What is Ubicloud CI, and what does it actually cost?

By Daniel Zoghalchali·Latchkey

What is Ubicloud CI: an open source infrastructure provider that runs your GitHub Actions jobs on its own virtual machines and bills them by the minute, at rates between two and a half and roughly five times below GitHub's published ones depending on the size you pick. The migration is a label change, the price list is public, and the two things worth checking before you move are which runner class you are on by default and where the machines physically are.

Headline claims 7x cheaper; the largest ratio in the vendor own price table is 4.8x, and 3x on premium — The headline against the price list. Ratios computed from the Ubicloud and GitHub columns published on ubicloud.com/docs/about/pricing, read 21 September 2026.

Ubicloud is unusual in this market twice over. The platform is open source under AGPL v3, so the managed service is a convenience rather than the only way to get it, and the runners are not resold hyperscaler capacity: the documentation says the application "allocates virtual machines (VMs) across data centers in Germany to provide high availability".

That second fact is the one to settle first, because it is a data residency and a latency statement at the same time, and no per-minute rate compensates for it if your compliance position rules it out.

The rates, size by size

Ubicloud publishes three ladders: standard x64, premium x64, and arm64. The standard 2 vCPU runner with 8 GB is $0.00125 a minute and doubles with each size step, reaching $0.01875 at 30 vCPU. The arm64 ladder is priced identically to standard x64 at every size, with slightly less memory per core. Premium x64 is a separate, faster class at $0.002 for 2 vCPU rising to $0.030 at 30.

Which one you are on is not the one most people quote. The documentation says plainly that "all new users get the superior performance of our premium runners by default", and that you disable premium in account settings if you want the standard rate. So the number an account actually pays at 2 vCPU is $0.002 a minute, not $0.00125, unless somebody went and changed it. Premium also falls back: "if capacity's full, you seamlessly fall back to standard runners with no extra wait time".

Billing is per minute and monthly, and every account gets a credit the documentation describes as "$2.5/month credit that's equivalent to 1,250 minutes of Ubicloud (2 vCPU) runner time". That identity is worth reading twice, because 2.50 divided by 1,250 is $0.002, which is the premium rate. The free allowance is quoted against the class you are actually on.

Runner	vCPU and memory	Ubicloud per minute	GitHub per minute	Ratio
Standard x64	2 vCPU, 8 GB	$0.00125	$0.006	4.8x
Premium x64 (the default)	2 vCPU, 8 GB	$0.002	$0.006	3.0x
Standard x64	8 vCPU, 32 GB	$0.005	$0.022	4.4x
arm64	2 vCPU, 6 GB	$0.00125	$0.005	4.0x
arm64	16 vCPU, 48 GB	$0.01	$0.026	2.6x

The headline multiple does not survive the price list

Ubicloud markets the runners as "7x cheaper than GitHub Actions", and that number does not appear anywhere in its own table. Divide each Ubicloud rate into the GitHub rate beside it and the largest ratio on the page is 4.8x, at 2 vCPU on standard x64. The arm64 ladder tops out at 4.0x and falls to 2.5x at the largest size. On the premium runners that new accounts are given by default, the ratio is 3.0x.

One more line is worth checking rather than trusting. The arm64 table compares its 30 vCPU runner against a GitHub rate of $0.04687 a minute, and GitHub does not publish an arm64 runner at 30 cores: its arm64 ladder goes from 16-core at $0.026 to 32-core at $0.050. That row is priced against an interpolation, not against a rate you could be charged.

None of this makes Ubicloud expensive. Between three and roughly five times below GitHub is a real saving and it is larger than most of this market offers. It is simply not seven, and a business case built on seven will be short by a third or more when the first invoice arrives.

What the migration looks like

The setup is an account, billing details, the GitHub App, and a label swap. The documentation notes that the tag ubicloud-standard-2 "defaults to Linux x64 2 vCPUs", and adds a recommendation that follows directly from the price gap: "given Ubicloud's price advantage, we recommend trying 4 vCPUs or more if your pipeline benefits from parallelism".

