The GitHub Actions control plane is no longer free

Summary

What's happening?GitHub just announced changes to Actions pricing. Previously, GitHub Actions had a free control plane. That meant if you used GitHub Actions but ran jobs outside of GitHub-hosted runners, whether that’s on Blacksmith, on your own machines, or in your own AWS account, you paid nothing to GitHub for those minutes; you only paid for the compute.With this change, GitHub is introducing a $0.002 per-minute platform fee for all GitHub Actions usage.In practice, this means CI costs now have two components:Compute costs (whoever runs your runners)A flat GitHub platform fee, charged per minute of Actions usageThese changes go into effect on March 1st, 2026.Our perspective on why they’re making these changesGitHub Actions has long had a graduation churn problem. As companies grow, their CI workloads become larger, more complex, and more expensive. At a certain scale, GitHub-hosted runners become both slow and costly, pushing teams to self-host or move to third-party runners like Blacksmith.Until now, that shift had an important side effect: companies could continue using the GitHub Actions control plane while paying GitHub nothing for CI execution. GitHub provided scheduling, orchestration, and workflow automation, but captured no revenue from some of its largest and fastest-growing customers.The new per-minute platform fee changes that. It directly monetizes the Actions control plane and establishes a floor on what GitHub earns from CI, regardless of where jobs run. In effect, self-hosting is no longer free.At the same time, GitHub reduced the price of GitHub-hosted runners. This isn’t accidental. Lower hosted runner prices make GitHub-hosted runners more attractive, while the platform fee introduces a new, unavoidable cost for self-hosting.From GitHub’s perspective, this is a rational move. Most Actions usage is concentrated on smaller runners, so the hosted runner price cuts likely don’t materially impact revenue. More importantly, GitHub is trading lower-m...