I'm happy to see they're investing in Actions — charging for it should help make sure it continues to work. It's a huge reason Github is so valuable: having the status checks run on every PR, automatically, is great. Even though I'm more of a fan of Buildkite when it comes to configuring the workflows, I still need something to kick them off when PRs change, etc.

Charging a per-workflow-minute platform fee makes a lot of sense and the price is negligible. They're ingesting logs from all the runners, making them available to us, etc. Helps incentivize faster workflows, too, so pretty customer-aligned. We use self-hosted runners (actually WarpBuild) so we don't benefit from the reduced default price of the Github-hosted runners, but that's a nice improvement as well for most customers. And Actions are still free for public repos.

Now if only they'd let us say "this action is required to pass _if it runs_, otherwise it's not required" as part of branch protection rules. Then we'd really be in heaven!

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fishpen0 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

This pricing model will continue to incentivize them internally to not fix the hundreds of clearly documented issues that causes CI to be incredibly slow. Everything from their self-inflicted bottlenecking of file transfers to the safe_sleep bug that randomly makes a runner run forever until it times out. All of it now makes them more money

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Bjartr 6 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> charging for it should help make sure it continues to work

It's there a particular reason you're extending the benefit of the doubt here? This seems like the classic playbook of making something free, waiting for people to depend on it, then charging for it, all in order to maximize revenue. Where does the idea that they're really doing this in order to deliver a more valuable service come from?

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asmor 6 days ago | parent | next [-]

Yeah. This is a reaction to providers like blacksmith or self-hosted solutions like the k8s operator being better at operating their very bad runner then them, at cheaper prices, with better performance, more storage and warm caches. The price cut is good, the anticompetitive bit where they charge you to use computers they don't provide isn't. My guess is that either we're all gonna move to act or that one of the SaaS startups sue.

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peterldowns 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I appreciate being able to pay for a service I rely on. Using self-hosted runners, I previously paid nothing for Github Actions — now I do pay something for it. The price is extremely cheap and seems reasonable considering the benefits I receive. They've shown continued interest in investing in the product, and have a variety of things on their public roadmap that I'm looking forward to (including parallel steps) — https://github.com/orgs/github/projects/4247?pane=issue&item....

Charging "more than nothing" is certainly not what I would call maximizing revenue, and even it they were maximizing revenue I would still make the same decision to purchase or abandon based on its value to me. Have you interacted with the economy before?

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blibble 6 days ago | parent [-]

> The price is extremely cheap

and you expect it to stay this way?

	▲	peterldowns 6 days ago \| parent [-]
		> and seems reasonable considering the benefits I receive. > I would still make the same decision to purchase or abandon based on its value to me.

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NewJazz 6 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I don't think it makes sense to charge per minute just for logs. If they want to charge for log retention, sure, go ahead. But that is pennies, let's be real.