I think it's brilliant. I'm now paying $30 per month for Github actions as a duo shop... it's freemium working the way it should. Give them the first hit and all.
And yes, I need to optimize (and am), but they're already getting hundreds from little me. I even started going towards the CI doing browser walks, code tests, AI rework, etc. It saved me from having another dev machine.
Great stuff, powerful as all heck, and once you see the power it was—for me—impossible NOT to think of 6 other uses and blow through the free CI tier.
The thing is, once you start paying for it, then a service like blacksmith is so attractive and easy to replace gh, that it seems a no brainer. We swapped like 30-40 gh actions from gh runners to Blacksmith runners and cut our ci times by about 4x on almost all of our workflows. And all you do is auth their gh app and update an image tag.
Especially if you can take advantage of the high vcpu runners, then you can get some really fast pipelines going (not affiliated w/ them, just an enjoyer).
I started on free, then upgraded to a 'pro' subscription. Now I'm paying the pro subscription + ~ $300 / mo in additional runner costs. Now looking at starting to self-host some runners to offset that growing cost.
It’s super easy to self host ci, I hosted one with a hetzner VM (pick one in the cheapest region, it doesn’t matter much where CI lives
I've started hosting most of my private projects on a self hosted gitea, but one roadblock I've found is oidc auth - from GitHub actions I can publish to the Google play store, or npm, without needing to manage any static credentials. I know I'll need to manage some kind of secrets/identity when self hosting, though I'm still looking for nicer solutions than a bunch of static secrets for individual services.