibble 10mo ago
I wonder how much of that $80 million is garbage code like safe_sleep.sh

AndrewDucker 10mo ago

It does not seem unreasonable that if the locally-run actions are using some GitHub resources (for logging, maintenance,etc) then there's a cost to that. What a reasonable charge is, is open to discussion.

estimator7292 10mo ago
It sure as hell isn't a per-minute cost
- jborean93 10mo ago
  per-minute is really just a way to express the cost in a human friendly name. Doing per-hour, per-second, per-day could all result in the same total value just at a different number. If anything per-minute is better than per-hour as you won't be charge for minutes you don't use.
  - whateveracct 10mo ago
    the issue is it's per-$DURATION it could be per-workflow, regardless of duration
  - tom1337 10mo ago
    But why not make it "per GB Logs ingested" or "per triggered job" (or both)? These should reflect the points where GitHub also has costs - but not per minute.
- chippiewill 10mo ago
  per-minute isn't a crazy unreasonable proxy for it though: - logs are generally proportional to the length of the job - other artifacts also usually correlate to an extent - some of the cost for Github will be for the entire time the job is active: e.g. active connections for log streaming etc. - it's largely correlated to the value the end-user gets out of it - it's easy to bill for because they can already do billing that way on the hosted runners - the costs are easy to predict for end-users It's not like the rest of the Github platform is a per-user cost to run, but that's how Github charge for most features.

gherkinnn 10mo ago

Unrelated to Actions. Jared Palmer, the author of this Tweet, has done well for himself. I remember him as the author of Turborepo which Vercel gobbled up a few years ago. https://jaredpalmer.com/about https://jaredpalmer.com/about

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

Shadowmist 10mo ago

Oh good I have a little bit more time to migrate away.

j45 10mo ago

Hm, still too late, and still leaving. Maybe I don't understand something, but self-hosted GitHub Actions cost more resources than GitHub Actions hosted with them? There might be some creative uses of GitHub Actions, it seemed that getting users into the platform was valuable.

ChrisArchitect 10mo ago

Related: initial development and reactions: Pricing Changes for GitHub Actions https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46291156 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46291156

julius-fx 10mo ago

Not gonna wait 30seconds to read the bloody article, when it says "5seconds ad".

greazy 10mo ago

this is a better link: https://github.blog/changelog/2025-12-16-coming-soon-simpler-pricing-and-a-better-experience-for-github-actions/ https://github.blog/changelog/2025-12-16-coming-soon-simpler...

HelloUsername 10mo ago
Or https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/182186 https://github.com/orgs/community/discussions/182186

techterrier 10mo ago

from the tweet [1]: "We’ve read your posts and heard your feedback. 1. We’re postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions to take time to re-evaluate our approach. 2. We are continuing to reduce hosted-runners prices by up to 39% on January 1, 2026. We have real costs" ^ theres more in the actual tweet, but the preview that gets unfurled on discord cuts off there. That last lines a killer, poor olde microsoft 1. https://x.com/i/status/2001372894882918548 https://x.com/i/status/2001372894882918548

bilekas 10mo ago
> We have real costs" Am i wrong or didn't they have a bug in the action runners that would basically cycle the CPU infinitely ? > https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/2380 https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/2380 > https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792 https://github.com/actions/runner/issues/3792 Didn't they take years to fix this ? Or its unrelated ?
- Narretz 10mo ago
  They are talking about the cost to run the Actions control plane and the scheduler that is not executed on the runner itself.
  - codeflo 10mo ago
    They have all kinds of costs hosting GitHub, which is why there's per seat pricing for companies. If those prices are too low, they can always increase them. Charging on top of that per minute of using your own infrastructure felt greedy to me. And the fact that this was supposed to be tied to one of the lesser-maintained features of GitHub raised eyebrows on top of that.

bilekas 10mo ago

> GitHub stated that it has canceled the price increase after reviewing developer feedback. It added that it will take time to listen to customers and partners. I get the feeling they got the feedback that their runners are not as indispensable to developers as they thought and realized they would lose a significant amount of users. Now if only they would listen to the feedback about windows 11 and their forced copilot we might be onto something.

anothernewdude 10mo ago
I've already jumped ship. Switching source control host was actually pretty easy. Builds still working just fine.
- thomasnno 10mo ago
  Great! Who did you jump to ?
  - embedding-shape 10mo ago
    The most obvious "all-in-one" package is GitLab, if you have the hardware for it and don't mind bit of bloat but all the needed features in one package. Personally, for smaller scale projects that still require collaboration over the web, Gitea/Forgejo + Woodpecker CI has been a really simple, lightweight and easy to maintain solution.
    - germandiago 10mo ago
      I am self host8ng forgejo. What can other CIs do that I could potentially need that is absent?
      - embedding-shape 10mo ago
        If you're using the built-in Actions/CI/whatever it's called, and it works for you, then that's great, don't try to change :) I guess I'm mostly still with Woodpecker because of having used it for years already, don't think there is anything major missing with either approaches, but was a while ago I looked deeper into it, maybe someone else here knows more (recent) details.

