Presumably, like every other GitHub feature, the people paying for GitHub pay for it, free users get it as part of the ecosystem building promotion that the free tier provides to bring in paying (not purely public/OSS, team features) customers, with the assumption that the surplus on the paid accounts will, over the log term if not immediately, cover the cost of the free use.

Or they’ll make it a separately charged feature once they evaluate demand and usage in the beta, but AFAIK that would be new for GitHub.

> Or they’ll make it a separately charged feature once they evaluate demand and usage in the beta, but AFAIK that would be new for GitHub.

Not new- GitHub's hosted Git LFS product costs $5/month per 50gb bandwidth/storage, after a 1gb free tier [1].

[1] https://help.github.com/articles/about-storage-and-bandwidth...

It mentions actions need to be private repos. So if I not mistaken free uses will not be able to use it.

Where exactly does what say actions need to be in private repos? I'm not finding it.

Edit: Seems like workflows can only be created in private repos [1],

> You can only create workflows in private repositories.

but actions can be public [2].

> To share GitHub Actions with the GitHub community, your repository must be public.

[1] https://developer.github.com/actions/creating-workflows/crea...

[2] https://developer.github.com/actions/creating-github-actions...

Found it about workflows at least:

https://developer.github.com/actions/creating-workflows/crea...

> You can only create workflows in private repositories

Does this mean that Actions in general cannot be used for public open source projects? It seems like a lot of them could benefit from this.

Maybe they need a new category of paid but still public.

Might be a security thing rather than money?

> Over time — and Lambert seemed to be in favor of this — GitHub could also allow developers to sell their workflows and Actions through the GitHub marketplace.

Nope, it's about money.

Supposedly, this is only a restriction during the beta period.

https://twitter.com/MoStueck/status/1052384517212725248

I have a feeling Microsoft does.

They've hosted Github pages for free for quite some time... though this may use far more resources.

Yes, computing costs far outweigh hosting costs.