RunsOn vs compiler.dev: Self-Hosted on AWS

RunsOn runs GitHub Actions runners inside your own AWS account and charges a yearly license, while the compute itself is billed by AWS. compiler.dev is hosted: you pay per minute and nothing runs in your cloud. RunsOn can be the cheapest option for a team that already lives on AWS and wants runners inside its own network. compiler.dev is the quicker option for a team that wants the change done in a minute. License prices were checked in October 2026 on RunsOn's pricing page.

What RunsOn is

RunsOn describes itself as self-hosted GitHub Actions runners on your own AWS account. Each job gets a fresh, ephemeral EC2 instance. It uses EC2 spot instances with automatic on-demand fallback, and its docs claim spot makes runners 5 to 12 times cheaper than alternatives; that is a vendor claim. A cache it calls Magic Cache, which it says is 5x faster than GitHub's and effectively unlimited, is backed by an S3 bucket in your account.

There are two products. Flex lets each workflow pick its own CPU, RAM, image, disk, cache, networking, GPU or Windows setup in the runs-on label. Fleet gives you a catalog of runner types defined by a platform team in Terraform.

How the money works

RunsOn has no per-minute price. You pay two separate bills.

1. License to RunsOn, per year: Starter EUR 300 (under 50,000 jobs a month), Growth EUR 900 (under 200,000), Scale EUR 1,800 (under 500,000), and Sponsorship EUR 3,600 for unlimited jobs with source access. Free for non-commercial use, with a public link back. Paid plans have a 15-day trial. One license covers all GitHub orgs and AWS accounts you own.
2. AWS costs, on your AWS bill: EC2 compute and EBS volumes, billed per second while jobs run with no RunsOn markup, plus a small control plane (a Fargate service, an S3 cache bucket, data transfer) that starts at about $7 a month.

So the total is license plus AWS. We cannot put a single per-minute number on it, because the EC2 price depends on the instance type and whether you get spot capacity. Check current EC2 pricing for your region before you compare.

Side-by-side

Where RunsOn is the better choice

• Your CI must reach private resources. A database or service in a private VPC subnet is easy to reach when runners are in your VPC. With a hosted provider you need tunnels or allowlists.
• Data must stay in your cloud. Source code and artifacts never leave your AWS account. That makes some security reviews simpler.
• You have high volume. Fixed license plus raw EC2 spot can be far below any per-minute list price when you run hundreds of thousands of minutes a month. Use the cost calculator to find your own number.
• You need unusual hardware. GPUs, custom images, big disks and specific instance families are options in a label like cpu=4/ram=16/family=m8a+m8i.
• You already have AWS credits or committed spend. Runner cost can be absorbed in it.

Where compiler.dev is the better choice

• You do not want to operate infrastructure. RunsOn is yours to monitor: IAM, VPC, spot interruptions, instance quotas, AWS bills. compiler.dev is install and one line.
• Your volume is small or irregular. A EUR 300 license plus AWS control plane has a floor. Prepaid credit with no monthly fee does not. With a 200 minute trial and prepaid credit from $20, you pay only for what runs.
• You want a predictable bill. Per-minute prices are fixed. EC2 spot prices move.
• You want a fallback to your own runners. If compiler.dev cannot run a job, it goes to the runners you had before.
• You need macOS. RunsOn's docs we read cover EC2 Linux and Windows; compiler.dev has macOS in early access.

The honest summary: RunsOn is a cost play for AWS-centric teams with someone who can own the setup. compiler.dev is a convenience and speed play. Our benchmarks show full pipelines median 1.5× faster across 18 measured stacks (15 faster, 2 the same, 1 slower) than GitHub-hosted runners; we did not benchmark RunsOn, which depends on the instance type you pick, so we make no claim against it.

How to switch

RunsOn setup, per its quickstart: launch the CloudFormation stack with your GitHub org name, license key and alert email, then register the GitHub App from the stack output. A workflow then looks like this:

jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: runs-on=${{ github.run_id }}/runner=2cpu-linux-x64
    steps:
      - uses: runs-on/action@v2
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: make test

For compiler.dev:

jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: [self-hosted, Linux, compiler-ci]
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: make test

Install the app at app.compiler.dev. Remove the runs-on/action step when you leave RunsOn.

How to decide

Add up three numbers for RunsOn: license divided by 12, the $7 control plane, and your EC2 cost for last month's minutes. Compare with minutes multiplied by compiler.dev's rate for the same size. Then add the time someone spends on operations, which is the cost people forget. See self-hosted vs GitHub-hosted runners for the wider trade-offs, and the provider ranking for the field.

FAQ

Is RunsOn free?

Free for non-commercial use (open source, non-profits, personal projects) with a public link back to runs-on.com. Commercial use needs a paid license, from EUR 300 a year, plus your AWS costs.

Does RunsOn cost less than compiler.dev?

It can at high volume, because you pay raw EC2 prices plus a license. At low volume the fixed license and operations time usually cost more. Run the numbers with your own minutes.

Does RunsOn need me to manage servers?

It creates and removes EC2 instances for you, but it runs in your account, so you own IAM, networking, quotas and the AWS bill.

Can RunsOn run ARM and GPU jobs?

Its docs show ARM64 runner labels and GPU and Windows setups. compiler.dev offers neither.