runners.io
- Free allowance
- 3,000 run-minutes included every month for every organisation, with no monthly fee; beyond that USD 0.0040 a run-minute.
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- cardcard required, no phone
- Binding limit
- request-rate3,000 run-minutes a month included, then USD 0.0040 a run-minute; a priority label costs twice the run-minutes and twice the rate of the same label
- Evidence
- documented10 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-12-11checked 2026-11-10 (live); stale on 2026-12-11
| Free tier | 3,000 run-minutes included every month for every organisation, with no monthly fee; beyond that USD 0.0040 a run-minute. A run-minute is one minute of a 2 vCPU Linux x64 machine, so a 4 vCPU job spends two run-minutes a minute and a 1 vCPU job spends half of one. unit minutes; metered on wall-clock |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
the meter is weighted by vCPU: 1 vCPU spends 0.5 run-minutes a minute, 4 vCPU spends 2, 8 vCPU spends 4, Linux ARM64 is 0.625x the same size on x64, and Windows is 2.5x |
| Binding | request-rate 3,000 run-minutes is the first thing to fail, and the vCPU weighting makes it smaller than it looks: on a 4 vCPU runner it is 1,500 wall-clock minutes a month, and the card requirement gates the account before the pool is spent. |
| Identity | card a card: the homepage and the pricing page both say "Card required", and the card is charged for the minutes jobs run |
| Egress | no bandwidth charge is published: the pricing page lists queue wait, cold start, control-plane calls and state reads and writes as not billed, and the homepage says the customer pays only for the minutes jobs run |
| Per-object cap | not applicable: a job is bounded by the runner size, and the meter is weighted by vCPU count rather than capped per job |
| Retention | not applicable: a job runs and is destroyed; state that is kept is priced separately at USD 0.50 a GB-month |
| Interface | git a GitHub Actions workflow changes its runs-on label to a runners.io label such as runnersio-2vcpu-ubuntu-2404; every job runs in its own fresh virtual machine |
| Tooling | a one-line runs-on change on an existing GitHub Actions workflow; no agent or self-hosted runner is needed |
| Composes with | GitHub Actions on a public repository stays free and comes first; runners.io buys private-repository minutes at USD 0.0040 for 2 vCPU against GitHub list price of USD 0.0060, and the 3,000 included run-minutes cover a small private pipeline, but a card is required before the first job |
| Reliability | the page publishes no job wall clock and no concurrency cap; the meter is weighted by vCPU, so a wider runner spends the pool faster, and a priority label doubles both the rate and the run-minutes |
| Notes | A hosted GitHub Actions runner market that includes 3,000 run-minutes a month for every organisation and meters by vCPU-weighted time rather than by seat. The weighting is the fact a reader must carry: 3,000 run-minutes is 1,500 wall-clock minutes on a 4 vCPU runner and 6,000 on a 1 vCPU one. A card is required before the first job, so this is not a no-card lane. |
| Evidence note | documented The included pool, the run-minute definition, the weighting and the card requirement are read from the vendor own pages. Raise by running one job on the included pool and reading the run-minute counter and the first invoice line. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 10
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-11-10 | www.runners.io/pricing | 3,000 run-minutes are included every month for every organisation |
| 2026-11-10 | www.runners.io/pricing | a run-minute is one minute of a 2 vCPU machine |
| 2026-11-10 | www.runners.io/pricing | state that is kept is priced at USD 0.50 a GB-month |
| 2026-11-10 | www.runners.io/pricing | the customer pays only for the minutes jobs run |
| 2026-11-10 | www.runners.io/ | a workflow targets the runners by changing its runs-on label |
| 2026-11-10 | www.runners.io/ | part of the text of Interface, above |
| 2026-11-10 | www.runners.io/pricing | the 2 vCPU rate is USD 0.0040 a run-minute |
| 2026-11-10 | www.runners.io/pricing | part of the text of Limits, above |
| 2026-11-10 | www.runners.io/pricing | part of the text of Free tier, above |
| 2026-11-10 | www.runners.io/pricing | part of the text of Composes with, above |