This was the second month in a row I hit the GitHub Actions minutes limit. And I'd already switched to Pro to get more - 3,000 minutes a month for private repos, at the time of writing. The bill creeps from the €4-ish I actually want to pay into double digits, and for what? Running the same builds I could run on hardware I already own.
So I decided it was enough. I moved all of it onto self-hosted GitHub Actions runners: one small cloud box for deploys, and a 16GB mini PC sitting in my living room for the heavy lifting. Billed CI minutes are now zero. Here's exactly how.
Where the minutes actually went
First thing I did was stop guessing and look at what was eating the budget. It wasn't the deploys. Push to main, build two images, ship - that's a couple of minutes a few times a day. Annoying but not 3,000-minutes-a-month annoying.
The killer was a nightly cron that runs a batch of build-and-boot tests. It's a few dozen small jobs, each one building an image and booting it to make sure nothing's quietly broken. They run on every relevant pull request, and once more every night to catch base images drifting underneath us.
