GitHub Actions Pricing in 2026
Plans, hidden costs, and alternatives compared
Is GitHub Actions worth the price?
GitHub Actions is free for public repositories and includes 2,000 minutes/month on the free plan — enough for most individual developers and small open-source projects.
The real cost kicks in with private repos on teams: Linux runners cost $0.006/minute (2-core), but macOS runners jump to $0.062/minute — 10x more. A team of 10 developers on GitHub Team ($4/user/month) gets 3,000 shared minutes, which active CI/CD pipelines can burn through in days.
The pricing is fair for Linux-heavy workflows but punishes iOS/macOS builds severely.
Pricing Plans
Free
Free
Public repos
- Unlimited minutes
- Self-hosted runners
- 6 concurrent jobs
Free (private)
Free
2000 min/mo
- Linux/Windows/Mac
- 500MB storage
Hidden Costs & Gotchas
macOS runner minutes cost 10x more than Linux ($0.062/min vs $0.006/min). A 30-minute iOS build costs $1.86 — run that 20 times/day and you are spending $1,116/month on macOS CI alone
Windows runners cost $0.010/minute — 67% more than Linux. Teams with .NET or Windows-native builds pay significantly more than the headline Linux rates suggest
Artifact and cache storage is shared with GitHub Packages. Heavy Docker image publishing or large build artifacts eat into your storage quota, triggering $0.07/GB/month overage charges
Included minutes are shared across the entire organization, not per-user. A single developer with a misconfigured workflow can burn through the team's entire monthly allocation in hours
Larger hosted runners (4-core, 8-core, 16-core+) are always billed, even for public repositories. Only standard 2-core runners are free for public repos
Self-hosted runners are free to use in Actions, but you bear the infrastructure cost: EC2/VM hosting, maintenance, security patching, and scaling. GitHub does not manage self-hosted runners
Concurrent job limits exist
Free gets 20 concurrent jobs, Team/Pro get 60, and Enterprise gets 180+. CPU-heavy monorepos can hit these limits and queue builds, slowing deployment velocity
Cache storage has a 10GB limit per repository regardless of plan. Large monorepo builds that exceed this limit see cache eviction and slower builds
How GitHub Actions Compares
10-person dev team, 8,000 CI minutes/month (90% Linux, 10% macOS), annual billing
Which Plan Do You Need?
Completely free for public repos with unlimited minutes on standard runners. Even private repos get 2,000 minutes/month and 500MB artifact storage — generous enough for personal projects
At $0.006/minute for Linux 2-core runners, a team burning 5,000 minutes/month pays only ~$12 in overages. Combined with the $4/user Team plan, total CI/CD cost stays under $60/month for a 10-person team
50,000 included minutes, 50GB artifact storage, SAML SSO, and audit log API. The generous minute allocation means most Enterprise customers never pay overages for standard workflows
Our Recommendation
Worth it if...
You are already on GitHub for source control. The zero-friction integration (no external service to configure, native YAML in your repo, marketplace with 20,000+ community actions) makes it the obvious choice. For Linux-heavy workflows, the $0.006/minute rate is competitive with any hosted CI provider, and the 2,000-50,000 included minutes per plan cover most teams without overages.
Skip if...
Your CI/CD pipeline is macOS-heavy (iOS builds, Swift projects). At $0.062/minute, macOS runners make GitHub Actions one of the most expensive options for Apple platform development. Also skip if you need advanced pipeline features like matrix fan-out with dynamic parallelism or built-in test splitting — CircleCI and GitLab handle these better natively.
Negotiation tips
GitHub Actions pricing is fixed — no negotiation on per-minute rates. However, Enterprise agreements (100+ seats) often include additional Actions minutes as part of the contract. Self-hosted runners eliminate per-minute charges entirely if you have the infrastructure. For macOS builds, consider using self-hosted Mac minis ($600-800 one-time) instead of paying $0.062/minute — the hardware pays for itself in 2-3 months of heavy CI usage.
