Bigger Linux runners for GitHub Actions on your personal account

Zerun runs GitHub Actions jobs from private repos on personal GitHub accounts. Change one runs-on line and the job runs on a 2- or 4-vCPU Ubuntu 24.04 VM. Every job gets a fresh VM, and Zerun destroys it when the job ends. You pay per second from prepaid credit, and a monthly cap stops spending at a limit you set.

Request an invite Read the docs

.github/workflows/test.yml

- runs-on: ubuntu-latest+ runs-on: zerun-4cpu

A 61-second job on zerun-2cpu

Zerun61 s, $0.0041

GitHub2 min billed

Price: $0.002 per vCPU-minute, billed per second
Runners: 2 or 4 vCPU 8 or 16 GiB, Ubuntu 24.04 x64
Monthly cap: $20 until you change it
Most set aside per job: $0.48 for a 60-minute job on 4 vCPU

What you get

Two runner sizes: zerun-2cpu has 2 vCPU and 8 GiB of memory. zerun-4cpu has 4 vCPU and 16 GiB. GitHub's larger runners need a Team or Enterprise Cloud organization, so a personal account cannot get them for a private repo.
One VM per job: No VM runs a second job, and nothing from its disk carries over to another job.
Billing by the second: The rate is $0.002 per vCPU-minute. A 61-second job on zerun-2cpu costs $0.0041. GitHub rounds every job up to a whole minute, so it bills the same job as 2 minutes. See pricing.
A hard spending cap: You buy credit first, and jobs draw it down. New jobs stop when the credit or the monthly cap runs out. The cap is $20 until you change it.
GitHub stays in charge of your jobs: GitHub queues and assigns the jobs and shows the checks as usual. Step logs and secrets go between the runner and GitHub, and Zerun does not receive them. The Zerun GitHub App does not ask for permission to read your code.
What Zerun keeps: Zerun keeps a record of each job, including its repo, workflow, job name, commit SHA, timings, charge and result. It also keeps statistics such as the tree hash of the job's checkout. It never keeps your code, step logs or secrets. The privacy policy lists everything Zerun stores.

Is Zerun for you?

It suits you if

Your CI runs about 10,000 job-minutes a month or more. At 10,000 job-minutes in 4-minute jobs on 2 vCPU, Zerun costs about 27% less than GitHub Free.
You want 4-vCPU runners for a private repo on a personal account, and your tests can use the extra cores. Then you buy speed, not savings. A 4-vCPU minute costs twice a 2-vCPU minute, and we have not measured how much sooner jobs finish.
You want per-second billing and a hard monthly spending cap.

It does not suit you if

You want a lower bill, and GitHub's included minutes cover most of your CI. At 1,000 or 2,500 job-minutes a month, you would pay a few dollars more on Zerun than on GitHub Free.
Your repos are public or belong to an organization.
You need Windows, macOS, ARM, a GPU or more than 4 vCPU.
Your jobs run longer than 3 hours, need fixed outbound IP addresses or need KVM.

What we have not measured yet

We have not measured speed on the beta system, so we do not promise any speed-up. A 4-vCPU job finishes sooner only if its work can use the extra cores. Before we invite paying users, we will publish our measurements against ubuntu-latest, including every job where Zerun is slower or costs more.