something that i'm concerned about and which may prove itself to be true is that it's economically impossible to run a git forge offering free CI runners. it's obvious that github's are subsidized in much the same way early uber subsidized rider costs, which is concerning because they'll crank down restirctions, yes, but also because it might just not be a ... serviceable offer
@whitequark@mastodon.social if they're offering us more than a nominal amount of free servers it has to either be unsustainably subsidized or a shady "you're the product" type thing (and I'm not trying to say this as a "you should've known" gotcha, I'm just reasoning myself through it)
There's also the fact that it gets abused for crypto mining etc, and a big org will have more resources to police for that
I think the only viable model is where you pay for it, which sucks in a lot of ways too
@aburka@hachyderm.io @whitequark@mastodon.social
It's mostly about upsell. The price for paid GitHub Actions runners is around 10x the cost of buying the same amount of compute from Azure. And Azure already has quite high margins. So everyone who they convert to a paying customer is paying a lot and subsidising a lot of free instances.
We're using Cirrus CI with our own GCE account for our LLVM fork, and we just passed the point where we're paying £5/month for CI. That's including doing a build and test run on every commit to a PR, and both x86-64 and AArch64 builds on every commit to head.
The cost of providing free CI is really small for most projects. Most personal projects use a few cents of cloud compute per month, if that.
Cirrus has a $10/month plan for personal users and it's very expensive relative to the cost of their underlying platform unless you're doing vast amounts of CI.
I'd love to see a forge with a 50% markup over underlying cloud resources. For most people, $1/month would more than cover the compute costs.
✧✦Catherine✦✧
aburka 🫣
