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.
AKA, the update where they start charging you to use your own hardware.
I love that they couch it in “fairness”.
No GitHub, we see you pushing us off self hosted
Microsoft also charges you €13 a month for every running self hosted agent on Azure DevOps
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?
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.
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.