Comment by OtherShrezzing
1 day ago
As a business user, our costs have gone up while service has gone down dramatically. Meanwhile our marginal cost to GitHub has hardly changed. Where our costs to them have increased, they mostly charge us per cpu minute, so obviously aren’t making any kind of loss on our account.
I’m sure they’re experiencing scaling issues across the platform, but it’s unacceptable for that to have a negative impact on us when we're sending them $250/dev/yr for (what is in all honesty) hosting a bunch of static text files.
I understand that, and maybe GitHub became a bad deal because of that.
But if anything, their post and your reply are precisely an endorsement of usage based billing.
The bit that's growing 13x YoY (and which they expect will easily blow past that) is unmetered - commits. The bit that is metered (for some, not all folks) - action minutes, grew only 2x YoY.
GitHub was not built to limit the number of commits, checkouts, forks, issues, PRs, etc - nor do we want them to - but that's what's growing ridiculously as people unleash hordes of busy beaver agents on GitHub, because their either free or unlimited.
Where there are limits - or usage based billing - people add guardrails and find optimizations.
Because for all the talk, agents don't bring a 10x value increase; otherwise, they'd justify a 10x cost increase.
Besides, other forges are having issues too. Even running your own. We have Anubis everywhere protecting them for a reason.
That sounds bad. Paying users don't want huge and every-growing numbers of freeloaders reducing the return for each dollar they spend...
That would only lead to further and further degradation of service until the paying customers were absolutely desperate to find a deal that didn't require them to lug around such a heavy ball and chain.
It all made sense at the beginning when Github was free for OSS and OSS was thriving, but now these billions of commits are mostly incredibly low value. I'd bet the average commit now doesn't create 1/10th of the value the average commit did in, say, 2018
> we're sending them $250/dev/yr for (what is in all honesty) hosting a bunch of static text files.
You know, you can just host your own code forge. Or you can just drop gitolite on a server. Or pull directly from each others' dev machines on a LAN.
GitHub is not git.
Our 20-dev company is unfortunately exactly the wrong size to justify self-hosting. We're not large enough that it can be someone's dedicated role, and we're not small enough that we can be experimental around our vendors for something so critical to our output.
We're actively looking into alternatives outside of GitHub though.
I'm curious how Azure DevOps reliability has been for comparison. My current job is managing stories in DevOps with SCC in GitHub ent. While I like Github slightly more, have been curious about the decision.
We use Azure DevOps at work for few things. It's been pretty rock solid since all agents don't recommend it and it's different architecture.
It's also legacy at this point since Microsoft is pouring all resources into GitHub but for most people/companies, they could probably use Azure DevOps just fine.
Concur on the rock solid comment. We use Azure Devops with git repos, lots of pipelines using self hosted or Microsoft hosted agents. There was an issue with Microsoft hosted agents a few months ago, but that didn't last long, and is the only issue in my memory.
I do prefer github interface over azure devops.
In that case, why are you using them at all?
> we're sending them $250/dev/yr for (what is in all honesty) hosting a bunch of static text files.
so start a GitHub competitor which bills $50/dev/yr for solving this easy problem and make a lot of money?