GitHub Actions pricing and cost
GitHub Actions pricing: what you actually pay, and how to pay less
A drop-in replacement for GitHub-hosted runners. Change one line of YAML, keep your workflows exactly as they are, and pay from $0.0025 per minute instead of $0.006.
30 days free · No credit card required · Up to 6,000 free runner minutes
Where the money actually goes
The bill nobody puts on the invoice
Per-minute rates are the visible half of CI cost. The other half is an engineer stopping what they are doing to look at a red build that was never their code: reading the log, recognising the registry timeout or the OOM kill, clicking re-run, waiting again. That time is not on any invoice, and it is the more expensive line.
Latchkey runners repair those failures while the job is still running. The agent diagnoses the cause on the machine, applies the fix, and retries the step, so the build goes green without anyone being interrupted. Self-healing is on by default, there is no separate charge for it, and there is nothing to configure.
Per-minute rates, side by side
GitHub figures are the published Linux list price. Latchkey runners are Ubuntu 24.04 on x86_64.
| Runner size | GitHub-hosted | Latchkey | You save |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2 vCPU / 8 GB | $0.0060 | $0.0025 | up to 60% |
| 4 vCPU / 16 GB | $0.0120 | $0.0050 | up to 60% |
| 8 vCPU / 32 GB | $0.0220 | $0.0100 | up to 55% |
| 16 vCPU / 64 GB | — | $0.0200 | — |
Savings compare Latchkey list rates against GitHub-hosted Linux list rates. Your actual saving depends on runner size, minutes used, and how much of your bill is spent on failed runs.
How Latchkey compares
| Feature | Latchkey | Blacksmith | GitHub Hosted |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price per minute | from $0.0025/min | from $0.0040/min | from $0.0060/min |
| Savings vs GitHub | -60% | -33% | Baseline |
| Free minutes/mo (mid tier) | 4,000 | 3,000 | 3,000 |
| Cold start speed | ~10s | ~10s | 30-60s |
| AI optimization insights | |||
| Cost performance analytics | |||
| Dependency caching | Built-in S3 streaming | 25 GB/repo | 10 GB/repo |
| AI scan runner images |
Switching takes one line
Point runs-on at a Latchkey label. Your steps, actions, secrets, and matrix stay exactly as they are.
jobs:
build:
- runs-on: ubuntu-latest
+ runs-on: latchkey-medium
steps:
- uses: actions/checkout@v4Work out your own numbers
Rather than take a percentage on faith, run your own minutes through the calculator, or read the breakdown of where GitHub Actions spend goes.
Questions about cost
How much do Latchkey Runners cost?
Runner minutes are billed by size: latchkey-small (2 vCPU / 8 GB) is $0.0025 per minute, latchkey-medium (4 vCPU / 16 GB) is $0.005, latchkey-large (8 vCPU / 32 GB) is $0.01, and latchkey-xlarge (16 vCPU / 64 GB) is $0.02. Custom runners bill at the xlarge rate. That is up to 60% cheaper per minute than GitHub-hosted runners. Every plan includes free runner minutes each month (2,000 on Developer, 4,000 on Launch, 6,000 on Scale), and usage beyond your included minutes is billed at the per-minute rate.
What plans does Latchkey offer?
Four plans: Developer at $5/month (1 repository, 2,000 free runner minutes, 1 seat), Launch at $19/month (up to 10 repositories, 4,000 free minutes, 1 seat included and extra seats at $5/month), Scale at $49/month (up to 40 repositories, 6,000 free minutes, 5 seats included), and Enterprise with custom pricing. Every plan starts with a 30-day free trial.
Do I need a credit card to start the free trial?
No. Every plan starts with a 30-day free trial with full feature access, and none of them ask for a card up front. Each workspace gets one trial.
What happens if I run out of free runner minutes?
Free minutes reset at the start of every monthly billing period. Once they are used, additional runner minutes are metered at the per-minute rate of the runner size you use. If you are on a card-less trial, new runner jobs are blocked until you add a payment method.
Do you charge for the number of workflow executions?
No. Analytics and monitoring are unlimited within your plan's repository limit; whether you run 10 builds a day or 10,000, monitoring costs the same. Runner minutes are the only metered usage: every plan includes free minutes each month, and usage beyond them bills at the runner's per-minute rate.
Do I need to pay for each developer on my team (per-seat pricing)?
Each plan includes seats: Developer is single-seat with no team members, Launch includes 1 seat, and Scale includes 5. On Launch and Scale you can add seats for $5/month each, so your whole engineering team can access the dashboard and insights.
Are GitHub Actions free?
For public repositories, yes: standard GitHub-hosted runners are free with no minute limit, and self-hosted runners are free on any repository. For private repositories you get a monthly allowance and pay for what you use beyond it, so "free" depends entirely on whether your code is public. Latchkey runners are billed per minute on every repository, with 2,000 to 6,000 free minutes a month depending on plan.
What does the GitHub Actions free tier include?
GitHub's published monthly allowance for private repositories is 2,000 minutes on Free, 3,000 on Pro and Team, and 50,000 on Enterprise Cloud, alongside 500 MB to 50 GB of artifact storage by plan and a 10 GB Actions cache per repository on every plan. Public repositories are not metered at all. Figures are from GitHub's billing documentation.
How much does GitHub Actions cost per minute?
GitHub's published list rate for a standard Linux 2-core x64 runner is $0.006 per minute, billed only on private repositories once the plan allowance is used. Larger runners and other operating systems cost more. Latchkey lists $0.0025 per minute for a comparable 2 vCPU / 8 GB Linux runner, which is where the up-to-60% figure comes from.
How much do self-hosted GitHub Actions runners cost?
GitHub charges nothing for self-hosted runners, so the per-minute line disappears and the cost moves to your cloud bill and your engineers: instances that idle between jobs, AMI patching, autoscaler tuning, and a security review of machines that check out your source. Price the engineer-days alongside the instance-hours; that total is what a managed runner is competing with, not the zero on the GitHub invoice.
Can I buy more GitHub Actions minutes?
Yes. Once the plan allowance is used, GitHub bills additional minutes at its published per-minute rate against a spending limit you set, so the bill scales with usage rather than stopping the build. The alternative to buying more minutes at $0.006 is running the same jobs somewhere cheaper: Latchkey is a one-line runs-on change at $0.0025 per minute, with no workflow rewrite.