The GitHub Actions control plane is no longer free
47 comments
·December 16, 2025mtlynch
suryao
With these changes, three things hold:
1. Services like blacksmith and WarpBuild (I'm the founder) are still cheaper than GitHub hosted runners, even after including the $0.002/min self-hosting tax.
2. The biggest lever for controlling costs now is reducing the number of minutes used in CI. Given how slow Github's runners are, or even the ones on AWS compared to our baremetal processor single core performance + nvme disks, it makes even more sense to use WarpBuild. This actually makes a better case for moving from slow AWS instances running with actions-runner-controller etc. to WarpBuild!
3. Messaging this to most users is harder since the first reaction is that Github options make more sense. After some rational thought, it is the opposite.
Overall - it is worse for Github users, but options like blacksmith and WarpBuild are still the better option.
K3UL
That's clearly the case, this is a three-pronged manoeuver :
- Introducing a cheap 1-core runner
- Lowering the price of GitHub-hosted runners
- Making it slightly more expensive to use self-hosted runners
- There is actually a fourth one: the vnet integration, which also allows you to run public runners in your own infra
As a bonus, for some people it means something that was free is now not free. Those who are willing to pay rather than go, might prefer to use GitHub-hosted if they are going to pay anyway.
This is clearly an incentive to use github-hosted, and their sales reps are also going this way.
benterix
Well, these people earn their living by saying these things that only seem to make sense superficially but don't withstand closer scrutiny.
amarant
Getting acquired by Microsoft is a death sentence for any product.
The only variable is how long after acquisition before they gut it. It's almost never right away. GitHub was acquired 7 years ago, but it started showing symptoms perhaps 2 years ago.
With this I think it's clear the wound was fatal. GitHub will stumble on for a few more years with ever-decreasing quality, before going the way of Skype.
So, I guess we're all migrating to gitlab? Or is it time to launch gittube? Githamster?
sytse
In case you're considering moving to GitLab we currently have no plans that I'm aware of to pay from bringing your own runners. Happy to answer any questions.
no_wizard
The exodus from GitHub has not begun, as far as I can tell.
They seem to care much less about free users than in the past but businesses still flock to it. GitLab is the only other platform I’ve seen in the workplace of anywhere I worked, with the exception of a big tech company I worked at. They had both GitHub enterprise and an internally maintained platform which was being phased out. if I recall correctly it based on Phabricator
Kwpolska
If Microsoft had not acquired GitHub, there would not be GitHub Actions. GitHub Actions is a mediocre knock-off of Azure Pipelines, and it was launched after the acquisition.
rcy
hopefully something decentralized like https://tangled.org
pferde
Hopefully something ForgeFed-powered, so that we can all re-decentralize, as is right and proper.
myko
I'm running forgejo on my NAS, including CI runners etc. Harder to share with folks but great for my personal projects (except building an iOS app, which someday I'll set a Mac Mini up for probably)
strangattractor
Microsoft has started raising prices on many of their products. I suppose they decided that their current customers need to pay the increased CapEx for AI;) New motto - AI pay for it whether you use it or not.
scienceman
No such thing as free parking
CartwheelLinux
No but there is validated parking for customers of other services.
This is going to be the downfall of GA
null
whalesalad
smcameron
Control, Alt, Delete.
szundi
[dead]
jrochkind1
a per-job cost instead of per-minute cost for non-compute "control plane" for CI would have made more sense and seemed more reasonable to me -- but don't really know if customers would have liked it better/worse or paid more/less under it.
(I work exclusively on public repo open source at the moment, and get Github actions for free).
erdaniels
Time to get off for good. We're moving to https://forgejo.org/. With downtime and this, screw them.
pjmlp
The way Github, Xamarin and other acquisitions have gone down, it is quite clear that the Satya charming phase is sadly gone.
cedws
I wonder if players like Depot could sidestep GHA by using webhooks instead of acting as a custom runner, in other words build their own compatible control plane. I guess it would probably break a lot of workflows.
What I'd really like to see is some new CI/CD systems though. Actions is garbage in multiple dimensions. Can't somebody do something clever and save us from this flaky insecure YAML hell?
kylegalbraith
Founder of Depot[0] here. To answer your idea, at Depot we already have this concept internally. In fact, Depot isn't reliant on webhooks at all to run your jobs. One of the reasons we can be up running your jobs when GitHub webhooks service is down. Effectively, we listen to a different system to know you have a job that needs to be run.
To your second statement, I generally agree. Sounds strange to say given we're in the business of GHA runners. But it's just not a performant or reliable system at scale. This change from GitHub doesn't smell of a company that wants to do right by it's users.
If you are interested in what is up next for us at Depot, feel free to ping me via the email in my bio. I think you'll be quite interested in what we are doing.
pmontra
At $0.002 per minute there are at most 90 dollars in a month. Maybe even after an year of cumulative costs it's less then the cost of switching to something else. Maybe even after many and many years of cumulative costs: the larger the company the more expensive corporate inertia gets.
llama052
Our org is showing around 200-300$/mo in added fees and we are exclusively self hosting in our own on premise cluster. Kind of wild we have to pay to use our own compute.
Alupis
In fairness to Github, bringing your own runners isn't "free" on their end. The orchestration happens server-side, so there is some level of cost. I don't know if that justifies the $0.002/min price - just wanted to point this out.
llama052
Oh absolutely, but honestly the self hosted runner setups that I'm familiar with are just waiting for a call. As far as I can tell GH side just routes.
notatoad
if you were only paying to use your own compute, you could just use your own compute - you don't have to use github actions, you can trigger actions on your own systems without github.
the control plane clearly has value to people beyond the compute used for running the actions, and it seems reasonable that they should charge for that if you're using it.
klinch
I agree that it’s probably not a big amount. But note that it can be potentially quiet a bit more than the 90$. Task runtimes are always rounded up to the nearest minute.
For example, in our pipeline we have 5 different linter tasks (for different subprojects), running each only a few seconds. Nonetheless, we’ll get billed for 5 minutes on every commit.
pmontra
Ah I see, they are not minutes as on the clock. They are runtime minutes. That changes my assessment. I was thinking that they picked a balanced price point not to scare away many people except probably personal projects or unfunded open source. If it's something potentially in the ballpark of $500 per month it's a bit too greedy. It's more like: we want only corporate customers, free tier users need not apply.
turtlebits
Per minute per runner. If you have multiple workfows/jobs running, it can add up.
bakies
Yeah... Kind of expected GHA to be a money trap at some point. It was tempting with how easy it is to setup. And every since Claude Code integrated tightly it assumes i want pipelines in gha even though I have pipelines elsewhere. Glad I stuck with picking a different system and didn't invest a lot of time here. I had plenty of compute to run jobs myself.
anthonj
It's a bit weird, they add pricing for this, but reducwle GitHub-hosted runners by "up to 39%".
Not sure about the "up to" implications, but I guess it's just Microsoft trying to make github a bit more freemium tm
noname120
The full quote:
> And we’re reducing the net cost of GitHub-hosted runners by up to 39%, depending on which machine type is used.
> The price reduction you will see in your account depends on the types of machines that you use most frequently – smaller runners will have a smaller relative price reduction, larger runners will see a larger relative reduction.
defraudbah
it explains github actions update better than github
>In the past, our customers have asked us how GitHub views third-party runners long-term. The platform fee largely answers that: GitHub now monetizes Actions usage regardless of where jobs run, aligning third-party runners like Blacksmith as ecosystem partners rather than workarounds.
It does? I feel like it implies that they want third-party runners like Blacksmith out of the ecosystem, which is why they're now financially penalizing customers who use them.