GitHub Actions' pricing changes
GitHub announced pricing changes for Actions:
TLDR - On January 1, 2026, we are lowering the price of hosted runners, and beginning March 1, 2026, we are charging $0.002 per-minute across self-hosted runners. The vast majority of customers will not see a change to their bill. Actions will remain free in public repositories.
They also, entertainingly, frame this as simpler pricing on their current blog.
And Jared Palmer introduced some additional context that hints at the numbers motivating the change:
96% of customers are unimpacted by the change. Of the 4% of Actions users impacted by this change, 85% will see their Actions bill decrease. Of the 15% who are impacted across all cohorts the median increase is $13. From our individual users (free & Pro plans) of those who used GitHub Actions in the last month in private repos only 0.09% would end up with a price increase, with a median increase of under $2 a month. Note that this impact is after these users have made use of their included minutes in their plans today, entitling them to over 33 hours of included GitHub compute, and this has no impact on their free use of public repos. A further 2.8% of this total user base will see a decrease in their monthly cost as a result of these changes. The rest are unimpacted by this change.
Essentially: .6% of Actions users use self-hosted runners, and they're tragedy-of-the-commons-ing the other 99.4%.
A few notes:
- Objectively speaking, this is not simpler pricing. There are now two meters instead of one: one for your total time using the GitHub Actions substrate, and one for using GitHub Actions runners on said substrate.
- This is very explicitly a tax on people who use self-hosted runners. To wit, the price points for Actions runners are going down even with the new marginal cost such that extant users of Actions will have a lower bill than they currently do.
- I actually think this is a very reasonable change in the abstract. The action substrate has value and operational costs associated with it. Charging for that value is not unreasonable.
- For Buttondown, this is just a price increase. We mostly use Blacksmith's four core runners, which charged $0.008 per minute before the change and now will be a cent per minute after the change. This is still less than what it would cost on GitHub Actions, which is 1.2 cents per minute.
- It seems frankly silly that services like Blacksmith are even able to outcompete GitHub on price and performance. That's why I think this change tastes so bad in my mouth: GitHub should simply outcompete these alternative services rather than levy a tax on them (even if I think the tax is a just one!)
- The incentives to invest in CI performance are stronger than ever before. We run our backend suite (the largest share of our CI time) around 1000 times a month; with this change, that means every incremental second the runner takes costs around two bucks a year. That's not a huge amount, but it's not nothing either.
- I think it would be cool if GitHub shipped something that made my life better or easier.
- What is the replacement for an Actions-shaped abstraction? I don't know, and until today it never occurred to me to look for one.
I close with one last bit of napkin math: at $0.002/minute, GitHub will charge you $86 $0.002/minute * 60 minutes/hour * 24 hours/day * 30 days/month = $86.40/month to leave a self-hosted runner running for a month continuously. Through that lens, migration off of Actions entirely onto something else becomes much more compelling.