IMO it's long time coming. Streaming logs and other supporting functionality is not free. We at Cirrus Runners provide runners as a service for a fixed monthly price with unlimited usage. We target large entrerprises that save $100K+ yearly by switching to us (10-25 times). In our calculations the new per-minute fee is roughly ~0.1% of the effective per-minute cost our customers avoid by using our fixed-price model. Over providers with the traditional per-minute pricing will have bigger impact.

Today GitHub announced changes to pricing for GitHub-managed runners and introduced a new per-minute charge for organizations using self-hosted runners. Below we’ll dive into what changed, the backstory, how companies have been using self-hosted runners, and how this affects third-party providers like Cirrus Runners.