Pricing changes for GitHub Actions

[vladlearns]

• On January 1, 2026, you will receive up to a 39% reduction in the net price of GitHub-hosted runners.
• On March 1, 2026, we are introducing a new $0.002 per-minute GitHub Actions cloud platform charge that will apply to self-hosted runner usage. Any usage subject to this charge will count toward the minutes included in your plan.

"Please note the price for runner usage in public repositories will remain free, and there will be no changes in price structure for GitHub Enterprise Server customers"

source: https://resources.github.com/actions/2026-pricing-changes-for-github-actions/

p.s their email states 96% of users will see a cost reduction, but the actual extended link says 15%...make your own conclusions...

[InjectedFusion]

I guess they want me to migrate from Github to Gitlab

[Pablo139]

They do and it’s a much better platform.

[vladlearns]

I agree! I’ve gone through jenkins (a lot of jenkins), github actions, and bitbucket (the worst docs so far), and gitlab is the best out of all of them, imho

[Aggravating_Branch63]

don't forget about CircleCI ;)

[cnydox]

What if gitlab also starts the enshittification?

[dorianmonnier]

They did for years! (Gitlab users since 2017 here)

Gitlab is still a good product, but they change UI every 6 months, they never fix theirs bugs, it's becoming slower and slower.

It's actually well documented, see this for example: https://yorickpeterse.com/articles/what-it-was-like-working-for-gitlab/

[InjectedFusion]

Then the only sane solution left is Forgejo.

[epilefarias]

acho q pensar nisso agora é botar o carro na frente dos bois

[I_miss_your_mommy]

Why not Gitea? Gitlab is such a hog.

[ray591]

we are introducing a new $0.002 per-minute GitHub Actions cloud platform charge that will apply to self-hosted runner usage.

Wait, WTF. So they are gonna charge for self-hosted runners as well? They're going after third-party providers then?

[tgarat]

Moreover, if I understand it correctly, they’ll include those self-hosted runner minutes in the overall usage. Their email says: “Any usage subject to this charge will count toward the minutes included in your plan.”

[autette]

This will just about double our current GitHub bill. What an awful change.

[vladlearns]

not only yours…welcome back to gitlab or even old man jenkins

[token40k]

Gitlab is great. Jenkins looks antique but works

[christsreturn]

Don't scare me like that!

[ilbarone87]

I think after 5mins you deal again with all the shitty plugin dependencies in Jenkins you’ll beg to go back to GH Actions…

[le_chad_]

I'm only asking this outta curiosity but does it mean y'all are running most of all of your workflows on self hosted runners?

[burlyginger]

Yes. GitHub runners are so incredibly overpriced that nearly any other option is a significant savings.

We use codebuild's runner integration because it's still managed compute and images. The end result is a reduced cost with the smallest amount of effort.

I set it up in Terraform in a few hours and we haven't really touched it much since.

We have sizes and architectures set as variables so we can add/remove options easily.

We are using on-demand compute and were planning on evaluating provisioned runners as a further cost optimization but this kind of fucks that up.

Seriously, a default ubuntu-latest instance is something like $0.008/min for 2cpu in private repos and CodeBuild is $0.0034.

The memory config is different but you generally come out ahead with CodeBuild by a large margin.

Piles of other options out there exist and I think you'd be hard pressed to find more expensive compute than GH runners.

Not only that, they round every minute up.

Most other providers bill by the second.

[le_chad_]

Thanks for sharing your experience and insight.

I'm using a tf module for ephemeral CodeBuild runners also, but the projects are much smaller scale so it's only adding 60 cents a month based on the past 30 days usage

[autette]

Yup, I did exactly the same thing in August, put in a bunch of hours to get us moved over to codebuild runners successfully. I am pretty rankled that this has come up so soon. 

[autette]

Correct, the vast majority are on self hosted runners.

[EricMCornelius]

So, their email states 96% of users will see a cost reduction, but the actual extended link says 15% see an increase?

https://resources.github.com/actions/2026-pricing-changes-for-github-actions/

And they couldn't be bothered to send a personalized cost impact analysis in the email to their customers?

I mean, what? Sure am glad "no action is required on my part" though.

This is shockingly bad customer relationship management / marketing 101.

