The crossover point

GitHub Actions costs $0.008 per minute on Ubuntu standard. A typical CI run for a medium codebase (lint + test + build + deploy) takes 12 minutes. So:

• 500 builds/month = $48
• 2,000 builds/month = $192
• 10,000 builds/month = $960
• 50,000 builds/month = $4,800

EmpireGit Runners pricing is the cost of your own infrastructure. A single t3.medium runner ($30/month on AWS, $14/month on Hetzner) handles roughly 4,000-7,000 build-minutes/month before queuing.

Real numbers from a 25-person team

We benchmarked a customer with 1,200 weekly CI builds across 40 microservices:

• GitHub Actions: $1,440/month average
• EmpireGit Runners (4 m6i.large nodes): $280/month infra

That is an 80% reduction on a workload where developer productivity is identical.

When to stay on GitHub Actions

Below 500 builds/month, the GitHub-included quota covers most teams. Above 2000 builds/month, EmpireGit Runners win.

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