What a GitHub Actions job costs on each runner: CI Bench v1 cost per job by workload
I maintain CI Bench, an open benchmark of GitHub Actions runners. I'm also the founder of Vitko, which sells one of the products measured (Vitko Runners, private beta). This post is about cost per job. A runner's list price per minute is not fully correlated with cost per job. Runners take different amounts of time and round differently. For example, GitHub rounds every job up to a whole minute,…
In the CI Bench v1 report, an analysis of GitHub Actions runners' costs per job was conducted across nine configurations. The findings revealed significant cost differences between self-hosted and hosted runners.
For instance, self-hosted runners on a 2 vCPU configuration resulted in an 88% lower cost per job compared to GitHub-hosted 2 vCPU runners. Similarly, Vitko Runners and Ubicloud provided 84% and 83% lower costs per job, respectively. Blacksmith, on the other hand, showed a 52% lower cost per job.
Furthermore, a GitHub-hosted 4 vCPU runner cost 39% more per job than its 2 vCPU counterpart but ran at a 1.6x faster pace. The report also noted that self-hosted options span fixed monthly costs over the volume, causing their cost per job figure to fluctuate with the workload.
The benchmark results can be found in the full cost per job by workload, complete ranking, list prices with sources and read dates for twelve providers, and the methodology along with all raw records. Any providers that wish to correct the measurements are invited to submit their feedback.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
