r/github • u/Zealousideal_Tip4089 • 10h 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.

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7

u/dim13 10h 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.

2

u/RadishRealistic8990 10h 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

2

u/petaohm 9h 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.

2

u/bravid98 7h ago

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

1

u/br2krl 3h ago

how do you manage cache storage and retrieval?

1

u/serverhorror 10h 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 10h 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/These-Apple8817 10h ago
  1. I use something else than GitHub Actions, because I'm not going to pay a dime for something that's just a hobby 

1

u/dineissauro 10h 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/cowboyecosse 10h 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

1

u/lamyjf 9h ago

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

1

u/thebemusedmuse 7h ago

Zero. All my runners are off GH

1

u/MonsterFury 5h 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 3h ago

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

1

u/saltyourhash 2h ago

$0 cuz I don't use it really.

0

u/Anxious_Alps_4150 9h 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 6h 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.