Skipbox pricing: flat monthly GitHub Actions runners

Yes. Plans cost $39, $79, or $149 a month, billed in US dollars monthly, or yearly upfront for the price of 10 months, with no usage charges. A plan limits how many jobs run at once and how big each is, not minutes: a job that doesn't fit waits until a running one ends, and waiting adds nothing to your bill. Your organization's page in Skipbox shows how many jobs are waiting and how long the oldest has waited. A job can run for up to 6 hours.

Concurrent jobs are counted in 4 vCPU jobs. A plan runs jobs up to its vCPU total at once (S 4, M 8, L 16 vCPU), so a job of 8 vCPU counts as 2, and one of 16 vCPU as 4. The largest single job a plan can run is its vCPU count: 4 on S, 8 on M, 16 on L. Add plans to run more jobs at once.

Cancel anytime; your plan runs to the end of the month, or the year, you paid for. If your jobs aren't faster on Skipbox than they were on GitHub, you get everything you paid back, on monthly and yearly plans alike: ask on your account's Plans and billing page within 30 days of your first payment. Skipbox takes each job's median time on Skipbox and on GitHub (the 30 days before you installed Skipbox), weights each job by how often it ran on GitHub, and compares the two totals; a job counts once it has run at least 3 times on each, and with no job to compare there is nothing to refund. If the first job you run after subscribing doesn't start within 10 minutes, not counting time it waits behind your own jobs, we refund your payment in full automatically and end the plan. Otherwise a paid month or year isn't refunded, except in the cases the Terms list.

Nothing is charged: the trial takes no card. It starts at your first job on Skipbox, not when you sign in or install the app, and runs one 4 vCPU · 16 GB job at a time for 7 days or 3,000 minutes, whichever comes first. There's 1 trial per account and 1 per person. When it ends, new jobs wait on GitHub until you choose a plan.

With AI writing more of the code, CI runs more every month, and per-minute billing grows with every run. So Skipbox chose a different model on purpose: you rent a VM for your account alone, by the month. GitHub doesn't bill self-hosted runner minutes, so however many jobs you run, the price stays a flat $39 a month for S. Fluxenic, the company behind Skipbox, runs servers from low-cost cloud providers and its own, and serves them as VMs of a useful size. Skipbox does the tedious part for you: it registers the runners, cleans up after every job and checks the machine's health. It also rebuilds a broken machine and keeps the image current. At full use, the price is 1/12 of GitHub's and 1/8 of Blacksmith's.

Rent a VPS of the same size from a major host and you still won't get a self-hosted runner that is cheaper, faster and less work than Skipbox. Skipbox registers a fresh runner for every job and removes it afterwards. After every job it wipes the runner's credentials and keeps your checkout and build output for the next one. It checks the machine's health, rebuilds it when the check fails and keeps the image current. Code from people without write access (such as pull requests from forks) runs on a throwaway VM. You get all of that for $39 a month on S, by changing one runs-on line, with nothing to maintain.

Yes, public and private repositories alike. Code from people without write access (such as pull requests from forks) runs on a fresh VM that reads your caches but can't change them; your own machine runs only your team's code.

Change runs-on to skipbox to move, and back to ubuntu-latest to go back. Sign in with GitHub, install the Skipbox CI app on your organization or Skipbox (personal) on your personal account, change the job's runs-on line to skipbox, and commit; for a larger VM on plans that include one, use skipbox-8x16 or skipbox-16x32. To go back, change runs-on: skipbox back to runs-on: ubuntu-latest. Nothing else in your repository changed.