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What to do when GitHub Actions changes its prices
Platform pricing moves. Here is how to model the impact on your pipeline in an afternoon rather than a quarter.
Jess Okonkwo · Co-founder · 2026-01-08 · 6 min read
Any per-minute platform will adjust prices, and CI bills are unusually sensitive to it because minute consumption grows with team activity rather than headcount.
Model it properly, quickly
- Pull trailing 90-day minutes broken down by OS — the multipliers differ enormously
- Apply the new rate per OS rather than a blended average; macOS usually dominates the delta
- Add artifact and cache storage, which people forget until it appears on the invoice
- Project forward on merge volume, not headcount — agent-driven pull requests have broken that correlation
The lever most teams have not pulled
Before switching providers over a price change, check concurrency cancellation and runner right-sizing. In our onboarding data those two together typically move the bill further than a rate difference does — a median 31% of runs were superseded before finishing, and about 40% of jobs averaged under 30% CPU utilisation.
Your next build could be twice as fast, at half the price
Start free. Migrating away is the same one line, and we publish that diff too.
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