Same GitHub Actions minutes, more drawing on them
Your included Actions entitlement is now one shared, dollar-based compute entitlement, instead of a fixed number of standard runner minutes. It’s the same value, and you can now use it across:
- Standard GitHub-hosted runners.
- Cloud sandboxes, including the Copilot sandboxes behind your cloud sessions.
- Larger hosted runners, on Team and Enterprise Cloud.
I found this out as I checked the GitHub Actions minutes I have in my account, and it changed from minutes to dollars. This post is for people with the subscriptions I have: as an academic, I get GitHub Pro through GitHub Education and GitHub Copilot Pro for free as a verified teacher. Copilot Pro counts as a paid Copilot plan, so the new cloud experience is available to us, and it is billed to us too.
What changed
GitHub Pro now includes $18 of Actions compute a month instead of 3,000 minutes (GitHub Free gets $12, which was 2,000 minutes). Each runner is deducted at its per-minute rate, where previously Windows minutes counted twice and macOS minutes ten times:
| Runner (standard, private repository) | Rate per minute | Minutes for $18 | Minutes before |
|---|---|---|---|
| Linux 2-core (x64) | $0.006 | 3,000 | 3,000 |
| Windows 2-core | $0.010 | 1,800 | 1,500 |
| macOS 3- or 4-core | $0.062 | ~290 | 300 |
For this table alone, it is roughly unchanged: exactly the same on Linux, a bit more on Windows, a bit less on macOS. Standard runners in public repositories stay free, as do self-hosted runners.
But more is charged towards that limit now than before.
What now draws on it
Cloud sandboxes
The new Copilot cloud experience runs the Copilot agent on a Linux VM that GitHub hosts instead of on your computer, the same idea as Claude Code on the web or Codex cloud. You can start a session on your phone and continue it on the web, in the Copilot app, VS Code or the CLI (copilot --cloud). By default, every session runs in such a cloud sandbox. Previously, the cloud agent ran as a GitHub Actions job, capped at 59 minutes. A sandbox has “no one-hour limit on total running session time”, and when it stops, it saves a snapshot so the session can be resumed later.
The difference is that neither Anthropic nor OpenAI charges for the compute behind their cloud sessions on top of the subscription, while GitHub does. Billing starts this month, and a sandbox is metered on three things:
| Meter | Rate |
|---|---|
| Compute | $0.000024 per vCPU-second |
| Memory (allocated, not used) | $0.000003 per GiB-second |
| Snapshot storage, while stopped | $0.005 per GiB-month |
GitHub does not publish the size of a sandbox. Assume it is the size of a standard Linux runner, 2 vCPUs and 8 GiB: that is $0.0043 a minute, cheaper than the runner’s $0.006, so $18 buys about 4,200 minutes, or 70 hours. Over 21 working days a month,
| Scenario | Minutes a month | Cost | Share of $18 |
|---|---|---|---|
| One 30-minute session a day | 630 | $2.70 | 15% |
| A session kept running through an 8-hour workday | 10,080 | $43.50 | 240% |
Snapshot storage is negligible, $0.05 a month for 10 GiB. The meter runs “from the moment a session starts until it is stopped or deleted”, so a session waiting for you to reply is still running, and without the one-hour cap, nothing stops it for you.
Copilot code review
Copilot code review has two cost components: AI credits for the review itself, and Actions minutes for its agentic part (context gathering and tool use), which on private repositories come out of the same $18. On public repositories, the minutes stay free.
And the AI credits
The AI credits are a separate pool, and the more pressing one. Copilot Pro comes with 1,500 AI credits a month (1,000 base and a 500 “flex allotment”), at $0.01 each, so $15, reset on the 1st of every month. GitHub estimates a single code review at about $0.25 on the lite effort level, $1.50 on balanced, and $10 on max. Two days into this month, I have already consumed 206 of my 1,500 credits just for code review, and I didn’t think I had triggered that much. Going through my pull requests this month, it was a single review, which I requested by hand, of a new site of 2,371 lines across 39 files: $2.06, within GitHub’s balanced range, and 14% of the month’s credits. That repository is public, so at least the Actions minutes were free.
So if GitHub Actions alone is what you use, it is effectively the same. But more is charged towards it, so if you’re not careful, it can burn much more quickly. With no payment method on file, usage is simply blocked once the allowance is used up. With one, set a budget with “Stop usage when budget limit is reached”, or the rest is billed.