GitHub’s Pricing Backlash and Why Developers Are Choosing Blacksmith

Well, you know, GitHub. Yeah. It's where you put your code to store it so everyone can collaborate on the code. You've got version history. It's if you don't know Git, and there's some memes going around of people graduating from university that don't know Git. If you don't know Git, then you need you need some serious um retraining. Lately, GitHub seems to be taking L after L announcing a shocking and quite frankly ridiculous update to their pricing. Now, we all love open code, don't we? and GitHub are no exception to allowing you to run what they call GitHub actions which are as it sounds it's a response mechanism to you creating a pull request or merging some code or doing something it's a side effect to doing that you could deploy you know I have no doubt that when you click publish on your web flow website that there is a GitHub action there is some form of action that runs some code to build that website and publish it like that. It's it's a system we've been doing for ages. It used to be that we would use Jenkins. It used to be a very m you set up this um uh thing like a box online and and and link it to your GitHub and respond to this that and the other. We also moved on to things like Travis and Circle. These are all great. When GitHub actions then came out to replace all of this, it was a dream come true because it's all nicely integrated with that with that system. You can also do all that externally. You can host it yourself. Well, GitHub have announced an a price increase to if you're running these on your own server. They have nothing to do with, you know, the uptime and this and that yet. They're increasing they were increasing the price. U I don't know where the costings actually is. uh because they basically TLDDR we're postponing the billing changes because there is literally uproar in the community about these changes. Yeah. If if it's open source, if you're hosting it yourself, how dare you um charge for that because that there are some alternatives. One is called Blacksmith. They've all got to raise their prices now because of this this announcement. It's just it's just ridiculous and it's greedy. And they said that 98% or like a large majority of customers won't be affected. So it begs the question, why are you raising them? Why are you raising these prices if no one's going to be affected? My guess is that most people are using like the free plan who aren't paying for it anyway. That's where they're probably botching those numbers from. But how much of the percentage of people who are paying, how much how many of them are going to be affected? Is it is it 100% or is it a much smaller number there? I don't know. I could say and their workers have many issues. They're not even that good. GitHub actions aren't even wellmaintained. Their UI is is frankly quite boring. So yeah, I mean it's this interface. I'm fixing some builds here, but it's just such a, you know, it's so basic. There's no reporting or anything like that. No alerts and things like this. Like Blacksmith is an amazing alternative to uh to GitHub actions which is so so much better featured. This looks probably looks really impressive, right? This probably looks like, oh, there's stuff going on and whatever. And it's helpful. It gets the job done. It's nice that it's integrated with GitHub, but it's not good enough that they're charging for self-hosted for sure. Yeah, that that is quite absurd. I've never heard uh of like charging in this way. This is part of a larger conversation on my show, Command AI, which we stream live every single week. We discuss the news and all things related to AI in the world of design and web. Catch us next week and join in the banter.