Is GitHub Actions free? What it actually costs in 2026
Yes, there is a free tier — with limits.
Free accounts include 2,000 minutes a month on standard Linux runners; beyond that you pay per minute. From 1 January 2026 GitHub cut hosted-runner rates by up to 39%: standard Linux is about $0.006/min, ARM about $0.005/min, Windows about $0.010/min, and macOS about $0.062/min — roughly ten times Linux. Larger runners are billed separately and included minutes never apply to them; a 16-core Linux runner is around $0.042/min. Self-hosted runner minutes remain free. Rates checked 2026-07-30 and quoted for standard runners; confirm against GitHub's current billing page before you model a budget.
When paying is still the right call
Stay if you are inside the free tier, which covers a very large number of small teams and every open-source project — public repositories run on standard runners at no charge, and no alternative beats free-and-already-configured. Stay if your pipeline depends on the marketplace ecosystem, on GitHub-native features like required status checks and environments, or on OIDC federation into a cloud account. And stay if nobody on the team wants to own a build machine: a self-hosted runner is free in minutes and not free in attention.
What you are locked into
Moderate and mostly cultural rather than technical. Workflow YAML is GitHub-specific, and the marketplace actions a pipeline leans on — checkout, cache, setup-node — have no direct equivalent elsewhere, so a migration is a rewrite of the workflow files rather than a copy. What does move cleanly is the actual work: if your CI is mostly `make test` or a Docker build, that runs anywhere. The deeper hook is that Actions is wired to GitHub's own events, permissions and secrets, so leaving Actions usually means keeping GitHub and bolting a second system to it.
If you would rather not pay: Woodpecker CI
Woodpecker CI
A small, container-native CI server you can run on one box.
Free and open source. You pay only for the machine it runs on.
See all 4 GitHub Actions alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Pricing is verified against the vendor's published figures and dated above. Vendors change prices — confirm current numbers with GitHub (Microsoft) before you commit. More ci/cd & build automation decisions on Macrostack.