Short answer
It depends on job volume, because self-hosted setups carry fixed monthly costs that managed per-minute prices do not. In CI Bench v1, RunsOn (self-hosted in your AWS account) cost 43% higher per job than GitHub-hosted (ubuntu-latest) at 1,000 jobs a month, 75% lower at 10,000 and 88% lower at 100,000. Against the managed runners measured it overtook the lowest managed option (Vitko Runners, 84% lower) only at the 100,000 level. Those figures leave out the time you spend operating the setup. Maintained by Vitko, Inc., which sells one of the products measured.
Cost per job against GitHub-hosted (ubuntu-latest), by monthly volume
| Configuration | Type | 1,000 jobs a month | 10,000 jobs a month | 100,000 jobs a month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| RunsOn | Self-hosted | 43% higher | 75% lower | 88% lower |
| Vitko RunnersVitko | Managed | 84% lower | 84% lower | 84% lower |
| Vitko Runners (warm starts + test splitting)Vitko | Managed | 84% lower | 84% lower | 84% lower |
| Ubicloud | Managed | 83% lower | 83% lower | 83% lower |
| Self-hosted runners on AWS (one VM per job) | Self-hosted | 49% lower | 60% lower | 62% lower |
| Self-hosted runners on Google Cloud | Self-hosted | 59% lower | 59% lower | 59% lower |
| Blacksmith | Managed | 52% lower | 52% lower | 52% lower |
| GitHub-hosted larger runner (4 vCPU) | Managed | 39% higher | 39% higher | 39% higher |
Self-hosted options are priced all-in: what the jobs use in your cloud account plus fixed monthly costs (Self-hosted runners on AWS (one VM per job) $3.07 a month; RunsOn $40.83 a month) spread over the volume. Managed prices do not change with volume. List price per minute is not cost per job; faster runners finish sooner.
What the table leaves out
- Your time: we operated the self-hosted options; operating time is not in these costs.
- Security work: GitHub's documentation says self-hosted runners have no clean-VM guarantee and should almost never be used for public repositories (GitHub Docs, secure use, read 2026-10-27).
- GitHub's announced $0.002 per-minute platform charge for self-hosted runners was postponed with no new date: platform fee.
- Your own job mix: one result set, 12 workloads. Use the calculator.
More: all questions answered · 12 options compared · ranked by cost per job · self-hosted vs managed · price per minute.
Method: how the runs were made; data: results.json; every raw record: the repository. Maintained by Vitko, Inc., which sells one of the products measured. Page dated October 28, 2026.