The cheapest GitHub Actions runners in 2026: what 100,000 minutes cost

说明与用途

团队构建了自托管的 SuperCI 运行器，在自己的云上运行，降低了 100,000 分钟 CI 任务的成本，从 $1,200 降至约 $140，同时保持对机器选择和性能的控制。

问题

Open‑source projects running GitHub Actions on public repos consume large amounts of minutes; if the repos were private, the cost would be significant.

结果

By building and deploying SuperCI, the team reduced the cost of 100,000 minutes of Linux 4‑vCPU jobs from $1,200 (GitHub larger runner) to ~$140, a 90% cost reduction, while maintaining control over machine selection and performance.

工作流

• 1. Measure minutes used by public repos (534,311 minutes).
• 2. Calculate list‑price cost ($8,292).
• 3. Compare pricing of 9 runners for 100,000 minutes of Linux 4‑vCPU jobs.
• 4. Identify cheapest option (SuperCI at ~$140).
• 5. Build SuperCI to run a machine per job in own cloud.
• 6. Optimize spot instance usage: handle termination, retry logic, fail‑fast off, newer machine families, disk speed, cache placement.
• 7. Switch CI jobs to SuperCI by updating runs‑on line in workflow YAML.
• 8. Deploy SuperCI via npx @superci/cli dashboard.

证据

From October 1 to 27, those repos ran 534,311 minutes on GitHub Actions. GitHub billed us $0, because the repos are public. At list price the same minutes come to $8,292.

来源

The cheapest machine isn’t the cheapest job. For 4 CPUs, AWS has several machine families at different spot prices, and the newer ones run the same job faster.

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Keep the cache next to the machines. With GitHub’s cache in an S3 bucket in the same region, a 4 GB cache restored in 11 seconds instead of 21 on GitHub’s own cache.

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Whichever you pick, switching is one line per job: ... runs-on: superci/cpu=4

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