---
title: "CI runners for GitHub Actions and GitLab CI, billed per second"
description: "Promigence runs your GitHub Actions and GitLab CI jobs in its sandboxes. One line of the workflow changes; on the same job at the same size it finished 2–3.5× sooner than hosted runners and cost 7–10× less."
url: "https://www.promigence.ai/for/ci-runners"
site: "Promigence"
---

# CI runners that finish the same job 2–3.5× sooner

Promigence runs your existing GitHub Actions and GitLab CI jobs in its sandboxes. One line of the workflow changes (`runs-on: promigence`, or a runner tag in GitLab), the job itself does not. On the same job at the same size, measured against two hosted runner services, it finished 2–3.5× sooner and cost 7–10× less. Coding agents working inside CI have their own page, Agentic CI.

**Who this is for:** Teams on GitHub Actions or GitLab CI whose jobs are slow, costly, or too big for the default runner.

## What breaks today
### Billed by the minute
A 50-second job is billed as a full minute, and each step up in runner size multiplies the per-minute rate.

### The default runner runs out of memory
On the TypeScript monorepo we measured, the default runner of both hosted services ran out of memory and never finished.

### Bigger runners wait for a machine
A larger hosted runner can sit provisioning for minutes before the first step runs.

## What changes with Promigence
### One line moves a job
`runs-on: promigence` in GitHub Actions, a runner tag in GitLab CI. Steps, caches and secrets stay where they are.

### Per second, with a cap per job
Each job is billed for the seconds it runs, and a cap sets the most one job may cost.

### A size per job
Name a size in `runs-on`, and keep runners waiting when a job should start the moment it is queued.

## The only change to a GitHub Actions workflow
```yaml
jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: promigence        # was: ubuntu-latest
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: npm ci && npm test

# then, on any machine with the CLI:
#   promigence runners github --repo your-org/your-repo
```