top_sigrid 10mo ago

See also: - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46304379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46304379 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46305216 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46305216

Daviey 10mo ago

Oh good, I can postpone my migration for personal projects.

redrove 10mo ago
Or, rather, you have more time to execute it. They _will_ rug pull again, this is Microsoft ffs.
- KJBweb 10mo ago
  That's the signal I'm getting here and they're not even being coy about it, they're just postponing some form of inevitable price increase.
- duskdozer 10mo ago
  It's the classic strategy of floating an extreme change, "listening to feedback", and then coming back later with the price they intended to charge all along.

tom-9999 10mo ago

1. Announce price increase generating bad publicity. 2. Kill bad publicity with blog pretending to be understanding and taking on feedback while "pausing" the increase. 3. Implement price increase a few months later when the bad publicity wave is over, and its old news so wont generate new headlines.

redrove 10mo ago
Sounds like Chat Control.
Uehreka 10mo ago
Nah, that doesn’t work when the substance of the change is this intense and has an actual effect on peoples’ bottom lines. If they wait a few months and try again, people will see their bills go up immediately and they’ll all get mad again. I don’t know what GH will do next, but if they try to do that, it will definitely backfire.
- arlcode 10mo ago
  sounds like it's time to increase their vendor lock in then an make sure they are not as compatible with other solutions. I fear this would be the obvious conclusion.
- beaker52 10mo ago
  You might be surprised at how much you’re willing to surrender if someone gave you some time to come to terms with it. It’s just a question of giving you enough time to move on from anger/shock/fear to toward acceptance. It’s like magic and is used all the time. > Nah, that doesn’t work when… Sounds like it could be another well known stage of the process called denial. Denial is when you tell yourself that something isn’t possible which makes you feel safer, when in fact you’re already moving toward acceptance - acceptance that you’re going to leave, or pay the price.
- lbreakjai 10mo ago
  When they eventually roll it out (And they will, they always do), everyone will have had plenty of time to run the numbers and either come up with a plan, or just swallow the pill. If you still complain in a few months then that's on you, because you've been warned.

denismi 10mo ago

Outside of work, I'm a very sporadic coder. On some side-projects where I'm using Actions, I'll have an inspired few days of progress followed by completely idle weeks/months/quarters. Losing free Actions doesn't particularly bother me, and I have no issue with paying what is most likely a negligible amount, but I don't really want to have a credit card on file which could be charged some unbounded amount if somebody gets into my account. I've shut down my personal AWS for similar reasons. Is there any way of me just loading up a one-time $20? That will probably last well into 2027, and give me the peace of mind that I can just let it run. If my account's compromised, or I misconfigure something that goes wild, I am perfectly happy to write off that amount and have my incredibly-low-stakes toy projects fail to build.

embedding-shape 10mo ago
Setup something like CircleCI that mainly relies on paid users of their main product, and has a free plan. Microsoft currently seem to be in the process of figuring out how to lower the costs of GitHub for free users, since I'm guessing they make their actual money on other segments and products.
hi_hi 10mo ago
I just want to say I found this quite an insightful comment. I similarly would love to use a pay-as-you-go pricing model as a way of safely trying out various SaaS services. Unfortunately I feel it is not in the SaaS businesses interests, who want to replicate the gym membership model where the 70% who don't use the service are supplementing the other 30% who use it frequently.
spockz 10mo ago
There are several “virtual credit card” providers that allow you to generate additional cards, set limit on them like amounts and who can charge the CC. The availability varies per geography.
- rjmunro 10mo ago
  The problem with that is you might still get a huge bill if something goes wrong, then they try to charge it to your card at the end of the day/week/month/whatever, and it fails. Now you still owe them the money, but haven't paid, so they tell you to pay on another card. If you refuse, they start debt collection against you and you could end up with your credit rating being affected, and maybe court cases and so on. I want give the company an amount of money, then know that it's run out and I have to pay for more. You can set monthly limits (https://github.com/settings/billing/budgets https://github.com/settings/billing/budgets), but if you are like me and have personal projects that you work on for a week or two a few times a year, that doesn't really work.

egorfine 10mo ago

Who could've thought, really

dvh 10mo ago

There's one thing I don't understand. Isn't GitHub action just "take a repo, do something with it, save something somewhere". So how is it different than writing a bash script that "clones the repo, do something with it, pushes the changes back"? If actions became paid feature, wouldn't that just generated myriads of show hn posts like "I recreated GitHub actions in xyz"?

