>In the past, our customers have asked us how GitHub views third-party runners long-term. The platform fee largely answers that: GitHub now monetizes Actions usage regardless of where jobs run, aligning third-party runners like Blacksmith as ecosystem partners rather than workarounds.
It does? I feel like it implies that they want third-party runners like Blacksmith out of the ecosystem, which is why they're now financially penalizing customers who use them.
suryao 47 minutes ago [-]
With these changes, three things hold:
1. Services like blacksmith and WarpBuild (I'm the founder) are still cheaper than GitHub hosted runners, even after including the $0.002/min self-hosting tax.
2. The biggest lever for controlling costs now is reducing the number of minutes used in CI. Given how slow Github's runners are, or even the ones on AWS compared to our baremetal processor single core performance + nvme disks, it makes even more sense to use WarpBuild. This actually makes a better case for moving from slow AWS instances running with actions-runner-controller etc. to WarpBuild!
3. Messaging this to most users is harder since the first reaction is that Github options make more sense. After some rational thought, it is the opposite.
Overall - it is worse for Github users, but options like blacksmith and WarpBuild are still the better option.
K3UL 1 hours ago [-]
That's clearly the case, this is a three-pronged manoeuver :
- Introducing a cheap 1-core runner
- Lowering the price of GitHub-hosted runners
- Making it slightly more expensive to use self-hosted runners
- There is actually a fourth one: the vnet integration, which also allows you to run public runners in your own infra
As a bonus, for some people it means something that was free is now not free. Those who are willing to pay rather than go, might prefer to use GitHub-hosted if they are going to pay anyway.
This is clearly an incentive to use github-hosted, and their sales reps are also going this way.
benterix 1 hours ago [-]
Well, these people earn their living by saying these things that only seem to make sense superficially but don't withstand closer scrutiny.
amarant 1 hours ago [-]
Getting acquired by Microsoft is a death sentence for any product.
The only variable is how long after acquisition before they gut it. It's almost never right away. GitHub was acquired 7 years ago, but it started showing symptoms perhaps 2 years ago.
With this I think it's clear the wound was fatal. GitHub will stumble on for a few more years with ever-decreasing quality, before going the way of Skype.
So, I guess we're all migrating to gitlab? Or is it time to launch gittube? Githamster?
no_wizard 8 minutes ago [-]
The exodus from GitHub has not begun, as far as I can tell.
They seem to care much less about free users than in the past but businesses still flock to it. GitLab is the only other platform I’ve seen in the workplace of anywhere I worked, with the exception of a big tech company I worked at. They had both GitHub enterprise and an internally maintained platform which was being phased out. if I recall correctly it based on Phabricator
sytse 1 hours ago [-]
In case you're considering moving to GitLab we currently have no plans that I'm aware of to pay from bringing your own runners. Happy to answer any questions.
Kwpolska 21 minutes ago [-]
If Microsoft had not acquired GitHub, there would not be GitHub Actions. GitHub Actions is a mediocre knock-off of Azure Pipelines, and it was launched after the acquisition.
Hopefully something ForgeFed-powered, so that we can all re-decentralize, as is right and proper.
myko 60 minutes ago [-]
I'm running forgejo on my NAS, including CI runners etc. Harder to share with folks but great for my personal projects (except building an iOS app, which someday I'll set a Mac Mini up for probably)
strangattractor 2 hours ago [-]
Microsoft has started raising prices on many of their products. I suppose they decided that their current customers need to pay the increased CapEx for AI;) New motto - AI pay for it whether you use it or not.
scienceman 2 hours ago [-]
No such thing as free parking
CartwheelLinux 2 hours ago [-]
No but there is validated parking for customers of other services.
a per-job cost instead of per-minute cost for non-compute "control plane" for CI would have made more sense and seemed more reasonable to me -- but don't really know if customers would have liked it better/worse or paid more/less under it.
(I work exclusively on public repo open source at the moment, and get Github actions for free).
erdaniels 2 hours ago [-]
Time to get off for good. We're moving to https://forgejo.org/. With downtime and this, screw them.
The way Github, Xamarin and other acquisitions have gone down, it is quite clear that the Satya charming phase is sadly gone.
cedws 1 hours ago [-]
I wonder if players like Depot could sidestep GHA by using webhooks instead of acting as a custom runner, in other words build their own compatible control plane. I guess it would probably break a lot of workflows.
