Following publication of our original article, GitHub reversed its decision. The Microsoft-owned developer site has taken to X to admit it might have made a mistake by unilaterally announcing plans to charge people for using their own hardware to host runners.
“We’ve read your posts and heard your feedback,” GitHub said. “We’re postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions to take time to re-evaluate our approach.”
The company said that it still intends to do something to help offset the “real costs” in running GitHub Actions via self-hosted runners, but “we missed the mark with this change by not including more of you in our planning.”
The real costs are the ~$100m they spend a year on developing GitHub and providing it for free to most people - including free CI.
They charge 3x the cost price for runners so that they can actually make money. This change is so that they can’t get undercut by alternative hosted runner providers.
I do think they could have just explained that and it probably would have been more palettable than their “we’re making it cheaper!” lie, but I guess there are also a lot of people that still think the only moral pricing is cost plus.