GitHub Actions Pricing: The Platform Reality Check
GitHub just announced pricing changes for GitHub Actions, and as expected, parts of the CI ecosystem panicked.
Some people are celebrating the price drop on GitHub-hosted runners. Others are furious that GitHub will start charging for self-hosted runners. And a few businesses are suddenly asking existential questions.
Since then, GitHub has paused the self-hosted runner billing change, acknowledging they moved too fast and didn’t involve the ecosystem enough.
That doesn’t change the underlying reality. It just delays the conversation.
GitHub Actions Was Never “Free”
GitHub Actions is not just a binary that runs on your machines.
It’s a platform:
job queuing and scheduling
runner registration and lifecycle management
workflow orchestration
security, isolation, secrets handling
reliability at massive scale
Even when you run your own hardware, GitHub is still doing a lot of work on your behalf. That infrastructure has always existed; hosted runners simply subsidized it.
GitHub explicitly said it:
“We have real costs in running the Actions control plane.”
That’s not new. It’s just now being made explicit.
Charging a small per-minute platform fee for self-hosted runners isn’t conceptually unfair: it’s GitHub aligning pricing with reality.
If you believe this is unacceptable, there has always been a clear alternative: run Jenkins, GitLab CI, or any other system where you fully own the control plane.
But you don’t get GitHub Actions “for free” just because the CPU cycles are yours.
Vendor Lock-In? Yes. And Everyone Chose It.
Some people are suddenly discovering that GitHub Actions can lead to vendor lock-in.
That’s… not new.
GitHub Actions is a GitHub App deeply embedded in the GitHub ecosystem. YAML workflows, permissions, APIs, events. The lock-in was the trade-off for convenience, reliability, and speed of adoption.
And let’s be honest: most teams are perfectly happy with vendor lock-in (right up until pricing becomes visible). You can’t have a deeply integrated platform and complain when the platform prices itself like one.
The Real Problem: CI Cost Arbitrage
The real pain isn’t for users. It’s for companies whose business model is essentially:
“We’ll run GitHub Actions cheaper than GitHub.”
That model was always fragile. If you are:
buying cloud compute from AWS, GCP, or another provider
reselling CI minutes
competing on price against Microsoft + Azure
You are not competing on technology. You are competing on arbitrage.
And arbitrage disappears the moment the platform owner decides to price closer to cost, or decides they don’t want that game played anymore.
This is not new. This is how platforms work.
When Self-Hosting Still Makes Sense
Self-hosted runners absolutely still make sense when:
you are very large
you have predictable workloads
you already operate infra at scale
growth is slow, and margin optimization matters more than velocity
In other words, when infrastructure is your business or a stable internal cost.
But for growing startups, optimizing CI costs too early is usually a mistake. Time spent shaving a few cents off a CI minute is time not spent shipping product.
(And yes: this is precisely why engineers should not be the sole decision-makers on infra strategy.)
What GitHub’s Pause Actually Signals
GitHub’s follow-up message is important:
They acknowledged real platform costs
They admitted poor communication
They paused to listen, not to abandon the direction
This is not GitHub “giving up.” It’s GitHub realizing that CI/CD has become critical infrastructure, and changes must be introduced with more ecosystem buy-in.
Hosted runners still get cheaper. Actions is still being positioned as a core execution layer (including for agentic workloads). The platform direction hasn’t changed.
Only the timeline has.
The Takeaway
GitHub Actions isn’t “turning evil.” It’s finishing its transition from a feature to a platform.
If your CI strategy depends on GitHub never charging for orchestration, scheduling, and reliability, that was never a safe assumption.
And if your business depends on undercutting a hyperscaler on compute, you were always racing the clock.
For everyone else, this remains mostly good news:
clearer economics
cheaper hosted runners
a stronger, more explicit platform contract
And a reminder that CI/CD is not just about cost. It’s about leverage.