What is happening?
GitHub has just announced a change to Action pricing. Previously, GitHub Actions had a free control plane. This means that if you used GitHub Actions, but ran jobs outside of a GitHub-hosted runner, whether it’s on Blacksmith, on your own machines, or in your own AWS account, you didn’t pay anything to GitHub for those minutes; You only paid for the calculations.
With this change, GitHub is introducing a platform fee of $0.002 per minute All GitHub Actions usage.
In practice, this means that CI costs now have two components:
- Calculate Costs (Whoever Runs Your Runner)
- A flat GitHub platform fee, charged per minute of action usage
These changes will be effective from March 1, 2026.
Our take on why they’re making these changes
GitHub Actions has had a long-standing problem with graduation churn. As companies grow, their CI workloads become larger, more complex, and more expensive. At a certain scale, GitHub-hosted runners become both slow and expensive, leading teams to self-host or turn to third-party runners like Blacksmith.
Until now, that change had one important side effect: companies could continue to use the GitHub Actions control plane while not paying anything to GitHub for CI execution. GitHub provided scheduling, orchestration, and workflow automation, but did not receive any revenue from some of its largest and fastest-growing customers.
The new per-minute platform fee changes this. This directly monetizes the action control plane and establishes a limit on what GitHub earns from CI, no matter where the jobs run. In fact, self-hosting is no longer free.
At the same time, GitHub reduced the price of GitHub-hosted runners. This is not accidental. The low prices of hosted runners make GitHub-hosted runners more attractive, while platform fees introduce a new, unavoidable cost to self-hosting.
From GitHub’s perspective, this is a logical move. Most of the action is focused on smaller runners, so a cut in the hosted runner price will not have a significant impact on revenues. More importantly, GitHub is trading low-margin compute revenue for high-margin platform revenue.
Hosted runners are basically a compute business. Platform fees, in contrast, monetize software without linearly increasing infrastructure costs. As CI usage increases, revenues increase with significantly improved unit economics.
In the past, our customers have asked us how GitHub views third-party runners long-term. Platform fees largely answer this: GitHub now monetizes the use of Actions no matter where the jobs run, aligning third-party runners like Blacksmith as ecosystem partners rather than workarounds.
Per Minute CI Pricing and Its Impact on Self-Hosting
Before this change, self-hosting was a way to avoid paying GitHub altogether. This is no longer true. Now, self-hosting on GitHub retains the operational burden of running a CI infrastructure while still charging per minute.
At that point, the primary variable you can still control is how many minutes your CI jobs consume. One approach is to run CI on infrastructure designed to minimize wall-clock time and eliminate unnecessary work. Blacksmith’s focus is on this problem. In practice, this is visible in some areas:
- Fast machines. Runs CI jobs on Blacksmith CPUs with 50%+ higher single-core performance than GitHub-hosted runners. As part of the ongoing fleet upgrade, we are deploying even more new instances that add an additional 15-25% improvement in reduced runtime for CPU-bound workloads.
- Reusing work across runs. The Docker layer cache is persisted across CI runs, allowing unchanged layers to be reused rather than rebuilt, reducing Docker build times from tens of minutes to seconds for many customers.
- Container Caching (Beta). Service containers can be pre-hydrated on runners, removing repeated image pulling and extraction from the job startup path.
With per-minute platform fees, CI performance and cost are tightly linked. The remaining levers are reducing CI time and total actions.
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