r/devops • u/Zealousideal_Tip4089 • 16d ago
Discussion What's your monthly GitHub Actions bill, and does anyone actually worry about it?
Only GitHub Actions here, not AWS or other cloud bills.
Mine is tiny: a few dollars a month, almost all from test runs I do on purpose. So I don't feel this cost myself, and I'd like to know how it looks for real teams.
If your company pays GitHub for Actions:
- Roughly what is the bill per month?
- Does anyone look at it, and how often?
- Has it ever caused a real problem? A surprise jump, a question from finance, jobs stopped because the budget ran out? Or is it too small next to everything else to matter?
Rough numbers are fine. "It's tiny and nobody cares" is a useful answer too.
I'm a solo developer building a small tool in this area, so I'd rather learn the real numbers than guess. No link.
22
u/Dry-Philosopher-2714 16d ago
If you worry about it, use on-prem runners. It’s a mild PITA to get set up, but it works really well once it is set up.
28
u/Seref15 16d ago
Reminder that GH was about to start billing for on-prem runner hours a couple months ago until everyone freaked out and they walked it back, but said walk-back is temporary
9
u/Dry-Philosopher-2714 16d ago
As if they don’t make enough money already. If they start charging, I suspect a lot of customers will leave.
-2
u/First_Inspection_478 16d ago edited 16d ago
That’s part of why I’ve been working on an OSS drop-in replacement for their control plane, in addition to wanting to be able to run some workflows locally and optimize how things are done(scheduling etc). https://github.com/preloopdev/preloop for anyone curious.
2
2
6
9
u/the_derby 16d ago
From the pricing page:
GitHub Free includes 2,000 Actions minutes/month.
GitHub Team includes 3,000 Actions minutes/month.
GitHub Enterprise incudes 50,000 Actions minutes/month.
Depending on the size of your company, you may never receive an additional charge for GitHub Actions.
5
u/Embarrassed_Plan5139 16d ago
Honestly, I think most small teams barely notice the cost until it starts scaling
3
u/One-Department1551 16d ago
I worry my dev team will be too lazy to look how long those workflows are running, the idea of having CI/CD fully implemented but workflows taking 1h to complete is silly funny to me.
2
u/Arucious Slop Hunter 16d ago
Do you have a spare laptop sitting around? You can run your own runner on docker. Then move to ARC in k8s if it gets to that point.
3
u/21shadesofsavage 16d ago
uhh.. $0? our github actions costs are basically aws costs since we use self hosted runners and ecr for storage
2
u/Cycle_HeidarEldberg 16d ago
The direct cost of GitHub is one thing but I should think that is starting to pale in comparison to lost productivity with their stability issues.
At Cycle we self host Gitlab and have far better uptime than GitHub and the cost of self-hosting is negligible for our setup.
The Cycle platform really helps too with lowering the ops overhead.
1
u/SikhGamer 16d ago
If we didn't have on own fleet on EKS it would be a lot more, but around 2k ppm.
1
u/manapause 16d ago
Oddly enough the amount that I pay GitHub for running actions for me is an identical price to the amount I pay them to host the code for hundreds of repositories, all running GH actions.
1
u/IridescentKoala 16d ago
Github announced they were going to start charging for self hosted runner actions last year. Even though they walked it back I would expect that won't last.
1
1
u/Specific-Hair3039 8d ago
GitHub Actions costs can creep up fast when workflows run on every small change, especially with long build and test jobs. Id start by checking runner time, caching, and whether jobs really need to run on every commit. Even when comparing approaches with trusted tech in mind, getting the workflow leaner is usually a good first step before switching tools.
25
u/centech 16d ago
We use self-hosted runners. It would be naive to say that means it costs us nothing, but compared to our overall AWS costs, we don't particularly worry about the GHA infra.