Namespace Runners: GitHub Actions Pricing Explained

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What Namespace runners are, and how unit minutes work

Namespace runners are GitHub Actions runners sold by the compute unit rather than the wall-clock minute, where one unit is 1 vCPU plus 2 GB of RAM for a minute, multiplied by 1 on Linux, 2 on Windows and 10 on macOS. You select one either by creating a profile in the dashboard and naming it in runs-on, or by spelling the whole machine out in a label. The Team plan is 100,000 unit minutes, so the machine you pick decides how many wall-clock minutes that is. Shapes, multipliers and rates read from namespace.so on 20 September 2026. Namespace Cloud sells compute for CI and development: these GitHub Actions runners, Devboxes, remote Docker builders, and caches for Bazel, Turborepo and the container registry underneath them. The runners are a drop-in replacement, adopted by connecting your GitHub organization and changing one line. Everything below was read from namespace.so on 20 September 2026, including its machine-readable pricing page, and is dated here. For the head-to-heads, Namespace against GitHub-hosted runners and Namespace against Blacksmith carry the comparison tables. Two ways to ask for a machine The first is a profile. You create it in the dashboard, pick the OS, architecture and shape, name it, and reference that name: runs-on: namespace-profile-big-apple. Caching options, runner controls and other settings live on the profile, so the workflow stays short and the configuration is centralized. The second puts everything in the label, which keeps the machine under version control with the workflow that needs it. The grammar is nscloud-{os}-{arch}-{shape}, with optional -with-cache, -with-features and -with-builders suffixes and companion labels underneath. One rule matters more than the rest: only one nscloud label is allowed, and a job with two of them, or with an invalid one, is never scheduled at all. jobs:
tests:
- runs-on: ubuntu-latest
+ runs-on:
+ - nscloud-ubuntu-24.04-amd64-8x16-with-cache
+ - nscloud-cache-tag-my-repo-e2e
+ - nscloud-cache-size-50gb
The shapes, and what a unit minute is A shape is written vCPU by memory: 4x8 is 4 vCPU with 8 GB. Standard Linux and Windows shapes are multiples of 1 vCPU and 2 GB, and a shape with a different ratio is counted as the larger of its vCPU count and half its gigabytes, so 8 vCPU with 32 GB counts as 16 units a minute rather than 8. Ubuntu runs 20.04 through 26.04 on amd64 and arm64, Windows Server 2022 on amd64, and macOS from Sonoma to Tahoe on Apple M5 Max or M4 Pro. Usage is then accounted in unit minutes: vCPU count times minutes times the platform multiplier. Namespace prices those two ways, prepaid through a plan or as overage, and the difference is exactly 50%. Shape Units per minute Prepaid Overage Minutes the $100 Team plan buys Linux 2 vCPU, 4 GB 2 $0.002 $0.003 50,000 Linux 2 vCPU, 8 GB 4 $0.004 $0.006 25,000 Linux 4 vCPU, 16 GB 8 $0.008 $0.012 12,500 Linux 8 vCPU, 32 GB 16 $0.016 $0.024 6,250 Windows 2 vCPU, 4 GB 4 $0.004 $0.006 25,000 macOS 6 vCPU, 14 GB 60 $0.06 $0.09 1,667 Two readings of that table decide whether Namespace is cheap for you. The shape that matches a standard GitHub-hosted Linux runner, 2 vCPU with 8 GB, is $0.004 a minute prepaid, a third below GitHub's $0.006. The shape one row above it is half that, and it is also half the memory, which is the comparison Namespace's own rate card invites and the one to be careful with. The plans are the prepaid rate rather than a fee on top of it: Team is $100 a month for 100,000 unit minutes, Business is $250 for 250,000, and the Developer tier is pay as you go with no allowance. Rounding is published too, and it rounds down more often than GitHub does: there is a one-minute minimum, and the next 15 seconds are dropped, so 30 seconds bills as 1 minute and 70 seconds also bills as 1. Cache volumes, which are the real feature A cache volume is a block device that persists between runs and mounts at /cache. You attach one by adding -with-cache to the machine label and a ...

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