That recommendation is sound arithmetic and worth stating in your own numbers before you take it. Moving from 2 to 4 vCPU doubles the rate at every step of the ladder, so it pays only where the job actually halves in wall clock. A job bound by a single-threaded compiler, a database, or the network does not, and you have doubled the line for nothing. Choosing a runner size has the break-even in one formula.

Ten thousand Linux minutes a month makes the comparison concrete. GitHub bills $60 at the standard rate. Ubicloud bills $20 on the premium runners a new account gets by default, and $12.50 if you switch the account to standard. For reference, a Latchkey managed runner at the same 2 vCPU with 8 GB is $0.0025 a minute, or $25: Ubicloud is genuinely cheaper per minute than we are, and a page that pretended otherwise would be worth nothing to you.

The limits to settle before you move

Location first. The runners are virtual machines in German data centres, which is a good answer for a European team and a question for anyone whose artefacts, secrets or customer data are not allowed to leave another jurisdiction. It also puts a fixed round trip between the runner and anything you host in North America, which shows up in registry pulls and deployment steps rather than in the CPU-bound part of a build.

Second, the published runner price list covers Linux on x64 and arm64. If your matrix includes Windows or macOS legs, those legs stay where they are, and a partial migration means two rate cards and two sets of runner labels to keep straight.

Third, the open source licence cuts both ways. AGPL v3 means you can run the platform yourself rather than buy the managed service, which is a genuine exit route that almost no competitor offers. It also means the thing you would be running yourself is a full IaaS, not a runner agent, and that is a much larger operational commitment than the phrase "self-host it" suggests. Self-hosted versus managed runners is the honest version of that choice.

Key takeaways

New Ubicloud accounts run on premium runners by default, at $0.002 a minute for 2 vCPU rather than the $0.00125 standard rate.
The published 7x headline is not in the price table: the largest ratio there is 4.8x, and 3.0x on the default premium class.
Runners are virtual machines in German data centres, which is a data residency decision as much as a price one.
The published runner rates cover Linux x64 and arm64 only, so Windows and macOS legs stay where they are.

Frequently asked questions

What is Ubicloud, and how is it different from a managed runner vendor?

Ubicloud is an open source infrastructure platform, licensed AGPL v3, that runs on bare metal providers and sells a managed service on top. The GitHub Actions runners are one product of that platform rather than the whole company, and because the platform is open source you could in principle operate it yourself.

How much does a Ubicloud runner cost per minute?

Standard x64 starts at $0.00125 a minute for 2 vCPU with 8 GB and doubles with each size step to $0.01875 at 30 vCPU. Premium x64, which new accounts get by default, starts at $0.002. The arm64 ladder matches the standard x64 prices at every size. Every account also gets a $2.50 monthly credit, which is 1,250 minutes at the 2 vCPU premium rate.

Is Ubicloud really 7x cheaper than GitHub Actions?

Not by its own price list. Dividing each Ubicloud rate into the GitHub rate printed beside it gives a maximum of 4.8x, at 2 vCPU on standard x64, falling to 3.0x on the premium runners new accounts are given and to 2.5x at the top of the arm64 ladder. The saving is real and substantial; the multiple in the headline is not one the table supports.

Where do Ubicloud GitHub Actions runners physically run?

The documentation states that the runner application allocates virtual machines across data centres in Germany for high availability. That is a data residency answer as much as a performance one, and it adds a fixed network round trip to anything your pipeline talks to on another continent.

Does Ubicloud offer Windows or macOS runners?

The published runner price list covers Linux on x64 and arm64. Any Windows or macOS leg of a matrix stays on GitHub-hosted runners or on a vendor that sells those machines, which means a mixed pipeline ends up with two rate cards and two sets of labels to maintain.