CafeRacer 10mo ago
It's like bash scripts, but with ability to debug them.
- Kinrany 10mo ago
  There are few things less debuggable than Github Actions. Bash scripts isn't one of them
  - CafeRacer 10mo ago
    Apologies, I realized I had a typo. It should be "It's like bash scripts but WITHOUT the ability to debug them". I am personally not a fan of GHA and I think unsuperwised claude code could have produced a better CI system.
000ooo000 10mo ago
Where does one get to suffer YAML hell then??
- muixoozie 10mo ago
  Hand roll something on k8s. Yaml seems unavoidable in that ecosystem. :)
benterix 10mo ago
Yes, in theory any CI/CD (whether Github, Gitlab, Jenkins etc,) is just a shell script with some warpping. But this wrapping matters because it's convenience: how you integrate with the repo, how you deal with variables, secrets, caching, deployment security and so on. Some people roughly figured this out and proposed some ways which other people learned, so switching is always a bit of a pain in various ways. But it is definitely possible - I did quite a lot of pipeline migration in my life and this is definitely not a blocker for a project of small to medium to biggish-size.

donatj 10mo ago

The utter rent-seeking audacity of charging by the minute for action runners you run on your own server... Charge a flat fee per Action, sure. There is a tiny cost on GitHub's part associated with the API calls for starting and stopping, but if my build takes 8 hours on a self-hosted runner there is no more cost to GitHub than it taking 10 seconds. That's the whole point of self-hosted runners. Maybe there was more outrage elsewhere, but I was frankly confused at the seeming lack thereof here on Hacker News.

ClikeX 10mo ago
Yeah, the per minute pricing is what really does it. It makes me think they've gone with the worst option first, so people will swallow the new adjusted workflow they'll come up with.
franktankbank 10mo ago
I don't even understand how they could do it. You own the servers that are giving them responses to determine the start/end times, so fudge the numbers fuck them, maybe you could find bugs in their shitty code so they start crediting you. I think they kinda fucked themselves 3 concrete ways (among the nerds which may not be a problem for them): 1) this whole thing 2) the infinite running jobs issues which called attention to how poorly managed the GHA system is 3) zig et al announcing their departure and all the positive conversation around that

brodo 10mo ago

https://archive.ph/3nsGi https://archive.ph/3nsGi

bearjaws 10mo ago

Glad I moved to GitLab 7 years ago.

arminiusreturns 10mo ago

Just as cloud agnosticism means you should be able to bootstrap your infra in different clouds, that also includes your ci/cd. As a greybeard sysadmin, my advice is to start separating your ci/cd from the platforms you run on. https://www.slingacademy.com/article/git-post-receive-hook-a-practical-guide-with-examples/ https://www.slingacademy.com/article/git-post-receive-hook-a... Another of my tricks is to tie in your containerization there too, system-nspawn is what I'm using at the moment, but it can apply to others.

N_Lens 10mo ago

The outcry against this move was much larger than Microsoft anticipated. While there is some logic for charging for self-hosted, it just doesn't make sense for the consumers.

codeflo 10mo ago

My theory: Some manager's KPI is to increase the number of sold GitHub runner minutes. So they did some market research -- not enough to have a clear picture, but barely enough to be dangerous -- and found that some companies use self-hosted runners for cost reasons. So they deploy a two-pronged strategy: lower the cost of GitHub runners, and charge for the use of self-hosted runners, to incentivize switching. This fails for several reasons that someone who actually uses the product might have intuited: (a) For some use-cases, you can't switch to GitHub's runners. For us, it's a no-go for anything that touches our infrastructure. (b) Switching CI providers isn't hard, we had to do it twice already. Granted, most of our CI logic is in a custom build script that you can run locally, and not in the proprietary YAML file. But to be honest, I'd recommend that sort of setup for any CI provider, as you always want the ability to debug things locally. (c) GitHub Actions doesn't get the amount of love you'd expect from something billed as a "premium service". In fact, it often feels quite abandoned, barely kept working. Who knows what they're brewing internally, but they didn't coordinate this with a major feature announcement, and didn't rush to announce anything now that they got backlash, which leads me to believe they don't have anything major planned. (d) Paying someone -- by the minute, no less -- to use my own infrastructure feels strange and greedy. GitHub has always had per-user pricing, which feels fair and predictable. If for some reason they need more money, they can always increase that price. The fact that they didn't do that leads me to believe this wasn't about cost per se. Hence the KPI theory I mentioned above: this wasn't well-coordinated with any bigger strategy.

dirkc 10mo ago
I agree with (c) - I can't quite pinpoint it, but I've had that feeling myself several times.
altmanaltman 10mo ago
"Hey ChatGPT, how do I increase the number of GitHub runner minutes? DO NOT suggested anything illegal, research hard"
g947o 10mo ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46189692 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46189692 from a few days ago pretty much tells me that any company that slightly cares about security cannot possibly depend on GitHub runner for their CI (except maybe the smallest/simplest projects). It is just one compromised package away from ruining everything.

6LLvveMx2koXfwn 10mo ago

From the horses mouth as it were: https://resources.github.com/actions/2026-pricing-changes-for-github-actions/ https://resources.github.com/actions/2026-pricing-changes-fo...

deleted 10mo ago

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ryandvm 10mo ago

Seems like a year with record downtime for them is not a great time to announce a price increase...

smivan 10mo ago

I ended up prototyping self hosted https://woodpecker-ci.org/ https://woodpecker-ci.org/ on my k8s cluster. Ended up taking just a few hours of AI time (Claude Code). Woodpecker has a helm chart, can connect to Github and post status checks to commits. Open to feedback or tips and tricks on this, but so far it's looking promising. Curious how other folks experience has been.

ath3nd 10mo ago

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