fix: reduce GitHub Actions storage costs

[NkwaTambe]

Problem

The fineract repo is responsible for $102.02 of the org GitHub billing this month, despite being a public repo with free compute minutes. The cost comes from storage overages (artifacts + container images) exceeding the org free tier.

Current state: 21,697 artifacts accumulated, with retention of 5-30 days, across 15 workflow files.

Changes

1. Reduce artifact retention-days from 5/7/30 to 1 day

• 29 occurrences across 15 workflow files changed to retention-days: 1
• Artifacts auto-delete after 1 day instead of hoarding for weeks

2. Add concurrency groups to prevent duplicate runs

• full-build-ci.yml: adds concurrency group ci-${{ github.ref }} with cancel-in-progress: true
• publish-ghcr.yml: adds concurrency group publish-ghcr-${{ github.ref }} with cancel-in-progress: true
• Cancels older in-progress runs when a new push arrives on the same branch, preventing wasted storage from redundant runs

Impact

• Immediate: New artifacts expire after 1 day instead of 5-30 days
• Prevents duplicate runs: Concurrency groups cancel redundant CI runs on same branch
• No functional impact: All workflow jobs remain identical; only retention timing and run deduplication changed

Remaining manual cleanup needed

1. Delete existing old artifacts — 17,670+ artifacts still in storage (API rate-limited during cleanup, needs org admin or GitHub Support to bulk-purge)
2. Delete old container image versions from GHCR (fineract, fineract/sms-gateway, fineract/fineract-config-cli, etc.)
3. Set org-wide spending limit to prevent future surprises
4. Consider reducing Docker publish frequency — currently publishes on every push to develop

[adamsaghy]

@NkwaTambe
"The fineract repo is responsible for $102.02 of the org GitHub billing this month, despite being a public repo with free compute minutes. The cost comes from storage overages (artifacts + container images) exceeding the org free tier."

Can you share more information about this? The billable amount should be still 0, no? Or were you running this on private repository?

[NkwaTambe]

Hello @adamsaghy ,

The $102.02 was observed in our organization's GitHub billing and was associated with our public fork of Fineract, not the Apache Fineract repository itself.

The fork was consuming a significant amount of artifact and container storage, which is what led us to investigate and make the retention-related changes.

[adamsaghy]

Hello @adamsaghy ,

The $102.02 was observed in our organization's GitHub billing and was associated with our public fork of Fineract, not the Apache Fineract repository itself.

The fork was consuming a significant amount of artifact and container storage, which is what led us to investigate and make the retention-related changes.

We are applying shorter retention as your PR recommended, but my understanding is if you are on public fork of Fineract, the cost might appear, but it is not billable.

[NkwaTambe]

Hello @adamsaghy ,
The $102.02 was observed in our organization's GitHub billing and was associated with our public fork of Fineract, not the Apache Fineract repository itself.
The fork was consuming a significant amount of artifact and container storage, which is what led us to investigate and make the retention-related changes.

We are applying shorter retention as your PR recommended, but my understanding is if you are on public fork of Fineract, the cost might appear, but it is not billable.

Thanks for the clarification. I'll double-check the billing details with our team to better understand whether that amount was actually billable or just reported usage.

[adamsaghy]

Hello @adamsaghy ,
The $102.02 was observed in our organization's GitHub billing and was associated with our public fork of Fineract, not the Apache Fineract repository itself.
The fork was consuming a significant amount of artifact and container storage, which is what led us to investigate and make the retention-related changes.

We are applying shorter retention as your PR recommended, but my understanding is if you are on public fork of Fineract, the cost might appear, but it is not billable.

Thanks for the clarification. I'll double-check the billing details with our team to better understand whether that amount was actually billable or just reported usage.

@NkwaTambe Hi

Have you had the chance to double check with your team?