Legal
How we compare
Exactly what the price comparison on this site measures, the GitHub rates it uses, the date they were checked, and the two cases where the comparison does not hold.
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-hosted Linux runner | GitHub, per minute | Apex |
|---|---|---|
| 2-core (standard) | $0.006 | Included; 1 standard minute |
| 4-core | $0.012 | Included; draws 2 standard minutes |
| 8-core | $0.022 | Included; draws 4 standard minutes |
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.
Included standard minutes per GitHub plan, used by the calculator: Free 2,000, Team 3,000, Enterprise 50,000.
What that works out to
| Apex plan | Price | Included standard minutes | Per included minute | As a share of $0.006 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $19 | 8,000 | $0.00238 | 40% |
| Team | $79 | 30,000 | $0.00263 | 44% |
| Business | $249 | 120,000 | $0.00208 | 35% |
| Overage, any plan | $0.003 per standard minute | — | $0.003 | 50% |
Overage is the number that makes "about half" survive a heavy month: past the allowance you are still at half of 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 subscription costs less than half of the equivalent GitHub bill from roughly 6,333 paid standard minutes a month on Starter, 26,333 on Team, and 83,000 on Business.
These figures were corrected on 6 September 2026. The rates above were previously stated as $0.008 / $0.016 / $0.032, which overstated GitHub by 33–45%; the break-evens quoted here 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 is now 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.
Where it does not
Two cases, stated plainly because a comparison that hides them is not a comparison.
-
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.
-
If you use a small fraction of a plan's allowance, you are not saving half. 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.
Other claims on this site
- "Jobs start in seconds." Capacity is kept ahead of the queue so that a push does not wait for a machine to be provisioned. 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.