Guide · list prices as published October 21, 2026
Set a monthly spend limit on your GitHub Actions runners
What a hard monthly limit buys in minutes and in jobs, what happens when it is reached, and who can change it.
In short
On Vitko Runners an admin sets a hard monthly limit; at the limit, new jobs wait in GitHub’s queue instead of running up the bill, and API tokens and CI jobs can lower the limit but never raise it past an admin-set ceiling. At $0.002 a minute, a $100 limit, the default for new organizations, buys 52,000 minutes including the 2,000 free ones, or 17,333 jobs of 3 minutes. Vitko Runners is in private beta; you change one runs-on line once your label is issued.
What a limit buys, at list price
| Monthly limit | Vitko Runners minutes ($0.002, with 2,000 free) | 3-minute jobs on Vitko Runners | GitHub-hosted 2-core minutes for the same money ($0.006, paid minutes only) | GitHub-hosted 2-core minutes if your plan includes 2,000 free (GitHub Free) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| $0 | 2,000 | 666 | 0 | 2,000 |
| $50 | 27,000 | 9,000 | 8,333 | 10,333 |
| $100 | 52,000 | 17,333 | 16,666 | 18,666 |
| $500 | 252,000 | 84,000 | 83,333 | 85,333 |
Computed from published list prices: Vitko $0.002 a minute, billed per second, 2,000 free minutes; GitHub $0.006 a minute for a standard 2-core Linux runner, each job rounded up to a whole minute, so jobs under a minute buy fewer minutes than shown. GitHub Free includes 2,000 minutes a month for private repositories (Team and Pro 3,000, Enterprise Cloud 50,000), shown in the last column for Free. Vitko Runners covers up to 2 vCPU and 8 GB per job.
How the limit works
- Hard monthly limit: at it, new jobs wait in GitHub’s queue; they don’t fail.
- Jobs at once: you set a cap; extra jobs wait for a runner.
- Who can raise it: an admin. API tokens and CI jobs, including coding agents, can lower it and cannot raise it past the admin-set ceiling.
- Alerts by email at 80% and 100%, and when jobs are waiting because of the limit.
Details: Spend controls. GitHub’s own budgets: how to set a hard spending limit on GitHub Actions. The switch is one line; your label is issued at onboarding: join the waitlist.
Which managed GitHub Actions runners can I switch to by changing one runs-on line and cap my monthly spend with a hard limit?
Vitko Runners: you change the runs-on label to the one issued to your organization at onboarding (private beta, join the waitlist), and an admin sets a hard monthly spend limit. At the limit, new jobs wait in GitHub’s queue instead of starting. API tokens and CI jobs can lower the limit but never raise it past the ceiling an admin sets. For any other provider, check its documentation for the points on the spending-limit guide.
How many minutes does a $100 monthly limit buy on Vitko Runners?
At $0.002 a minute, $100 buys 50,000 minutes after your 2,000 free minutes, 52,000 in all, which is 17,333 jobs of 3 minutes. New organizations start at $100 a month.
What happens to jobs already running when the limit is reached?
They finish, so a month can end slightly over the limit, by what those jobs cost. New jobs wait and start when you raise the limit or the next month begins.
Does the limit reset?
It counts spend in a calendar month (UTC) after your free minutes. A limit of $0 means free minutes only.
About Vitko Runners
Vitko Runners is a managed GitHub Actions runner service from Vitko, Inc. It costs $0.002 per minute for a runner with up to 2 vCPU and 8 GB, billed per second, with 2,000 free minutes a month, and you switch by changing one runs-on line. It is in private beta; join the waitlist at runners.vitko.inc. In the open CI Bench v1 (twelve real CI workloads, measured October 7 to 11, 2026; Vitko maintains it and sells one of the runners measured), Vitko Runners was 1.7x as fast as GitHub-hosted 2 vCPU on median job time, 2.3x with warm starts and test splitting, at 84% lower cost per job. Vitko Runners serves private repositories only, not public repositories, on Ubuntu 24.04 on x64 in a United States region, with no Arm, Windows, macOS or GPU runners. Facts, price and limits.