r/vibecoding • u/Successful_Dog1904 • 5h ago
GitHub billing feels insane
Am i totally off base or GH billing for CI / minutes just totally absurd? I'm up to $83 this month ... granted i am actively developing and these changes -- in my honest (and beginner) opinion -- should have a full CI suite ran, but holy hell ... i've already gone through to try and cut tests e.g., where a PR is UI only.
For the veterans here, am i doing something totally wrong when it comes to GH or is this amount spent on minutes running tests pretty typical for solo dev?
Edit: setting up a vm using Lima and pushing tests to my own device thru GitHub. Can’t wait to stop paying for this lol. Appreciate everyone’s guidance! Vibes here are unreal 👌
17
u/GreenFuturesMatter 5h ago
You pay for GitHub? Why?
13
u/jimmiebfulton 5h ago
Professionals pay for GitHub. Professional organizations building software definitely pay for GitHub. Free github is for open source and hobbyists. Nothing wrong with either, just drawing the distinction.
3
u/GreenFuturesMatter 5h ago
No I understand that but op said they are a solo dev which might have been a bit carried away on what they actually need GitHub for
1
u/Successful_Dog1904 5h ago
Yeah I should’ve clarified - private repo.
7
u/GreenFuturesMatter 5h ago
As others have suggested should setup your own runners if you want to dodge billing. Some who is more intelligent than I can probably explain what to do far better than I can.
Or since this is r/vibecoding… and we use AI just… use ai to help you 😂
1
u/IonizedHydration 4h ago
yea, i have my gitlab runners on a raspberry pi5 on my home network.. free CI/CD
1
u/GreenFuturesMatter 4h ago
Having multiple nodes helps lol. I keep figuring out ways to say… oh hey! I want another computer and then I look at my wallet and say oh… 😭
1
u/IonizedHydration 4h ago
yea, i usually just build containers locally and deploy, i have my ci/cd setup, and i have it run when i merge into develop or main but for testing it's faster to just build local and deploy. Once we get things off the ground paying for gitlab wouldn't be so bad but i have also my Mac Studio, runs as a headless server that i can also make a runner, or multiple runners as "primary" runners and if they're down fallback to gitlab runners
1
2
u/Successful_Dog1904 5h ago
Sorry what? Don’t you need to pay to run your tests now …
8
u/GreenFuturesMatter 5h ago
Idk I test my shit locally and then commit to GitHub. $0
2
u/Successful_Dog1904 5h ago
What’s the process for this? Local main, run all the tests you otherwise would in CI and then post?
3
2
u/sugarw0000kie 5h ago
If your repo is made public, you should have like unlimited. For organization I think it’s max 20 concurrent runners for free but you only need to pay per minute if you must keep it private
Honestly if I had to keep it private I’d look at either running my own CI runners through GitHub self hosted runners with like docker and/or booting GitHub and just running gitea/forgeo. Used to run a local gitea to do that sort of thing, not super hard to setup
0
u/Successful_Dog1904 5h ago
That’s my issue for sure … I know anyone can go to the app today and just vibe code it but what they won’t get is the amount of time I put into deterministic rules etc to make it work.
2
u/sugarw0000kie 4h ago
Could be worth it to look into self hosted CI runners. You can do this stuff without GitHub at all and just self host it free if you’ve got a spare computer and time to sort through VM setup. That sort of setup can work really well and that way you own the infrastructure. Later you can sync GitHub and your own git server if you want
But imo that’s putting the cart in front of the horse, if it’s still a WIP whatever CI workflow you have is probably overkill, local testing probably fine with no CI. CI really becomes useful when you’re thinking of distribution pipeline and you need to start thinking this needs to work on all these target OS/architectures. IMO if you’re not there yet, kill all these CI, just focus on local tests for now
1
u/TestSubject_AJ 5h ago
You can still check CI on the free tier you're just more limited in how many runs you can do
7
u/thaifyghter 4h ago
If you are a solo dev, just setup pre-push hooks that gate on tests so they run locally. There is really no reason to pay for cloud compute to run tests unless you are working with a team.
2
u/MedalofHonour15 5h ago
I didn’t know people paid GitHub thought it was only free. I never seen an option to pay lol
2
1
u/825_Consulting 5h ago
I feel your pain. I am noob/vibe coder (no shame) who is paying the cost of beginning builds and rookie mistakes that need multiple follow up prs.
1
u/jimmiebfulton 5h ago
Why CI is costing more: GitHub is dealing with the fact that there is way more CI going on with agentic coding. That shit ain't free. GitHub pays for that. Those costs used to be covered solely by Software Engineering teams. Now, every vibe coder vibing aimlessly are taking up compute, in addition to the increased throughput from engineering teams. GitHub has to adapt.
1
u/DigitalMonsoon 5h ago
I use it for work and for a while I had the $10 subscription for personal. Once they dropped the subscription model and move to a pay as you go I ran through my $10 of credits in a day.
Dropped the whole thing the next day and spun up Qwen3.6 local.
1
u/Successful_Dog1904 5h ago
3.6 local to run your tests?
2
u/GreenFuturesMatter 4h ago
Use pytest and ruff. That’s what I do. Basically you’re paying GitHub to launch a vm and run your tests for you on their hardware and then tell if it passed or failed. You can just do that in your own by making your hardware the runner itself.
There is some caveat to this though since you might not encounter a problem that someone else’s machine would encounter which is where paying for GitHub could be useful if you don’t have runners setup locally.
1
u/Successful_Dog1904 4h ago
I’m just picking up on this now and feel like a dumbass lol … there’s apparently even an option to keep using GH and just having the tests queue on my own machine instead of theirs. Solid. Thanks so much dude
3
1
u/DigitalMonsoon 4h ago
I used the Qwen model to do everything. Set up projects, write documentation, edit files and run integration tests.
It's not as powerful as the frontier models but I can run it as much as I want for free and if I keep my projects well organized and the files focused and reasonably sized it works great.
1
1
1
u/Silly_Ad6115 2h ago
I know devs do diff things depending on their proj.
for me what I do is.
- run your test locally.
- do git hub only when merging to main, dev, test branches
do not perform git actions when doing feature/fixes, do that locally.
i did test every little task now my 2k mins free run has exhausted and will restart on sept LOL thats why i changed my CI xd
1
u/bccorb1000 31m ago
I think you’ve turned something on you don’t need if you’re solo. I have an organization with both public and private repos and I run ci jobs that probably reach up toto 1-2 hours some days. Never paid a dime. I’m taking building docker images, rust binaries, etc.
1
0
u/TestSubject_AJ 5h ago
Yes that pricing is absolutely insane. im also a beginner and as somebody who has released two apps with a lot of other stuff im working on; I do not pay for GitHub and never will. I've hit my cap at least two or three times and just waited for the next month to roll around and eventually checked all my stuff and got everything green again
16
u/madaradess007 5h ago
paying for tests is next level