Pricing

Zerun costs $0.002 per vCPU-minute, billed per second from credit you buy in advance. There is no subscription.

Both sizes run Ubuntu 24.04 on x64. Prices are in US dollars.

Credit

• Buy credit by card before your first job, in packs of $10, $25 or $50. Each pack is a one-time payment.
• Set a monthly cap. It is $20 until you change it.
• Zerun emails you at 50%, 80% and 100% of your balance or your cap.
• When the credit or the cap runs out, each new job fails within about 15 seconds with a message that says how to fix it. Jobs that are already running finish.

What a job costs

The charge runs from the moment GitHub assigns the job to a Zerun runner until the job finishes, rounded up to the second. It never runs past the job's timeout, which is 60 minutes unless you raise it. Time in GitHub's queue and the time a VM takes to boot are free.

A job that fails because of Zerun is not charged, and the dashboard marks it as an infrastructure failure. A job that fails because a test failed is charged as usual.

No surprise bills

• Jobs draw down credit you bought first, so Zerun never charges for anything you did not pay for in advance.
• The monthly cap stops new jobs when the month's usage reaches it, even if you have credit left.
• Before a job starts, Zerun sets aside the most it could cost. For a 60-minute job on 4 vCPU, that is $0.48.
• If jobs that are already running go past your balance or cap, Zerun absorbs the difference and never bills it. With 4 jobs at once and the 60-minute timeout, that is at most $1.92.

Worked examples

These are three monthly workloads on 2 vCPU, priced on Zerun and on GitHub Free. Both columns assume each job takes the same time on both.

Only the heavy workload saves money on Zerun. Heavy means about 10,000 job-minutes a month or more. The light and typical workloads cost more, because GitHub's included minutes cover most of them. On GitHub Pro, 3,000 included minutes make GitHub cheaper still for them. At those volumes you would choose Zerun for the 4-vCPU size and per-second billing, not for a lower bill.

How the GitHub column is worked out

GitHub Free includes 2,000 Linux minutes a month, then charges $0.006 a minute for a 2-core runner, as GitHub listed it on 12 November 2026. GitHub rounds each job up to a whole minute. On one real project's history, that added 26% to 2-minute jobs. For 4-minute jobs we assume 12%.

A 4-vCPU minute costs twice a 2-vCPU minute. Moving a job to zerun-4cpu from zerun-2cpu saves money only if it finishes in less than half the time. We have not measured that yet.

The beta price

We will review the price before general availability. If it changes, we will email you before the change applies to your account. Refunds of unused credit are covered by the refund policy.