GitHub will charge $0.002 per minute for self-hosted runners (used for GitHub Actions) from March 1 2026 – a significant shift as these were previously free. The move comes as competitors offer faster, cheaper alternatives.

While GitHub-hosted runner prices will drop 20 and 39 percent from January 1 2026, the new self-hosted fees have drawn sharp criticism. Developers object to paying per-minute charges for software running on their own infrastructure.

GitHub justifies the change by noting that GitHub-hosted revenue was subsidizing free self-hosted runners, despite costs for “maintaining and evolving GitHub Actions” (which now runs 71 million jobs daily).

The price changes do not affect users of GitHub Enterprise Server, which runs on-premises, and GitHub Actions remain free for public repositories. The company claims that “96 percent of customers will see no change to their bill”, and that most customers who are impacted will pay less.

Developers in discussions, such as this one on Reddit, complain about “the audacity to charge for self-hosted compute.” Paying to run licensed software is hardly new, however, the change is unpalatable for some. 

GitHub’s move may be in response to competitors such as Depot, which offers optimized runners for GitHub actions, with per-second billing, at what it claims is “half the cost of GitHub-hosted runners.”

One user branded the change as “absolutely bananas”, saying: “for my own CI workflow I’ll have to pay $140+/month now just to run my own hardware” – though this reflects unusually intensive usage.

Why is developer reaction negative overall? Despite there being a cost reduction for many users, GitHub is perceived as neglecting its core platform. A developer observed that the open source runner application, used to set up a self-hosted machine, is not taking contributions, the stated reason being that “we are allocating resources towards other areas of Actions.” One customer complained that GitHub runners are hard to host, with an “unnecessarily byzantine” configuration process, and there are faults with the service including inability to cancel jobs cleanly and consistency problems.

Self-hosted runners are popular in part because of performance issues with the GitHub-hosted option. “We self host the runners in our infrastructure and the builds are over 10x faster than relying on their cloud runners,” said one user.

GitHub said that along with the price changes it will invest in self-hosted Actions, with a new scale-set client, multi-label support for Actions Runner Controller for more flexibility in managing runners, and a new Actions Data Stream which will provide real-time observability data for GitHub workflows.

While this may help, the company has a lot to do in order to persuade developers that it is focused on core platform improvements, rather than just controversial AI features and user interface changes. The Zig project recently moved away from GitHub citing unreliable and neglected Actions as one of the reasons.