My take as a cofounder of Shipfox, a company working on alternative GitHub Actions runners (same space as Depot, Blacksmith, Namespace).
The price update itself wasn't very surprising. GitHub-hosted runners historically carried a significant premium given the underlying hardware, which isn't particularly well suited for CI workloads that are often CPU-intensive. Lowering prices there makes sense and better reflects real usage.
Pricing self-hosted runners also feels logical from GitHub's perspective. Until now, GitHub Actions generated little direct revenue from self-hosted usage, despite still providing orchestration, Actions Marketplace, etc. Given how widely self-hosting is used, it's hard to imagine that remaining free forever.
For users of GitHub-hosted runners, this is clearly good news. For teams running self-hosted runners, the impact can be noticeable. For example, if your infrastructure previously achieved a per-minute cost about half of GitHub's hosted 2 vCPU rate (a conservative assumption), adding a $0.002/min fee effectively moves the total from ~$0.004 to ~$0.006 per minute, roughly a 50% increase. In setups that were much cheaper than hosted runners, the relative increase is even higher.
That said, most teams don't self-host purely to save money. Performance, hardware control, and security or compliance requirements are usually the main drivers. This change doesn't remove those benefits, but it does change the cost equation and likely forces a reassessment.