Free Github Actions weren't built for this scenario.

Make Github Actions a paid-tier exclusive and this problem goes away.

GitHub are too scared to do that after the backlash around charging people for their own runners, but this would be a very different thing, simply stop giving free actions to people who have never paid them a penny.

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thayne 17 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

It isn't just that they wanted to charge for using your own action runners. It's that the price was almost as much as using GH's hosted action runnners. Which didn't even include the cost of hosting your own runners.

I think removing the free tier altogether would be a bad move, especially given that some important open source projects rely on it. But they could possibly lower some of the limits, especially for new accounts, with a way for open source projects to apply for more, and maybe have an automatic scale up for projects that are more popular, by some metric. And maybe limit the free tier to public repos, and maybe even only repos that use an OSI approved license or something.

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LaffertyDev 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> GitHub are too scared to do that after the backlash around charging people for their own runners, but this would be a very different thing, simply stop giving free actions to people who have never paid them a penny.

I had no idea they charged you to run your own runner. I am immediately of the opinion that is wrong.

Conversely, I would have no issues if GHA become a premium product. Or maybe "your actions only run when we have spare compute". I've personally given Github money (back when private repos cost $$) and wouldn't be concerned about doing it again.

That is to say, I think you've nailed it.

	▲	whynotmaybe 2 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		They don't charge you for your own runner but they wanted to. The downtime hasn't really impacted me and not really a reason for me to leave github, but making me pay for using my own infrastructure would quickly encourage me to leave github.
	▲	Normal_gaussian an hour ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		> Conversely, I would have no issues if GHA become a premium product. This is a real problem for acquiring customers. CI/CD / Actions in general has a low initial perceived value and a high perceived value after use while being primarily a commodity product (serverless compute). To acquire customers they need to offer a free tier, to make money they need to charge their heavy users more, but because it is a commodity their heavy users will self-host runners or jump ship. Action minutes is a really good proxy for value gain from cloud git services, where repo count, user count, file count/size, etc isn't. Its a fun pricing puzzle.
	▲	toomuchtodo 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I think a reasonable amount is fine for them to serve as the orchestrator, queue, and control plane for self hosted runners, has to be reasonable though. Think monthly utility service cost to maintain service vs usage.

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spacephysics 23 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Likely easier said then done, but why not separate infra out from shared vs dedicated hosts? Something like, actions will still run but at some degraded capacity, where actions and PRs are still at least functional.

My company has heavy handily moved from self-hosted version control system to github and now we’re suffering more outages. Though the self hosted system had less features, and we needed to maintain our own jenkins infrastructure for CI/CD, at least we really only suffered from very major cloud-provider level outages

	▲	thayne 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> Likely easier said than done You said it. And it is also significantly more difficult to retrifit that design onto a running system than to design it like that from the beginning.

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nchmy an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

worse than this is that if you fork a repo that has actions, the actions will run on your account as well - which is completely unnecessary. I have all sorts of stale forks that are just churning away with actions that I dont care about at all because I am not getting charged.

The solution, of course, is not to simply start charging for all actions, because then everyone would wake up to all sorts of mystery charges. They'd need to notify that forked actions would be turned off and then opt-in for paid actions.

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howunfortunate 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

They already have a free tier cap, I believe around 100 action minutes per week or something like that.

(I know because I recently hit it)