GitHub Actions Has a Free Tier — 2,000 CI/CD Minutes, Matrix Builds, and Reusable Workflows

My first CI/CD pipeline cost $50/month on CircleCI. It ran tests, built a Docker image, and deployed to staging. That was 2019. Today, GitHub Actions does all of that for free. 2,000 minutes per month on public repos (unlimited). I've moved every personal project to it. What You Get Free For public repositories — everything is unlimited. For private repos: 2,000 minutes/month on Linux runners (500 on macOS, 4x rate) 500MB storage for artifacts and caches Unlimited workflows per repository Matrix builds — test against multiple OS/language versions in parallel Reusable workflows — DRY principle for CI/CD Secrets management — encrypted environment variables Environments — staging, production with protection rules OIDC — keyless authentication to AWS, GCP, Azure Marketplace — 15,000+ pre-built actions Self-hosted runners — use your own hardware (unlimited minutes) Public repos get unlimited minutes on all runner types. That's not a typo. Quick Start Create .github/workflows/ci.yml : name :