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# GitHub-hosted agents with Pay-as-you-Go pricing are now generally available in Azure Pipelines

**[DevBlogs](https://daily.dev/sources/devblogs)** · 5 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

GitHub-hosted agents and pay-as-you-go pricing are now generally available in Azure Pipelines, giving teams access to additional compute options including native Apple silicon and larger Linux and Windows machines. Instead of pre-purchasing parallel-job capacity, teams pay per minute of pipeline execution time based on the selected agent SKU. The release includes GA of GitHub-hosted agents and macOS SKUs, plus public preview of Linux and Windows SKUs. Pricing ranges from $0.022/min for an 8-core Linux agent to $0.102/min for an XLarge macOS agent. This billing model is separate from the existing Microsoft-hosted parallel-job pool, has no free tier, and existing pipelines are unaffected unless explicitly updated. Setup requires enabling the feature in organization billing settings, after which a new GitHub-hosted Agents pool is provisioned within 24 hours. Usage and costs can be tracked via the Analytics tab or Azure Cost Management.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://devblogs.microsoft.com/devops/github-hosted-agents-with-pay-as-you-go-pricing-are-now-generally-available-in-azure-pipelines>

## Questions this post answers

### How much does an 8-core Linux GitHub-hosted agent cost per minute in Azure Pipelines?

An 8-core Linux GitHub-hosted agent costs $0.022 per minute, with 32 GB RAM and 300 GB SSD storage on x64 architecture. A 16-core Linux variant costs $0.042 per minute with 64 GB RAM and 600 GB storage. Billing is pay-as-you-go per minute of execution time rather than pre-purchased parallel-job capacity, and there is no free tier for these agents.

_Teams comparing CI compute costs can follow Azure Pipelines pricing changes like this on daily.dev._

### Do GitHub-hosted agents in Azure Pipelines consume my existing Microsoft-hosted parallel job capacity?

No, GitHub-hosted agent jobs do not consume existing parallel jobs purchased for the Microsoft-hosted Azure Pipelines pool. They use a separate pay-as-you-go billing model where you pay per minute based on the selected agent SKU, with no need to purchase parallel-job capacity in advance, and existing pipelines keep using their current pool unless explicitly switched.

_daily.dev helps engineers track pipeline billing changes before they affect CI budgets._

### How do I use a native Apple silicon macOS agent in an Azure Pipelines YAML pipeline?

Set the pool name to 'GitHub-hosted Agents' and specify vmImage as 'macos-26-arm64' for a standard macOS agent running on arm64 (M1), or 'macos-26-arm64-xl' for the XLarge SKU with 8 GPU hardware-acceleration cores on M2. The standard SKU costs $0.062 per minute and the XLarge costs $0.102 per minute, each with 14 GB SSD storage.

_Developers adopting Apple silicon CI runners can keep up with Azure Pipelines updates via daily.dev._

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---

Tags: [#azure](https://daily.dev/tags/azure), [#cicd](https://daily.dev/tags/cicd), [#github-actions](https://daily.dev/tags/github-actions), [#finops](https://daily.dev/tags/finops), [#azure-devops](https://daily.dev/tags/azure-devops)

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