[s3cur3]

Having been a happy customer of Blacksmith, Depot, and Ubicloud at various points (all three of which offer GitHub Actions runners at cheaper prices than GitHub themselves), I agree the billing here is weird. It's worth pointing out, though, that you have to use a lot of CI minutes to incur a $1000 bill. You're well outside of hobbyist levels, and that same level of usage would have previously cost double from GitHub themselves. This a business with serious compute needs, being asked to pay real money.

[justinclift]

Wonder if they'd be better served $$$ wise to use dedicated servers or similar?

[Lalabadie]

Yes, having a performant CI server on premises would probably pay itself in less than three months.

Startups are usually resource-rich and time-poor, and don't want to allocate employee time to infrastructure unless it's core to their business, so arguments for efficient spending there are easily overlooked.

[ashkulz]

We used to have self-hosted runners on Hetzner dedicated servers, and we migrated to UbiCloud ~6 months ago.

Unless you can optimise your CI runtime to be very balanced and fast, you're going to have a lot of jobs queued during working hours ... although it costs more per minute, the fact that CI jobs are bursty means it works out not too much costlier but with less queue time.

[justinclift]

Oh good point. Hadn't thought of the bursty nature of the load.

Sounds like you need to share infra with an org of similar needs in a vastly different timezone.

I guess that's what SaaS CI solutions are in a way. :)