How we compare

Every comparative price claim on this site resolves to one sentence:

This page is what stands behind it. If any figure here stops being true, the claim comes off the site before it is reworded.

What is being compared

One line against one line: what you pay GitHub for hosted runner minutes against what you pay Apex for a subscription. Both are the cost of running CI jobs, and a subscription replaces the metered line entirely.

What is excluded, and why

GitHub seat licences are not part of any comparison on this site, and are never counted as a saving. Your repositories, pull requests, reviews and permissions stay on GitHub. Apex installs as a GitHub App and runs the jobs; it does not replace GitHub. You keep paying for every seat you have today, and we would be inflating our own numbers if we pretended otherwise.

The calculator shows your seat cost as a separate line and says it does not move. Apex itself charges nothing per person on any plan, which is a genuine difference — but it is a difference from other CI vendors, not a reduction in your GitHub bill.

The rates used

GitHub-hosted Linux (x64) list rates, as published at github.com/pricing, checked 6 September 2026:

Why x64. ubuntu-latest is an x64 runner, so these are the rates your workflows cost on GitHub today without changing anything — which is the comparison that matches what switching to Apex actually involves. GitHub also offers arm64 runners at a lower per-minute rate ($0.005 for 2-core), but reaching them means editing runs-on in every workflow. If you have already done that, your GitHub bill is lower than the figures here and your saving is correspondingly smaller.

GitHub discounts its larger runners, so these are not a clean multiple of the standard rate — an 8-core minute is 3.67× a standard one, not 4×. The draw column is how much of an Apex allowance a minute consumes, which is set against our own costs and is not derived from GitHub's curve.

Apex's 8-core size, apex-8core, is arm64; there is no 8-core x64 size. Against GitHub's own arm64 8-core runner, which is cheaper per minute than the x64 rate above, the 8-core row flatters us.

Included standard minutes per GitHub plan, used by the calculator: Free 2,000, Team 3,000, Enterprise 50,000.

What that works out to

Overage is the number that keeps the claim true in a heavy month: past the allowance every minute is still a third less than GitHub's published standard rate rather than back at full price.

Where the claim holds

At or near the usage each plan is sized for, and beyond it. Measured in paid GitHub minutes, a plan used to its full allowance costs 37% less than the same minutes on GitHub on Starter (5,000 minutes: $19 against $30), 47% less on Team (25,000: $79 against $150) and 48% less on Business (80,000: $249 against $480). "About a third" is the floor: Starter, and every overage minute, at 37% and 33% less; the larger plans do better than the claim says. Below the allowance the saving shrinks, and a subscription costs less than the equivalent GitHub bill from roughly 3,167 paid standard minutes a month on Starter, 13,167 on Team, and 41,500 on Business.

Paid minutes is the measure, and GitHub's own allowance comes off the top of a real bill. On GitHub Team the first 3,000 standard minutes are free, so Starter costs less than a GitHub Team bill only from 8,500 minutes a month (with overage past its 5,000), Team from 16,167 and Business from 44,500. On GitHub Free, with 2,000 included, Starter crosses at 5,500. The calculator on the pricing page does this subtraction for you.

On 18 October 2026 the plans were re-priced at the same monthly prices: overage rose from $0.003 to $0.004 per standard minute, and the included minutes fell from 8,000, 30,000 and 120,000 to 5,000, 25,000 and 80,000. At the old numbers this page stood behind a claim of half the cost; at the new ones that is no longer true of every plan, so the claim was replaced with the one above, and every figure on this page was recomputed.

Earlier, on 6 September 2026, the figures were corrected. GitHub's rates were previously stated as $0.008 / $0.016 / $0.032, which overstated GitHub by 33–45%; the break-evens then quoted were correspondingly too low. GitHub being cheaper than we had recorded means more minutes are needed before half of their bill covers a subscription — so this section became stricter about the claim, not looser. Overage moved to $0.003 in the same change to keep it at exactly half of the corrected standard rate, which was the rule until the re-pricing of 18 October 2026.

Where it does not

Three cases, stated plainly because a comparison that hides them is not a comparison.

1. If you are inside GitHub's included minutes, GitHub charges you nothing for minutes. A team running 1,500 minutes a month on GitHub Free pays $0 for them, and no subscription beats $0. The calculator says so in those words rather than showing you a saving. Apex may still be worth it for the speed and for what a run tells you — but not on price, and we will not claim it is.

2. If you use a small fraction of a plan's allowance, you are not saving a third. You are paying for headroom you have not used. The remedy is your own number, not ours: put your real monthly minutes into the calculator on the pricing page and read the result, including the months where it tells you to stay where you are.

3. If your repositories are public, GitHub charges nothing for standard runners. On a public repository ubuntu-latest runs on 4 cores, as it does on GitHub, and on Apex each minute draws two standard minutes from your allowance. GitHub's price for the same minute is $0.

Other claims on this site

• "Jobs start in seconds." On a warm runner — a machine that has just finished a job stays up for two minutes and takes the next one at once. When a machine has to start, a job takes about a minute to begin. It describes how the fleet is operated, not a guaranteed time to first job; the terms say what we commit to on availability.
• "Your workflows, unchanged." Linux workflows. Windows and macOS runners are not offered, and a workflow needing them keeps those jobs on GitHub-hosted runners — the compatibility matrix is generated from the conformance suite and lists what is covered.
• Comparison columns. Where this site describes GitHub-hosted runners, it describes the work a team does today with them. It is a comparison between two ways of running CI, made by us, and GitHub has had no part in it.

Trademarks

GitHub and GitHub Actions are trademarks of GitHub, Inc. Apex Actions is an independent service, not affiliated with, sponsored by or endorsed by GitHub, Inc. GitHub's marks are used here only to identify GitHub's products, which is the only way to say what Apex is compatible with.