Recent changes GitHub announced for Actions pricing and platform fees.

✅ 1. The Good News: The Free Quota Remains the Same

The core free offering for individuals and small teams using the GitHub Free plan is unchanged:

Scenario Free Quota Private Repositories (GitHub Free) 2,000 minutes per month (using standard GitHub-hosted runners). Public (Open Source) Repositories Free and Unlimited (using standard GitHub-hosted runners).

If you are an individual developer or a small team using the minutes GitHub provides to run your CI/CD, you are not affected by the loss of your free minutes.

⚠️ 2. The Big Change: The New Platform Fee

GitHub is introducing a new fee for the underlying control plane (the service that orchestrates and manages the workflows), which previously was free for self-hosted users.

What is it? A $0.002 per-minute Actions cloud platform charge.

Who is affected? This charge applies primarily to private repositories using self-hosted runners.

Effective Date: This new fee will begin on March 1, 2026.

⚠️ Why is this a big deal?

Before this change, if you used your own server or cloud account (a self-hosted runner) to run your CI/CD, you only paid for your own compute. You paid $0 to GitHub for the orchestration. Now, you will pay the new $0.002/minute fee to GitHub for simply using their platform to run the workflow, even if the actual compute is on your machine.

💸 3. Price Reduction for Paid Users

To offset this change and improve the value of their product, GitHub is also reducing the cost of their standard GitHub-hosted runners by up to 39% for paid customers.

This price reduction goes into effect on January 1, 2026.

For GitHub-hosted runners, the new $0.002 platform charge is already included in the new, lower listed price.

📊 Summary Table of Impact

Runner Type Repository Type Old Pricing to GitHub New Pricing to GitHub (Mar 2026)
GitHub-Hosted Private (Free Tier) 2,000 Minutes Free 2,000 Minutes Free
GitHub-Hosted Public Free & Unlimited Free & Unlimited
Self-Hosted Private (All Tiers) $0 per minute $0.002 per minute platform fee