Yikes! They seem to be gunning for services like WarpBuild, which we've used for a couple years to keep our costs low. The $0.002 per minute on top of WarpBuild's costs is exactly GitHub's new pricing scheme.

I'm happy for competition, but this seems a bit foul since we users aren't getting anything tangible beyond the promise of improvements and investments that I don't need.

The lever that matters the most with the new $0.002/min tax is to reduce the number of minutes consumed.

Given that GitHub runners are still slow as ever, it actually is a point in our favor even compared to self-hosting on aws etc. However, it makes the value harder to communicate <shrug>.