If its the price of runs, then its not always running.
If its price of the agent to exist, then thats not paying per runs- then you’re right that people tend to leave their runners online 24/7- but I’ve never worked anywhere that had workers building 24/7.
OP means to say he has many jobs in the merge queue that the runners are always busy 24/7.
This is not uncommon in some orgs - less number of concurrent runners, slow builds, loads of jobs because of automation or how hooks for the runners are setup.
In the context of discussion that doesn't matter, OP's point distills to that they use minimum of 720 hours / month of orchestration time or some multiple of that on self hosted runners running 24x7.
Github will now charge $84 extra per month for single self-hosted runner running 24x7 - i.e. that is the cost for 43,200 build minutes for only their orchestration alone.
In a more typical setup that is equivalent to say 5 self-hosted running running ~4.5 hours a day(i.e 144/hours/runner/month)
If you have a lot of not very time sensitive jobs, e.g. large merge trains, it was reasonable to have a not very fast runner run close to full utilization. Now that you'd pay by the run-minute, it'll be cheaper to move to a faster runner and run it at 10%.
His workload is close to the more typical one i mentioned as scenario b. It will cost them $84/month.
For me, we do about 800,000 build minutes/month, for orchestration alone it is going to be $1600/month. In contrast the runner host we use (Namespace labs) cost $0.0015 / minute[1] which is less than orchestration cost for GH, that is just ridiculous.
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[1] It is even worse, the first 250,000 minutes is fixed at $250, so the base is $0.001 /minute for the runner.
I guess some people just always have something running since it's owned hardware. Daily builds of popular OSS projects or constant vuln scans or whatever?
When you've already paid for the hardware, it is essentially free after that (aside electricity, I suppose). So there wasn't a reason to ration our runners, and we actually added additional workloads/scans/etc just because we could.
We're targeting 4x different deployment pipelines, so while we aren't running 24/7, we are running the same number of hours but split over all our runners. Often runs are queued during our busy 8-hour work-day, and then unused for 16-hours.
Either way, we will likely pay 8-hours4-pipelines5-days=160 hours per week, just shy of 168-hours for true 24/7. This currently costs $0 just for context.
