We Spent Six Months Fighting GitHub Actions. Here's What We Learned.
GitHub Actions is great for CI/CD. It's not great for scheduled data pipelines. We learned this the hard way.
TL;DR: We cut our data pipeline costs by 98% and made job updates 4x faster. Here's why we finally made the switch.
This week, GitHub announced they're charging for self-hosted runners starting March 2026.
For us, it was the final push to leave a system we'd been fighting for months.
Why it mattered
Our job is simple: get you the latest assignments as fast as possible. Every hour, we sync data from hundreds of partner integrations and update the site.
But our old system was getting in the way.
Updates that should take minutes were taking 45. When something broke at 3am, it could be hours before we noticed. And the bill was creeping toward hundreds of euros per month—money that should go toward building features, not babysitting infrastructure.
What pushed us over the edge
Delays hurt you. A 45-minute pipeline means you might see a hot assignment 45 minutes late. In consulting, that's the difference between landing a gig and missing it.
Failures were silent. If a partner integration went down, we wouldn't know until someone complained. That's not the reliability you deserve.
Costs were unpredictable. We couldn't budget properly. Costs varied wildly month to month. Building a sustainable service requires predictable costs.
We were locked in. Our entire operation depended on one vendor's pricing decisions. That's a risk we weren't comfortable with.
The switch
We moved to a self-hosted system. It took effort, but the results speak for themselves:
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| 45 min updates | 12 min updates |
| Silent failures | Instant alerts |
| Hundreds/month | Minimal cost |
| Vendor lock-in | We own it |
What this means for you
Fresher data. Assignments hit your search results faster. When a company posts at 9:00, you'll see it by 9:15—not 10:00.
More reliability. We catch problems before they affect you. No more stale listings or integration gaps.
Lower overhead. Money saved on infrastructure goes into building better search, better filters, and expanding to new markets.
We don't talk about our tech stack to brag. We talk about it because every decision we make is about delivering better results to you. This was one of those decisions.