What I'd really like to see is some new CI/CD systems though. Actions is garbage in multiple dimensions. Can't somebody do something clever and save us from this flaky insecure YAML hell?
kylegalbraith 57 minutes ago [-]
Founder of Depot[0] here. To answer your idea, at Depot we already have this concept internally. In fact, Depot isn't reliant on webhooks at all to run your jobs. One of the reasons we can be up running your jobs when GitHub webhooks service is down. Effectively, we listen to a different system to know you have a job that needs to be run.
To your second statement, I generally agree. Sounds strange to say given we're in the business of GHA runners. But it's just not a performant or reliable system at scale. This change from GitHub doesn't smell of a company that wants to do right by it's users.
If you are interested in what is up next for us at Depot, feel free to ping me via the email in my bio. I think you'll be quite interested in what we are doing.
At $0.002 per minute there are at most 90 dollars in a month. Maybe even after an year of cumulative costs it's less then the cost of switching to something else. Maybe even after many and many years of cumulative costs: the larger the company the more expensive corporate inertia gets.
llama052 56 minutes ago [-]
Our org is showing around 200-300$/mo in added fees and we are exclusively self hosting in our own on premise cluster. Kind of wild we have to pay to use our own compute.
notatoad 18 minutes ago [-]
if you were only paying to use your own compute, you could just use your own compute - you don't have to use github actions, you can trigger actions on your own systems without github.
the control plane clearly has value to people beyond the compute used for running the actions, and it seems reasonable that they should charge for that if you're using it.
Alupis 33 minutes ago [-]
In fairness to Github, bringing your own runners isn't "free" on their end. The orchestration happens server-side, so there is some level of cost. I don't know if that justifies the $0.002/min price - just wanted to point this out.
llama052 31 minutes ago [-]
Oh absolutely, but honestly the self hosted runner setups that I'm familiar with are just waiting for a call. As far as I can tell GH side just routes.
klinch 1 hours ago [-]
I agree that it’s probably not a big amount. But note that it can be potentially quiet a bit more than the 90$. Task runtimes are always rounded up to the nearest minute.
For example, in our pipeline we have 5 different linter tasks (for different subprojects), running each only a few seconds. Nonetheless, we’ll get billed for 5 minutes on every commit.
pmontra 57 minutes ago [-]
Ah I see, they are not minutes as on the clock. They are runtime minutes. That changes my assessment. I was thinking that they picked a balanced price point not to scare away many people except probably personal projects or unfunded open source. If it's something potentially in the ballpark of $500 per month it's a bit too greedy. It's more like: we want only corporate customers, free tier users need not apply.
turtlebits 1 hours ago [-]
Per minute per runner. If you have multiple workfows/jobs running, it can add up.
bakies 2 hours ago [-]
Yeah... Kind of expected GHA to be a money trap at some point. It was tempting with how easy it is to setup. And every since Claude Code integrated tightly it assumes i want pipelines in gha even though I have pipelines elsewhere. Glad I stuck with picking a different system and didn't invest a lot of time here. I had plenty of compute to run jobs myself.
anthonj 1 hours ago [-]
It's a bit weird, they add pricing for this, but reducwle GitHub-hosted runners by "up to 39%".
Not sure about the "up to" implications, but I guess it's just Microsoft trying to make github a bit more freemium tm
noname120 1 hours ago [-]
The full quote:
> And we’re reducing the net cost of GitHub-hosted runners by up to 39%, depending on which machine type is used.
> The price reduction you will see in your account depends on the types of machines that you use most frequently – smaller runners will have a smaller relative price reduction, larger runners will see a larger relative reduction.
gcau 1 hours ago [-]
If I have a VPS, what should I be running on it to replace github actions? (eg run tests, return pass/fail to github PR)
watermelon0 1 hours ago [-]
https://woodpecker-ci.org is an option. It's an open source CI tool, that supports integration with GitHub (among others).
defraudbah 2 hours ago [-]
it explains github actions update better than github
indubioprorubik 2 hours ago [-]
Makes you wonder, how much the AI madness will be able to cannibalize other buisness sectors before it encounters the limits of growth there, leaving behind hollowed out eco-systems - similar to how adds ruined everything.
llama052 1 hours ago [-]
I guess this is on brand for Microsoft. Just lame to go through the trouble to self host runners and still get tacked on with fees after the fact.
Hard for me to feel like our industry is innovating and not just gouging with the rest in the battle for enshittification.
I will intentionally start exploring other options even if the cost isn't high, because I don't want to support this type of thing.
Is there any included free amount of platform minutes for private orgs/repos? Currently using Blakcksmith with arm64 and do around 600 minutes a month (very small). I get 2,000 free minutes of GitHub runner time for free, so maybe have to switch to using GitHub native arm64 runners.
