GitHub announces charging you for running it on your own hardware, then walks it back

[thewayne]

GitHub is software mainly intended for programmers and developers as a software repository. Very useful stuff, very widely-used. And now about to get a lot more expensive for large teams.

Microsoft bought GitHub a few years back, and a month ago, announced that it would start charging people who ran it on their own hardware $0.002 per minute charge for "self-hosted runners executing jobs on private GitHub repositories. At the same time, GitHub noted in a Tuesday blog post that it's lowering the prices of GitHub-hosted runners beginning January 1, under a scheme it calls "simpler pricing and a better experience for GitHub Actions." Self-hosted runner usage on public repositories will remain free, we note." This was to go into effect in March.

One person contacted noted that they had run the numbers and it would cost them $3,500 a month on top of their normal monthly fee for using GitHub.

There was a large hue and cry, and pretty much the same day Microsoft announced that they were rescinding the charge.

HOWEVER, as The Register article points out about the later MS announcement, "We note that GitHub didn’t say it won’t ever go forward with charging for self-hosted runners, only that it’s postponing the change. As one commenter on the community thread pointed out, that means charging for self-hosted runners may be a foregone conclusion."

The Slashdot article lists many completely free, open-source alternatives to GitHub and I expect people are making migration plans as we speak.

https://www.theregister.com/2025/12/17/github_charge_dev_own_hardware/

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/12/17/2042247/github-is-going-to-start-charging-you-for-using-your-own-hardware

Comments

[disneydream06]

MS smells blood or is that money in the water, and they won't give that up. :o
Hugs, Jon

[silveradept]

This is the squeeze that comes after the acquisition. Of course, someone could use their own git hosting and not connect at all to Microsoft GitHub, and plenty of places probably do, but the choice now is between either making the code public or paying Microsoft for the privilege of having your code be private.

I wonder if places like Codeberg will start rolling out "import your code to us and away from GitHub, because we're not fools like them!" tools soon. Or if someone will code up and release a GPL version of the infrastructure so that everyone who is already doing most of the work themselves can fully transition away from another Microsoft product.

[thewayne]

From what I gleaned in the /. comments, there are several OS ports.  I am not familiar with GH, though I would like to use it.  I had a source control package in the '90s called Sourcerer's Apprentice that integrated with the BRIEF editor, it was a very useful package.  But being pre-WWW, it wasn't networked.