💰 Main Branch: The One Where Actions Got Cheaper? - Issue #6

Hiya friends,

GitHub announces and later postponed a change to Actions last week. And as always, there is more to the story.

Just read this on twitter: A team of 15 developers switched from Jenkins to GitHub Actions. Their Jenkins setup: self-hosted on EC2, 47 plugins, Groovy pipelines, one person who knew how it worked. Server maintenance ate 10 hours a month. Then that person quit. Jenkins became a black box. Six months after switching to Actions: all 15 developers write workflows. Pipeline changes went from 2/month to 40/month. Build times improved 40%.

They didn't struggle because of cost. They struggled because one person owned the system and nobody else wanted to touch it. When infrastructure requires a hero, you've already lost.

Quick heads-up: I work at GitHub (views are my own).

GitHub-hosted runners cost less (January 1, 2026)

Up to 39% cheaper depending on machine size. Free minute quotas unchanged. Open the pricing calculator and know your actual number. But here's what matters more: you don't manage them. Your whole team owns CI/CD instead of one person becoming the bottleneck.

GitHub Actions: The Self-Hosted Runner Fee (March 2026 Postponed)

New $0.002/min fee for self-hosted runners (counts toward your plan's minutes).

Honestly? The backlash here is legitimate. You're still handling all the ops burden, and self-hosted improvements have felt vague/slow. I hear that. When you're managing your own infra, you want the tooling to match.

But somethings keep getting lost in the conversation: GitHub shipped 11.5 billion free minutes to open source in 2025. And for what it's worth, other CI platforms charge for self-hosted too - Buildkite does per-minute orchestration fees, Azure Pipelines charges per parallel job. The models vary, but the concept isn't new.

So what do you actually do with this?

Self-hosted still makes sense for compliance, custom hardware, or massive scale. If that's you, factor in the cost and carry on. But if self-hosted was your way to "avoid paying GitHub"? Time to reevaluate. You'll be paying and maintaining infra. Do the math - include maintenance hours, plugin drama, and the knowledge that walks out the door when someone leaves.

Writing for Developers by Piotr Sarna and Cynthia Dunlop.

My colleague Brittany Ellich launched the Overcommitted Book Club and I'm in. The whole thing is about practicing the craft of writing and building real connections.

Worth your time if: You're learning to write for technical audiences, or you just want to be part of a community doing the work together.

Parse a platform to extract and structure data from any website. I built APIs this week to extract my Main Branch issues into clean markdown, structured JSON, and chunked sections 🤓.

Is 🎅🏼 week for those who celebrate, I look forward to sitting by my tree, coquito in hand, soaking all the goodness. Much to be grateful for my friends, I wish you a lovely holiday week. Next week Main Branch will be extra short and sweet announcing the winners of our 100 Subscriber giveaway, if you haven’t subscribed do it today!

That's it. Know your numbers before January 1. Forward this to your team if it was useful. Reply and tell me what you actually want to read about if it wasn't.

With gratitude, I'll see you next week,

Andrea

P.S. — Quick win for anyone paying for minutes: stop wasting them on duplicate runs. Best for CI/testing workflows. Skip this for deployments.

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