Things like this are the reason why companies like GitHub then put everything under a paid tier.

I know a lot of people talk about GH outages, but I personally haven't encountered it even tho as you can see form my profile (github.com/crisdosaygo) I'm on there everyday. Maybe my workflows don't hit the weak spots, idk.

But the reason I created this was because Actions always worked so well for me, and it seemed to have so many possibilities to build things on it.

Regarding the Global Free Tier, every GH account comes with Actions Minutes and this is way to have a nice CLI to put them to use toward your building, and maybe have a spot for agents to do some work you don't want locally.

Bigger picture, I feel GH led the way providing this idea of "compute as utility" (free compute for even free GH accounts, was amazing - but I really think that the future is shaped like that). I'm serious about that: AI will eventually become cheaper to train and infer, and the oversupply of compute will be a background layer we will have access to much cheaper. Just one of the trends. So the idea of the Global Free Tier or Background Compute as a universal utility, is something I think si really real.

Also probably important to note that the reliability issues GH seems to have faced, are more of a recent uptick, but Actions has had this free tier for ages.

Given the consistent outages everywhere on GitHub, they actually should put GitHub Actions under a paid tier only if they want their platform to be sustainable and stable. Period.

It's quite irresponsible of them to have almost all the core features free and a paid tier would significantly reduce abuse of it (and especially GitHub Actions) like this.

If they don't, then don't be surprised to see more outages on their platform.

Do you realize how disastrous it would be for the open-source ecosystem to remove actions from the free tier?

Open source developers got along perfectly well before free GHA compute. It hasn’t been around for that long.

Yeah, I can't imagine if open source maintainers had to pay for their own laptop, food, electricity, housing, transportation, or compute time.

They might have to figure out running CI on their own hardware. The horror.