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Coming soon: Simpler pricing and a better experience for GitHub Actions - GitHub Changelog (Adds self-hosted runner cost) (github.blog)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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On January 1, 2026, GitHub will reduce the price of GitHub-hosted runners by up to 39% depending on the machine type used. The free usage minute quotas will remain the same.

On March 1, 2026, GitHub will introduce 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, as explained in our GitHub Actions billing documentation.

Runner usage in public repositories will remain free. There will be no changes in price structure for GitHub Enterprise Server customers.

We are increasing our investment into our self-hosted experience to ensure that we can provide autoscaling for scenarios beyond just Linux containers.

Historically, self-hosted runner customers were able to leverage much of GitHub Actions’ infrastructure and services at no cost.

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[–] 53 points 10 months ago (6 children)

AKA, the update where they start charging you to use your own hardware.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago* (1 child)

    Microsoft also charges you €13 a month for every running self hosted agent on Azure DevOps

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago

    To be fair, it's not that crazy - your agents are generating a lot of data that Azure DevOps is storing. And they're doing a bunch of other things like release management and showing test results over time, etc etc

    I'm using Azure DevOps practically free - (unless I build way too much and run out of free credits for the month)

    But since so many things in Azure DevOps are already free.. If you're going to start substituting the paid features like extra build agents with your own "free self hosted agents" then where are they getting any money from?

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    You're still using their hardware for the coordinator, artifact storage, etc. aren't you?

    The last thing I want to be doing is defending microsoft, but this is inevitable in any free service. In fact this seems like one of the least-bad ways of enshittifying.

    We should all be moving to self-hosting or shared hosting through a non-profit, but neither of those are going to be free.

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  • [–] 15 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

    Yeah, but charging $0.002/minute is pretty extreme for being a coordinator. That's the current per minute rate for single core GitHub actions. Is being a coordinator really consuming an entire vCPU of compute for your own runners?

    FYI You already pay for artifact storage.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    Microsoft does this is other products too.

    For example, python runs inside of Excel now so you can finally make good figures with matplotlib.

    But they intentionally slow code compilation so it takes around 5x as long as as spyder for the same code.

    Then, your code will time out after a couple seconds of execution and you "have to buy compute tokens" in order to be able to compute it further with your own machine.

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    • [–] 17 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Did you know that actually self-hosted runners like the ones you can use with Forgejo are free forever? Never going back to GitHub ✌️

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    • [–] 12 points 10 months ago

    Okay. This is really bad for our company lol.

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    [–] 3 points 10 months ago (7 children)

    any alternatives to GH that allow private repos and self-hosted action runners?

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    Forgejo has been working wonders for me, highly recommend ^^

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (3 children)

    but the whole thing is self-hosted, not just the action runner, right?

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah, I believe so, sorry. I wonder if codeberg permits something like this?

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago* (1 child)

    Maybe. The problems I have with codeberg are the lack of support to private repos and the 100 repo limit. I have some personal stuff in version control that I prefer to keep private, like notes, dotfiles, and shell history.

    At the same time, I'm not sure I want to maintain a self-hosted forge.

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    [–] 3 points 10 months ago

    We’re postponing the announced billing change for self-hosted GitHub Actions to take time to re-evaluate our approach.

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