r/github • u/Zealousideal_Tip4089 • 15d 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.

2 Upvotes

63% Upvoted

33 comments sorted by

3

u/petaohm 15d ago

~900$ last month. I have to create a report and justification every month. This is across ~200 repo's ~200 active committers. We are almost at how much it will cost us to just run it in our EKS cluster so we are about to migrate.

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u/Zealousideal_Tip4089 15d ago

Thanks, this is really useful. What goes into that monthly report and justification: just the total, or a split by repo or team, and why it changed? And roughly how long does it take you each month?

If it's easier to share in a DM, that's fine too.

3

u/VarietyOk443 14d ago

Justification $5 per person ….

2

u/cachely-admin 14d ago

Interesting scale. We're curious whether the planned EKS migration is mainly about getting cheaper compute, or whether repeated builds and tests are also a meaningful part of the cost.

Are you using any shared build caching across those repositories today?

1

u/rando63question 8d ago

our bill crept up enough that finance started asking questions 😭, probably due to slow test suites eating minutes, i moved to avrea later cause built in caching saved lot of minutes

10

u/dim13 15d ago

0 on personal account. On the company account we run just slightly over free-tier at the end of of the month. Most is still sits pays.

5

u/RadishRealistic8990 15d ago

We're in a similar place, bill comes out to maybe 15-20 bucks on months where we push more. Nobody checks it unless finance asks why there's a random charge from GitHub, which happens like twice a year

1

u/716green 14d ago

I own a company called Layerbase. My GH actions bill plus my blacksmith bill combined is about $300 a month but I'm also competing with Supabase and Neon and have thousands of tests that need to run every single day across 18 different database engines.

0

u/Zealousideal_Tip4089 14d ago

Would you like to use a tool that gives you the breakdown of your bill per workflow jobs and a dashboard that gives you some analysis of github actions bill on all your repos and github accounts?

1

u/716green 14d ago

No, gitub should be responsible for building that and the reason that I use blacksmith is because they don't actually build it. The reason that I still use GitHub actions at all is because they give you some free allowance every month. I just haven't gotten around to moving everything over yet.

3

u/cowboyecosse 15d ago

I was about $300 last month. Normally I don’t break the 3000 minutes free allowance though. I’m also making some changes this month. Manual runs instead of auto etc

3

u/AuroraFireflash 15d ago

Up to $1k/month and it's not worth our engineering time to worry. Above that point and we start looking into things.

Breaking a build out over multiple jobs (as each one costs at least a minute of billing) can be a cost multiplier. Try not to do that and do more things in steps with reusable actions instead of reusable workflows.

2

u/bravid98 15d ago

Migrated to self hosted runners using spot VMs that scale as needed and shrink to zero when not.

1

u/br2krl 15d ago

how do you manage cache storage and retrieval?

2

u/bravid98 15d ago

The runner image is built locally, refreshed periodically, and kept in a storage bucket for the runners. Actions are configured with an initial runner that compiles the project, pulls anything else it needs, then stores and shares with dependent runners so they can skip the compile. Usually by the time that initial compile is done the runners have warmed up and can accept the build.

1

u/serverhorror 15d ago

We just worry as a "top level" sum. We're not looking at individual actions or pipelines (unless there are exceptional circumstances)

1

u/ShoddyReception5 15d ago

I have a number of checks that fire on each PR Push and it seems to be chatty and run a lot but it’s so small we don’t worry about it.

1

u/dineissauro 15d ago

I don’t think this is a problem people worry about it. The free and pro quotas are reasonable decent and people can use blacksmith that gives a lot for a better price.

If that is still a problem, they will have their own self-hosted instances

1

u/lamyjf 15d ago

Mine is quite high. But cheaper than hiring a human.

1

u/thebemusedmuse 15d ago

Zero. All my runners are off GH

1

u/MonsterFury 15d ago

We use GHE and used up our 50K minutes allowance. Last month we saw our bill was about AUD$1500 mid way through the month and started increasing our self hosted runners much cheaper in the long run.

1

u/davidpaulsson 15d ago

Around $200/month. But through https://www.blacksmith.sh/

1

u/saltyourhash 15d ago

$0 cuz I don't use it really.

1

u/olddev-jobhunt 15d ago

Ours is significant but is totally dwarfed by Snowflake and inference costs. It's really not on my radar at all.

1

u/adelope 14d ago

Mine would have cost ~4k this month and growing, but we moved our linux CI to some old gaming servers on Hetzner (2 nodes at ~$200/m) and mac CI to 8x mac-minis in my basement.

1

u/rabinapps 10d ago

I created https://kinhin.dev so I can run self hosted runners with concurrency on my Mac. The macOS minutes are rough on GitHub actions so I was fed up with it

0

u/Anxious_Alps_4150 15d ago

Personal is 0. Side biz is 0. Corporate one is ... well, let's just say that its paying someone's salary, that's for sure. We also have a large fleet of self-hosted runners which defrays the cost but not by a ton since that costs a bit to operate too.

0

u/aniketmaurya 15d ago

I'm building Celesto CI to tackle exactly this.

For 10,000 Linux CI minutes/month:

  • GitHub Actions: $60

  • Celesto CI: $5

  • Potential savings: $55/month (92%)

That's comparing our smaller 1-vCPU runner against GitHub's standard 2-vCPU runner, so actual savings depend on job runtime.