7 teams that moved to self hosted runners
7 teams moved to self hosted runners. Most left GitHub Actions (6) or CircleCI (1). The typical team cut 81% of its bill. Each team's old bill, running cost and net saving.
The question on this page is where CI jobs run, not which CI tool runs them. Nearly every team kept GitHub Actions and moved only the build machines. JMDC is the exception: it left CircleCI, about $575 a month including compute, and adopted GitHub Actions on self-hosted EC2 spot runners for about $76. Six of the seven stories start with GitHub's hosted runners.
Ranked by how much of the bill disappeared, the cloud-hosted moves land between 44% and 88%. SODA's runners on EC2 cut about $24,000 a month to $3,000, and NullAlpha's Kubernetes fleet cut about $14,200 to $2,700. DevOpsNess saved about 70% on EKS Spot. Harmonic is at the bottom, at 44%, because its GKE costs take back most of what it stopped paying GitHub. Together they account for most of the page's roughly $39,600 a month, and SODA alone is over half.
Two moves went to hardware the team already had. Vokal runs its jobs on its own Mac and a VM and reports dropping a $500 a month bill. The Guardian moved iOS builds onto its own runners and reports about £400 a month saved. Neither gives a running cost, and the Guardian figure is a saving, not a bill. Apple builds are a recurring thread: DevOpsNess left its macOS jobs on GitHub's runners. The moves date from 2024 to 2026.
Written from these stories, updated Nov 2026. Numbers as each team reported them. How this ledger works
What they left for self hosted runners
Left GitHub Actions6 teams · median $2,788/mo saved · cut 44%–88% of the bill
| Team and what they built | Since | Old bill | Running cost | Net saved | Bill cut |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SODASelf-hosted EC2 runners with RunsOn · AWS SODA moved CI from GitHub-hosted runners to self-hosted EC2 runners with RunsOn, taking the cost from about $800 a day to about $100. | Jul 2025 | $24K/mo | $3,000/mo | $21K/mo | 88% |
| NullAlphaAutoscaling self-hosted runners on Kubernetes · AWS The NullAlpha team moved CI from GitHub-hosted runners, about $14,200 a month, to a Karpenter-scaled self-hosted fleet on Kubernetes at about $2,700. | Oct 2026 | $14.2K/mo | $2,700/mo | $11.5K/mo | 81% |
| HarmonicSelf-hosted CI runners on GKE · GitHub · Google Cloud Harmonic moved CI off GitHub-hosted runners onto self-hosted runners on GKE in a week. Sang Mercado says the GitHub bill fell 91% and the saving is about 44%, or $38K a year, after GCP costs; the old bill and running costs here are worked back from those figures. | Oct 2026 | $7,167/mo | $4,000/mo | $3,167/mo | 44% |
| DevOpsNessSelf-hosted runners on EKS Spot · AWS · GitHub The DevOpsNess team moved most CI from GitHub-hosted runners to self-hosted runners on EKS Spot instances. macOS jobs stayed on GitHub-hosted runners, which they say still cost about $800 a month. | Apr 2026 | $3,420/mo | $1,010/mo | $2,410/mo | 70% |
| The GuardianSelf-hosted runners for iOS builds The Guardian's engineering team moved iOS CI to self-hosted GitHub Actions runners and reports the monthly bill dropping by roughly £400. | Dec 2025 | $520/mo | not disclosed | $520/mo | — |
| VokalSelf-hosted runners Zhen Han moved CI off GitHub-hosted runners onto self-hosted runners on their own Mac and VM, saving a $500 a month bill. | Oct 2026 | $500/mo | not disclosed | $500/mo | — |