GitHub will introduce a $0.002 per minute charge for self-hosted runners starting March 2026, ending years of free usage. While the company claims 96 percent of customers won’t see higher bills, developers are pushing back against paying for software running on their own infrastructure.
GitHub announced the pricing change on December 16, alongside a reduction in GitHub-hosted runner prices. From January 2026, GitHub-hosted runners will cost 20 to 39 percent less depending on machine type. Yet it’s the new self-hosted fees drawing sharp criticism from the developer community.
Self-hosted runners allow organizations to execute GitHub Actions workflows on their own hardware. They’ve been free since launch, with companies adopting them for performance and cost reasons. That changes March 1, when GitHub begins charging $0.002 per minute for self-hosted runner usage in private repositories. Public repositories remain free, as do GitHub Enterprise Server deployments.
Developer backlash over own hardware charges
The reaction has been swift and negative. On Reddit and other forums, developers express frustration about paying per-minute charges for software running on infrastructure they own and maintain. “The audacity to charge for self-hosted compute,” one developer complained, as pointed out by DevClass. Another calculated their costs would jump to over $140 monthly just to use their own hardware.
GitHub justifies the change by noting that GitHub-hosted revenue was subsidizing free self-hosted runners. The company maintains infrastructure and services that self-hosted users leverage, despite not using GitHub’s compute resources. With Actions now processing 71 million jobs daily, GitHub argues the pricing realignment is necessary for continued platform investment.
It’s clear that more changes are afoot. CEO Thomas Dohmke announced his departure in August 2024, and GitHub has since been integrated more tightly into Microsoft’s CoreAI organization. The platform is also migrating entirely to Azure infrastructure, suggesting cost pressures may be influencing pricing decisions.
Performance drives self-hosted adoption
Many organizations chose self-hosted runners specifically to avoid GitHub’s platform limitations. “We self host the runners in our infrastructure and the builds are over 10x faster than relying on their cloud runners,” one user noted. This performance gap explains why developers feel particularly aggrieved—they moved to self-hosted to solve GitHub’s own performance issues.
The frustration extends beyond pricing. Developers complain about GitHub’s “unnecessarily byzantine” configuration process for self-hosted runners and persistent service issues like inability to cancel jobs cleanly. The open source runner application isn’t accepting contributions, with GitHub citing resource allocation “towards other areas of Actions.” For some, this signals platform neglect. The Zig programming language project recently left GitHub, citing unreliable Actions as one reason.
Competitive pressure mounts
GitHub faces growing competition from alternatives like GitLab CI/CD, CircleCI, and Jenkins. Depot offers optimized runners with per-second billing at what it claims is half the cost of GitHub-hosted options. Buildkite and other platforms emphasize hybrid models where customers control infrastructure while using SaaS management.
GitHub promises to invest self-hosted runner revenues into platform improvements. Planned features include a new scale-set client, multi-label support for Actions Runner Controller, and an Actions Data Stream for real-time observability. Whether these additions satisfy developers accustomed to free self-hosted usage remains to be seen. For now, the message is clear: GitHub’s era of subsidizing self-hosted compute is ending, regardless of customer sentiment.