Running macOS legally requires real mac servers and a bespoke storage solution: https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/analysis/not-just-stac...

A self-hosted macOS runner will be more economical in the long-run, if you have a spot you can hook it up at; or, if you're fine doing things less than legally, you can use https://github.com/sickcodes/Docker-OSX.

To add to this, they recently published a video showing how they provision and manage their macOS runners: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2J2MzKjcqY

I'm sure legality depends on jurisdiction, too. If you acquired the software legally and you need to keep it running in a VM, I'm sure it's legal at least in some places.

But yeah, just drive-by-downloading MacOS to your Windows box it is probably not quite on the up and up.

Or get one from Hetzner (there's one in the server finder right now for 64/month).

Highly recommend everyone check out the self-hosted runners. GitHub has made it crazy easy to set up and all your actions are free and can have local cache. And you get all the benefits of the Actions ecosystem. Throw a used Mac mini or old PC or whatever at it.

They also price gouge by charging each job you run as per minute rounded up.

So if you have 5 10 second actions that run when a PR is created, that 50 seconds of compute is charged as 5 minutes.

Is it really price gouging, or just embodying the real warmup costs of spinning up a job?

I truly don't understand why this isn't more widely discussed (I've seen several "GH Actions Gotchas" articles where this isn't mentioned). Many of the community actions also seem to be designed to run as short jobs to paper around missing features (for ex: https://github.com/dorny/paths-filter ), that end up eating up an enormous amount of your minutes budget.

We are working on an alternative that's 100% compatible with GHA but much cheaper and faster. Check out https://dime.run/