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.

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carefulfungi 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

Classic SaaS platform problem. If you give it away, it will cost you money - and eventually someone will "arbitrage" it at sufficient scale to matter. If you charge for it, your billing becomes a nightmare collection of counters and rates, impossible for users to estimate and understand.

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estimator7292 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It sure as hell isn't a per-minute cost

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chippiewill 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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jborean93 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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.

	▲	tom1337 4 days ago \| parent \| next [-]
		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.
	▲	whateveracct 4 days ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		the issue is it's per-$DURATION it could be per-workflow, regardless of duration

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0x073 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Then why we pay a fix price for everything, size of repositories, webhooks etc, except the self hosted actions.