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Comment by larkost | Hacker News Reader

But it is not for hardware you own. It is for the use of GutHubs coordinators, which they have been donating the use of to you for free. They have now decided that that service is something they are going to charge for. Your objection to GitHub "extracting usage-based rent from me" seems to ignore that you have been getting usage of their hardware for free up to now.

So, like I said, the question for you is whether that $140/month of service is worth that money to you, or can you find a better priced alternative, or build something that costs less yourself.

My guess is that once you think about this some more you will decide it is worth it, and probably spend some time trying to drive down your minutes/month a bit. But at $140 a month, how much time is that worth investing?

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No. It is not worth a time-scaled cost each month for them to start a job on my machines and store a few megabytes of log files.

I'd happily pay a fixed monthly fee for this service, as I already do for GitHub.

The problem here is that this is like a grocery store charging me money for every bag I bring to bag my own groceries.

> But at $140 a month, how much time is that worth investing?

It's not $140/month. It's $140/month today, when my company is still relatively small and it's just me. This cost will scale as my company scales, in a way that is completely bonkers.

> The problem here is that this is like a grocery store charging me money for every bag I bring to bag my own groceries.

Maybe they can market it as the Github Actions corkage fee

> The problem here is that this is like a grocery store charging me money for every bag I bring to bag my own groceries.

This is an odd take because you're completely discounting the value of the orchestration. In your grocery store analogy, who's the orchestrator? It isn't you.

Do you feel that orchestration runs on a per-minute basis?

As long as they're reserving resources for your job during the period of execution, it does.

Charging people to maintain a row in a database by the minute is top-tier, I agree.

If you really think that's all it is, I would encourage you to write your own.

It would be silly to write a new one today. Plenty of open source + indy options to invest into instead.

For scheduled work, cron + a log sink is fine, and for pull request CI there's plenty of alternatives that don't charge by the minute to use your own hardware. The irony here, unfortunately, is that the latter requires I move entirely off of GitHub now.

> It is not worth a time-scaled cost each month for them to start a job on my machines and store a few megabytes of log files

If it is so easy why don’t you write your own orchestrator to run jobs on the hardware you own?

so they are selling cent of their CPU time for a minute's worth

> My guess is that once you think about this some more you will decide it is worth it, and probably spend some time trying to drive down your minutes/month a bit. But at $140 a month, how much time is that worth investing?

It's $140 right now. And if they want to squeeze you for cents worth of CPU time (because for artifact storage you're already paying separately), they *will* squeeze harder.

And more importantly *RIGHT NOW* it costs more per minute than running decent sized runner!

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