We run hosted GitHub Actions runners, so "what does a CI minute really cost?" is a question we answer for customers every week. Most teams asking it have just had a surprise bill: an AI agent opening pull requests all day, a test matrix that quietly doubled, or a macOS job nobody noticed.
So we priced every option the same way, from each provider's own pricing page, and put them side by side.
GitHub Actions runner pricing, side by side
To compare like with like: 100,000 minutes a month of Linux jobs on 4 vCPUs, roughly 110 ten-minute jobs a day. Prices read on November 7, 2026.
| Runner | Where jobs run | Cost per minute (4 vCPU Linux) | 100,000 minutes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sengi Basic | Sengi's managed runners | $0.002 | $200, with 3,000 free minutes a month |
| Sengi Premium | Sengi's managed runners, faster class | $0.006 | $600 |
| Blacksmith | Blacksmith's hardware | $0.008 | $800, with 3,000 free minutes a month |
| WarpBuild | WarpBuild's cloud | $0.008 | $800 |
| Namespace | Namespace's hardware | $0.012 pay as you go ($0.008 on the $100/month Team plan) | $800 to $1,200 |
| GitHub larger runner | GitHub | $0.012 | $1,200 |
| Depot | Depot's cloud | $0.012 | $1,200, plus a plan from $20 a month |
| RunsOn | Your AWS account | ~$0.0013 on spot | ~$130 plus a €300+ yearly licence, plus running it |
| Actions Runner Controller | Your Kubernetes cluster | Your cluster's cost | Your cluster's share, plus running it |
The pattern: managed runners cost $0.002 to $0.012 a minute, and Sengi Basic is the cheapest one you don't have to operate. At this volume it's $1,000 a month less than GitHub's larger runner for the same jobs.
At 2 vCPU the gap is the same shape: Sengi Basic is $0.001 a minute against GitHub's $0.006, so a dollar buys six times the minutes.
What actually drives a GitHub Actions bill
macOS minutes cost ten times Linux ones. Past your included minutes, GitHub charges $0.062 a minute for macOS against $0.006 for Linux. One lint job on macos-latest that should have been on Linux can cost more than the rest of the pipeline. Check the usage report for jobs that don't need a Mac.
Every matrix leg is billed separately, and each job rounds up. A 12-leg matrix where each leg runs 20 seconds bills 12 minutes, not 4. Coding agents make this worse: every push from an agent re-runs the whole matrix.
Most minutes don't need to be fast. Lint, unit tests, type checks and nightly jobs are the bulk of CI time, and nobody is watching them finish. Those belong on the cheapest runner you can find. The few jobs people actually wait on, like the Docker image or the integration suite blocking a merge, are where a faster class pays for itself.
Per-minute price is only half the sum. If a job runs twice as fast, it uses half the minutes. That's why we sell two classes: Basic for price, and Premium for speed. On a PostHog Docker build at 4 vCPU, Sengi Premium finished in 7m34s; GitHub's runner took 14m36s.
Self-hosting is cheap per minute and expensive per engineer. Running your own fleet on spot instances gets the raw minute under $0.002, but you own the images, the autoscaling, spot interruptions, disk and network costs, and the pager. For most teams that time costs more than the difference.
Which runner is cheapest for you
- Most teams: Sengi Basic. The lowest per-minute price of any managed runner in the table, $0.001 at 2 vCPU, 3,000 free minutes a month, and nothing to run yourself. Put Premium on the few jobs where speed matters.
- You want jobs inside your own cloud account and have someone to run it: RunsOn on AWS, or Actions Runner Controller if you already run Kubernetes.
- macOS jobs: keep those on GitHub or a provider with Mac runners, and move the Linux jobs, which are usually most of the minutes.
Whichever you pick, switching is one line per job:
jobs:
test:
# runs-on: ubuntu-latest # GitHub
runs-on: sengi-basic-2-ubuntu-2404 # Sengi Basic, $0.001/min
image:
runs-on: sengi-premium-4-ubuntu-2404 # Sengi Premium, for the slow Docker build
Your workflows, secrets and logs stay in GitHub. You can start without a card, and the 3,000 free minutes cover a real trial on one workflow.
Sources and more detail
The full price table, re-checked every month with a source for every number, is on our site:
- The 2026 GitHub Actions runner price table
- Sengi Basic vs Premium
- GitHub Actions cost calculator for your own minutes
If a price here is out of date, tell us in the comments and we'll fix it.
Disclosure: this post is by the team behind Sengi.
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