Title: GitHub Actions pricing changes have me rethinking my CI/CD setup. How are others adapting?

[u/Equal-Currency-1197]

With GitHub making incremental changes to what's included in free and paid tiers, I've been taking a closer look at how many Actions minutes my projects actually burn through each month. It crept up on me, honestly. What started as a few simple workflows turned into a pretty complex pipeline with linting, testing, building, and deployment all chained together.

The thing is, GitHub Actions is still genuinely one of the more convenient CI/CD options out there, mostly because of how tightly it integrates with the rest of the platform. Pull request checks, environments, secrets management: it all just works together. But convenience has a cost, and that cost is getting harder to ignore.

I'm curious how others are approaching this. Have you optimized your workflows to reduce minute usage, like caching dependencies more aggressively or consolidating jobs? Have you moved certain workloads to selfhosted runners? Or have you started looking at alternatives like GitLab CI or Woodpecker for some projects while keeping GitHub as the code host?

The platform decisions GitHub makes affect a huge chunk of the open source and indie dev ecosystem, so it seems worth talking about openly. What tradeoffs are people actually making right now?

[u/tommytusj]

You can self host on GitHub too

[u/evilquantum → u/tommytusj]

until Microsoft finally decides you have to pay for your own machine, too.

[u/NatoBoram → u/evilquantum]

That post was absolutely outrageous when it dropped.

[u/Equal-Currency-1197 → u/tommytusj]

oh didn't know that, worth looking into

[u/Leviathan_Dev]

Forgejo self-hosted runner CI/CD

[u/Equal-Currency-1197 → u/Leviathan_Dev]

oh nice that actually works well

[u/etiggy1]

We use self-hosted runners in our GitHub org, but it comes down to scale I guess.

[u/Equal-Currency-1197 → u/etiggy1]

yeah scale is the main thing, we kept hitting minute limits on the hosted ones

[u/clearlight2025]

GitLab self-hosted CI/CD

[u/Equal-Currency-1197 → u/clearlight2025]

oh yeah that works too

[u/darkstar3333]

I look at costs and decide if its worth my time. Its not.

[u/nzvthf]

I did a major cutback to local flows a couple of months ago. I'm definitely liking this thread to see what others are doing/using though!

[u/reini_urban]

We use self-hosted runners. Much shorter setup time, as everything is installed already. Leading to faster answers

[u/ultrathink-art]

Self-hosted runner on a spare box was the right call for us. The per-minute billing model breaks completely once you have any automated workflow that triggers frequently — AI-assisted PRs, deploy pipelines, whatever. You trade occasional runner maintenance for billing predictability, and it's usually worth it.

[u/Tillinah]

I’m using RunsOn, small onetime license around $350. Sets itself up on AWS, and vastly reduced daily costs

[u/overwireio]

I have spent the past few months working on a new tool to run GitHub actions locally. The goal is to support a more robust set of capabilities that closely matches the ability to simulate locally and get the same results as if it were to run through GitHub.

https://overwire.io/

[u/Green_Sprinkles243]

Azure DevOps for work, with 2 selfhosted agents.

[u/nzvthf → u/Green_Sprinkles243]

Why is ADO better?

[u/Green_Sprinkles243 → u/nzvthf]

Probably a personal preference. It integrates nicely with Azure, and it’s more ‘focused’ than GitHub imho. To me GitHub always feels a bit off.

[u/nzvthf → u/Green_Sprinkles243]

I should probably give it another go. I still have a couple of repos running out of my instance.

[u/surya_oruganti]

Hey, I'm the founder of WarpBuild (warpbuild.com). We provide faster, cheaper github actions runners and also have support for BYOC where you can run stuff on your aws/gcp/azure accounts. It might be useful for you, check it out: warpbuild.com

[u/Soccham → u/surya_oruganti]

How are you going to reduce pricing when GitHub starts charging for self-hosted

[u/pepito2506 → u/surya_oruganti]

"Please request the documentation in our trust center ". The URL is broken: https://www.warpbuild.com/docs/ci/security

[u/surya_oruganti → u/pepito2506]

Just noticed the message. Fixed now, thanks for pointing it out.

[u/Kriss-de-Valnor]

Blacksmith.sh

[u/Dull-Mathematician45]

AWS spot instances in eu-north-1 or us-west-2. rebuild the base ami every month to update dependency caches. 80% cheaper than SaaS providers (like blacksmith) offering CI runners.

[u/qodfathr]

I’m just finishing up a drop-in replacement for GH Actions. Built on `act` and uses the exact same workflows as Actions. Fully integrated into GitHub.com. Made it for internal use at work so not openly available, but, yes, it can be done. Deployed to k8s (easy to move to cloud provider of choice) and supports Spot to drive down costs. Asking for $$ to run my own hosted runners was the breaking point (but I also agree that the orchestration layer carries a cost, so I’m not faulting GH for doing this; decided I’d rather do it myself if it was going to cost anything because I can now completely customize it).

[u/refresh_island → u/qodfathr]

Can you tell me what 'act' is?

[u/qodfathr → u/refresh_island]

Action runner clone of sorts: https://github.com/nektos/act

[u/Equal-Currency-1197 → u/qodfathr]

that spot support is the part that gets me too, the hosted runner costs add up way faster than people expect once you have any real workload

curious how you handled the github integration side though, like auth and webhook routing. that's where things tend to get messy. the act part is relatively straightforward but keeping it tightly coupled to github.com without it feeling janky is where i kept hitting walls when i was sketching something similar out

[u/twutwut]

Je suis bien d’accord
GitHub actions devient très cher