Introducing Vitko Runners

The fastest and cheapest managed runners for GitHub Actions, now in private beta.

Today we're opening the private beta of Vitko Runners: the fastest and cheapest managed runners for GitHub Actions.^*

We measured twelve real CI workloads from popular open-source projects, in a benchmark we're calling CI Bench v1. Among the managed providers we tested, Vitko Runners had both the lowest time and the lowest total cost per job.

Compared to GitHub's default 2 vCPU runners, Vitko Runners with automatic warm starts and test parallelization was 2.29x faster at 84% lower cost per job. Without those features, it was 1.74x faster at 84% lower cost. The benchmark and results are fully public, so you can check or rerun the numbers yourself. Read the benchmark.

We built Vitko Runners after our own coding agents sent our GitHub Actions bill past $2,000 a month, while spending most of their time waiting for CI jobs to complete. Since switching our CI to Vitko Runners, our cost is down 71% while our volume of merged PRs has kept growing.

The private beta is open today: $0.002 a minute, with 2,000 free minutes every month. Join the beta.

How it works

• A new compute engine. Vitko Runners runs your jobs on our custom liquid compute engine, built to start jobs fast and pack them efficiently.
• Warm starts. Jobs automatically skip setup by starting from a ready state, so you stop waiting, and paying, for the same installs on every run.
• Test parallelization. A workflow step splits your test suite into parallel batches that each run on their own compute, with no extra setup.
• One-line switch. Add the Vitko GitHub App to the repositories you choose, then change runs-on: ubuntu-latest to runs-on: vitko-ubuntu-24.04. Your workflows, logs and secrets stay in GitHub. Warm starts and test parallelization are each one step added to your workflow. Read the docs.
• Pricing. $0.002 a minute, billed per second, which is a third of GitHub's list price. No seats and no machine sizes to pick. There's also a hard monthly spend limit, so new jobs wait instead of running up your bill.

What's next

We're focused on making Vitko Runners faster and cheaper through more work on the compute engine. Today it's faster than every runner we tested, managed or self-hosted. It also costs less per job than every managed provider and than the other self-hosted setups we tested, with one exception. RunsOn, running in your own AWS account on spot instances, costs less per job at very high volume (around 100,000 jobs a month), while taking about twice as long. Below that volume, Vitko Runners is cheaper. We want to beat it at every volume.

*Among the managed runners in CI Bench v1. RunsOn, self-hosted in your AWS account, costs less per job at high volume.