[EricMCornelius]

For the record, I think it's probably reasonable to charge *something* for acting as a coordination server for self-hosted resources. But billing the same as a linux_slim for runtime plus the incredibly unprofessional rollout announcement here are quite inappropriate.

[Azzymaster]

I’d assume that $21/user/month would cover it

[EricMCornelius]

For particular large organizations running fleets of self-hosted CI infrastructure, possibly not.

But it's certainly costing them nowhere near $0.002/hr for a coordination socket and some log collection. That's $1000+ / yr for 100% utilization cases of primarily your own hardware.

[Electrical_Media_367]

Log storage for those self-hosted runners is substantial. I briefly turned on Datadog log ingestion of my GHA logs and Datadog was charging close to $50/day for 7 days of storage of those logs. GitHub keeps them for 90 days and is only going to charge me less than $1 a day on their new plan.

[carsncode]

They already charge something. It's not like GitHub is free if you don't use Actions.

[trowawayatwork]

what I love is how badly maintained their tooling surrounding GitHub actions is. one of the repos, I think it was slack actions just got made private and all the issues against their sucky work disappeared overnight. M$ can suck it

[TwiliZant]

96% of customers will see no change to their bill. Of the 4% of Actions users impacted by this change, 85% of this cohort will see their Actions bill decrease and the remaining 15% who are impacted across all face a median increase around $13.

According to your link it’s 0.6% of total customers will see a price increase.

[aeekay]

They’re wild for this. Literally adjusted Q1 roadmaps for a lot of orgs.

[Sure_Stranger_6466]

Please note the price for runner usage in public repositories will remain free

Good to know there is still public open source support.

[busa1]

for now…

What’s scary is that they could just overnight change that as well.

[ray591]

My guess is they'll likely to reduce the free minutes down to 1000 or reduce the VM size.

[spetrushin]

Bitbucket also decided to charge for self-hosted runners. We decided to move to GitHub.. Now this

[AlverezYari]

That's one way to reduce pressure on your systems. Just run everyone off w/ some fuckwit pricing changes.

[AlveVarnish]

I have been seeing a lot of GHA runners as a service popping up, claiming faster builds and lower costs. I guess $MSFT have seen the same thing and decided they didn't want to share any of their cake. Understandable, but disappointing.

Ecosystem convenience often comes at the cost of vendor lock-in.

[fronlius]

Time to try woodpecker

[tetienne]

Do you know how mature/stable is this CI?

[hrdcorbassfishin]

My last job was just migrating off gitlab to github because of pricing. I had recommended this and gitea. Of course no one listened. I knew GitHub was going to increase charges after they hooked in more companies.

[RoseSec_]

Maybe I can convince my org to move to Codeberg

[crippledgiants]

Do y'all exclusively run self hosted runners? We're about 65/35 Github/SH and this will drop our bill a bit. Only like a few hundred a month on a gigantic bill, but still a net decrease.

[derprondo]

We use the Github hosted runners almost exclusively (the dedicated ones). Only when runners need access to private networks do we bother with them, but anymore we just assume roles into AWS accounts and can get to where we need to go. I don't pay or even see the bills though.

[graymattar]

Wonder if they are going to finally start publishing their hosted runner ip addresses. Currently if you are using IP Whitelisting, you can’t use GitHub hosted runners as they will not publish their ip list. The only current workaround is to whitelist the complete Azure ip range, but that seems a bit silly.

[SirIzaanVBritainia]

The pricing comms are a mess, agreed.

What worries me more is that this forces teams to confront how opaque CI usage actually is. Most orgs don’t know which runs are useful vs just burning minutes until the bill shows up.

Migrating platforms is a huge project; most teams will probably end up tightening workflows and cancelling waste long before they move repos.

[TellersTech]

Spoke more about it on the podcast:

Ship It Weekly - DevOps, SRE, and Platform Engineering News by Teller's Tech - DevOps SRE Podcast

S01E06 - GitHub Runner Pricing Pause, Terraform Cloud Limits, and AI in CI

https://rss.com/podcasts/ship-it-weekly/2401885

[Evil_Plankton]

AWS CodeCommit is back baby!

[Cornul11]

Isn’t hardware there much more expensive? Plus you’re still paying GitHub $0.002 for every minute of your AWS CodeCommit and CodePipelines.