Introduction
Just a few days ago, GitHub sent an email to its users that, at first glance, looked quite strange, followed shortly by a public announcement on their social media channels. The email subject was “GitHub is updating the Actions pricing structure”, which by itself is a worrying title for any user, since nobody expects good news out of nowhere.
The mail
I believe most people, myself included, were surprised once they actually started reading the email or the post, depending on where they saw it first, especially when they realized that the first point was actually a 39% price reduction for GitHub-hosted runners starting January 1st, 2026.
My first reaction to that number was that I must have misunderstood something, so I went back (not knowing what was coming next) and read it again just to confirm the information.
I told myself, okay, fair enough, this is a nice change.
Then I looked at the second point, which introduced a $0.002 per-minute platform charge for self-hosted runners.
What?
I found myself confused, wondering how we as a community even got to this point, again thinking that I must have read something wrong.
Of course, GitHub’s PR team tried to soften the blow by assuring us that, overall, the community would actually pay significantly less than before these changes. Still, something about it left a bad taste.
Backlash
As anyone could have expected, and as GitHub’s team definitely should have expected, this change caused a wave of negative comments and heated discussions across every possible communication channel.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that this change came at a time when GitHub seems to have one of the lowest levels of user support in its history, especially for a platform that was once known for supporting open-source and self-hosted communities.
Reading through the comments, it feels like the community primarily wants GitHub Actions and runners to improve from a technical standpoint, and for GitHub to focus on building a better product, rather than aggressively going after people who self-host their runners and maintain them.
Git revert
After the overwhelmingly negative feedback, we soon got another post stating that GitHub is postponing the introduction of charges for self-hosted runners, admitting that this was a bad decision and that they should have gathered community feedback beforehand.
The first point, the 39% price reduction remains, meaning that starting January 1st, GitHub Actions should ultimately cost less.
Conclusion
Even though this ended up being a win for the community, a big question remains: how did a change like this, from such a serious company, even get approved or even considered as something that could pass without major consequences? Especially if we don’t look at this from Microsoft’s perspective, but from the perspective of the product itself: GitHub.