That being said even with no free platform minutes my Blacksmith usage will only $1.20 a month in platform fees, so inconsequential.
throwaway613745 2 hours ago [-]
Use open source software. Buy your own compute. Make the effort. It's worth it.
amarant 1 hours ago [-]
I'm kind of ok with renting compute so long as it's running open source software.
Basically I'll gladly pay for a service, but I don't like getting locked into that service. If the payed service is using FOSS, I will always have the option to migrate if the provider starts to misbehave
gaigalas 2 hours ago [-]
> TL;DR GitHub is adding a $0.002-per-minute fee on all GitHub Actions usage, so the control plane is no longer free.
It does? I feel like it implies that they want third-party runners like Blacksmith out of the ecosystem, which is why they're now financially penalizing customers who use them.
1. Services like blacksmith and WarpBuild (I'm the founder) are still cheaper than GitHub hosted runners, even after including the $0.002/min self-hosting tax.
2. The biggest lever for controlling costs now is reducing the number of minutes used in CI. Given how slow Github's runners are, or even the ones on AWS compared to our baremetal processor single core performance + nvme disks, it makes even more sense to use WarpBuild. This actually makes a better case for moving from slow AWS instances running with actions-runner-controller etc. to WarpBuild!
3. Messaging this to most users is harder since the first reaction is that Github options make more sense. After some rational thought, it is the opposite.
Overall - it is worse for Github users, but options like blacksmith and WarpBuild are still the better option.
- Introducing a cheap 1-core runner
- Lowering the price of GitHub-hosted runners
- Making it slightly more expensive to use self-hosted runners
- There is actually a fourth one: the vnet integration, which also allows you to run public runners in your own infra
As a bonus, for some people it means something that was free is now not free. Those who are willing to pay rather than go, might prefer to use GitHub-hosted if they are going to pay anyway.
This is clearly an incentive to use github-hosted, and their sales reps are also going this way.
The only variable is how long after acquisition before they gut it. It's almost never right away. GitHub was acquired 7 years ago, but it started showing symptoms perhaps 2 years ago.
With this I think it's clear the wound was fatal. GitHub will stumble on for a few more years with ever-decreasing quality, before going the way of Skype.
So, I guess we're all migrating to gitlab? Or is it time to launch gittube? Githamster?
They seem to care much less about free users than in the past but businesses still flock to it. GitLab is the only other platform I’ve seen in the workplace of anywhere I worked, with the exception of a big tech company I worked at. They had both GitHub enterprise and an internally maintained platform which was being phased out. if I recall correctly it based on Phabricator
This is going to be the downfall of GA
(I work exclusively on public repo open source at the moment, and get Github actions for free).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46291156
What I'd really like to see is some new CI/CD systems though. Actions is garbage in multiple dimensions. Can't somebody do something clever and save us from this flaky insecure YAML hell?
To your second statement, I generally agree. Sounds strange to say given we're in the business of GHA runners. But it's just not a performant or reliable system at scale. This change from GitHub doesn't smell of a company that wants to do right by it's users.
If you are interested in what is up next for us at Depot, feel free to ping me via the email in my bio. I think you'll be quite interested in what we are doing.
[0] https://depot.dev
the control plane clearly has value to people beyond the compute used for running the actions, and it seems reasonable that they should charge for that if you're using it.
For example, in our pipeline we have 5 different linter tasks (for different subprojects), running each only a few seconds. Nonetheless, we’ll get billed for 5 minutes on every commit.
Not sure about the "up to" implications, but I guess it's just Microsoft trying to make github a bit more freemium tm
> And we’re reducing the net cost of GitHub-hosted runners by up to 39%, depending on which machine type is used.
> The price reduction you will see in your account depends on the types of machines that you use most frequently – smaller runners will have a smaller relative price reduction, larger runners will see a larger relative reduction.
Hard for me to feel like our industry is innovating and not just gouging with the rest in the battle for enshittification.
I will intentionally start exploring other options even if the cost isn't high, because I don't want to support this type of thing.
GitHub will begin charging for self-hosted action runners on March 2026 https://github.blog/changelog/2025-12-16-coming-soon-simpler... (Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46291156)
That being said even with no free platform minutes my Blacksmith usage will only $1.20 a month in platform fees, so inconsequential.
Basically I'll gladly pay for a service, but I don't like getting locked into that service. If the payed service is using FOSS, I will always have the option to migrate if the provider starts to misbehave
That's not true for _all GitHub Actions usage_.
https://resources.github.com/actions/2026-pricing-changes-fo...
> Standard GitHub-hosted or self-hosted runner usage on public repositories will remain free.