No it's much less. Our runners are hosted in AWS ECS, you'd be surprised how affordable you can make that given the right optimizations (which is probably why GH made this decision).
IMO it's long time coming. Streaming logs and other supporting functionality is not free. We at Cirrus Runners provide runners as a service for a fixed monthly price with unlimited usage. We target large entrerprises that save $100K+ yearly by switching to us (10-25 times). In our calculations the new per-minute fee is roughly ~0.1% of the effective per-minute cost our customers avoid by using our fixed-price model. Over providers with the traditional per-minute pricing will have bigger impact.
Today GitHub announced changes to pricing for GitHub-managed runners and introduced a new per-minute charge for organizations using self-hosted runners. Below we’ll dive into what changed, the backstory, how companies have been using self-hosted runners, and how this affects third-party providers like Cirrus Runners.
There’s been a lot of conversations about moving off the traditional cloud for companies to save tremendously on infrastructure bills. Famously DHH and 37signals moved off AWS to their own hardware to save millions.
We are doing something similar with Cirrus Runners...
Cirrus Runners team controls, develops and optimizes every layer of the infrastructure involved, from provisioning the fastest bare-metal servers off traditional clouds to building state of the art virtualization solutions for macOS called Tart and for Linux called Vetu.
This vertical integration allows us to provide the most cost-efficient infrastructure for your GitHub Actions. Unlimited monthly usage for a fixed price. No hidden fees. No surprises.
Initially there were a lot of interest from Anka users to migrate to a more scalable and DX friendly tool. That’s why FAQ started with comparison. In a nutshell these tools are similar but taking different approaches for the same problems: OCI registries vs own implementation, CLI first vs REST oriented, Packer/VNC vs own scripting, etc.
You can setup a Linux dev VM but unfortunately it won’t have access to the GPU. There is Rosetta 2 support though which works brilliantly with amd64 binaries.
Realization for the license change was a bit different. From day 1 we knew Tart is good and hoped to build a healthy ecosystem around it. Unfortunately, our enthusiasm wasn't met by big companies. You can check this blog post for more details https://tart.run/blog/2023/02/11/changing-tart-license/.
The free usage is pretty generous: free on any amount of personal computers including personal workstations and up to 100 cores (12 Mac Minis) when installed on servers. If your organizations needs a bigger installation then it's probably values the product and can budget out a little bit to support it.
