[llamaLord]

As the person who runs one of the largest cloud CI/CD services around, I can tell you exactly how they're making money... Actions.

GitHub would be making a VERY healthy margin on every minute of build time run on their platform, especially considering they don't have to pay a cloud platform for the compute like Gitlab or Bitbucket Pipelines do.

[Aeolun]

Running an amazon instance is around 10x cheaper than using an equivalent action runner.

But for 99% of people it doesn’t matter because their usage never goes over the free allowance anyway.

[llamaLord]

You'd be surprised actually. Once you factor in network costs, running your own on AWS is only ~50% cheaper than paying for SaaS.

Factor in the opportunity cost you pay by having to have a person manage a self-hosted CI/CD cluster rather than outsourcing it, and SaaS CI/CD is around 3x better value than self-hosted.

Happy to share more detailed numbers if people are curious...