Looking for something to do while GitHub is down? - Pelican
Pelican runs on its own GitLab CI stack, saving about $70,000 a year in equivalent hosted minutes. Shared with ❤️ 🏎️💨›
Found a bug? Poke @featherless<br>Prices and uptime data read on August 6, 2026
Looking for something to do while GitHub is down?
GitHub Actions has been down 68.5 hours so far in 2026.
Standing up your own GitLab server takes an afternoon, and keeping it running takes a few hours a month, so in the time you spend watching that status page you could build the whole thing three times over.
Below: the parts at today's prices, the install commands, the migration steps, and a calculator for when it pays for itself.
Rolling 90-day uptime
Healthy<br>Degraded
89.93% 2026 so far
91.06% Trailing 12 mo
95.40% All time
78.33% Worst month
Actions on its own
The part of GitHub this page replaces
Year<br>Incidents<br>Hours<br>Critical
2024<br>27<br>46.0
2025<br>36<br>95.9
2026 so far<br>30<br>68.5
Seven months of 2026 already beat all of 2024, and the critical rating went from unused to six. Half these incidents ran past two hours.
The long ones
Single Actions outages, 2026
DateOutageLength
Jul 9Delays starting Actions runs10h 10m<br>Jul 19Incident with GitHub Actions5h 10m<br>Apr 24Larger runners, VNet injection5h 34m<br>May 5Incident with Actions3h 49m<br>Feb 2Incident with Actions3h 40m
Reading the numbers
Each point is the share of the prior 90 days GitHub was healthy, from The Missing GitHub Status Page.
Maintenance is excluded. Everything else counts in full, so this is time GitHub was not fully healthy, not time it was hard down.
The mirror trails live status by about a day, so today's incident is not here yet. Figures run through August 5, 2026 .
August 2026 is a partial month.
Pricing nothing yet
$1,092 Hardware
… Time to pay off
When does it pay off?
GitHub, cumulative<br>Self-hosted, cumulative
Solo iOS<br>Solo web<br>Startup<br>Scaling
Your team
Developers8
Dev cost / hour$110
Upkeep / month3 hrs
Patching GitLab and the runner hosts, checking backups restore. Priced at the hourly rate above.
GitHub plan
Free$0<br>Team$4<br>Enterprise$21+
CI minutes / month
Linux minutes20,000
macOS minutes2,000
Linux runner
2-core · $0.006<br>4-core · $0.012<br>8-core · $0.022<br>16-core · $0.042
macOS runner
4-core · $0.062<br>12-core · $0.077<br>M2 Pro · $0.102
Outages
GitHub uptime89.9%
Self-hosted uptime99.5%
Blocks you15%
Running the box
Hardware$0<br>Power draw0 W
Set by the machine counts on the cards.
Electricity$0.16/kWh
Where the money goes
Every monthOn GitHubOn your own
How this is calculated
GitHub seats<br>Free $0, Team $4, Enterprise from $21 per user per month, off github.com/pricing. Both paid tiers quote first-year rates, so treat them as floors. Self-managed GitLab is free at any seat count.<br>Actions minutes<br>Rates come from GitHub's published per-minute table. The free allowance of 2,000, 3,000 or 50,000 only applies to standard runners, and macOS spends it 10× faster. Larger runners are billed from the first minute.<br>Turnaround<br>A hosted 2-core runner and a 14-core tower do not take the same time over the same job. Speed-up is capped at 4× because build steps do not all parallelise.<br>Apple silicon costs more<br>GitHub charges $0.102 a minute for the 5-core M2 Pro against $0.077 for the 12-core Intel. Fewer cores, higher price, because Apple silicon capacity is scarcer. Owning the Mac sidesteps the choice.<br>What an hour costs<br>Three numbers, depending on how you earn.<br>Salaried: pay plus overhead. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics put the median developer at $133,080 in May 2024, about $85 an hour with 30% overhead.<br>Contracting: what they bill, since an idle hour is unbilled. Senior freelance web runs about $115 an hour.<br>App Store: no hourly rate exists, so use what you forgo. An hour you cannot work is an hour you could have sold to somebody else, which puts a solo indie near the salaried figure, around $95. Pricing the hour against app revenue instead gives a much smaller number: RevenueCat puts the top 10% of subscription apps at $2,500 a month, roughly $16 an hour, and the median at $72 a month. That measures how big the business is, not what an idle hour costs, since subscriptions keep renewing while you wait for GitHub.<br>Downtime<br>Developers × hours down × the share that stops you × their hourly cost. Hours down comes off 160 working hours, not 730, because a 3am outage costs nothing.<br>Downtime that blocks you<br>The share of GitHub's downtime that actually stops your work. Most incidents degrade one service rather than take everything out, so the default is 15%: of 16 hours down, about 2 hours cost you something.<br>Your box<br>Power around the clock, its own downtime on the same terms, and the upkeep hours above. GitLab ships security releases roughly monthly, so the upkeep number is the one that decides whether this is worth doing at all: at 8 hours a month it costs more than most teams' GitHub bill.<br>Not...