Billing

Running an agentic workflow incurs two types of cost: GitHub Actions minutes for compute, and AI inference charged by the model provider. Both appear independently on your bill.

GitHub Actions Minutes

Every workflow job consumes Actions compute time at standard GitHub Actions pricing. A typical run includes a short pre-activation job (10–30 seconds) and an agent job (1–15 minutes). Each job also incurs approximately 1.5 minutes of runner setup overhead.

Actions minutes are billed to the organization or user that owns the repository.

AI Inference

Inference costs depend on which engine the workflow uses.

GitHub Copilot (default engine)

There are two billing paths for the Copilot engine (engine: copilot, the default):

Organization billing — Inference is charged as AI Credits (AIC) against the organization’s Copilot tenant. This requires all three of the following:

1. The organization has centralized billing enabled for Copilot requests in its Copilot policies. Enable it under Organization → Settings → Copilot → Policies → Copilot CLI → “Allow use of Copilot CLI billed to the organization”. See also Authentication.

2. The workflow declares copilot-requests: write under permissions:

   permissions:
     contents: read
     copilot-requests: write

3. The workflow has been compiled (gh aw compile) and the updated .lock.yml committed to the repository.

gh aw compile does not auto-inject copilot-requests: write into arbitrary workflow source. The permission must be declared in the workflow frontmatter. Some authoring flows such as gh aw add can insert it when the author explicitly chooses Copilot org billing, but the compiler otherwise only emits an informational tip.

Individual/seat billing — If the above conditions are not met, the workflow must be configured with a user-supplied COPILOT_GITHUB_TOKEN. In this case inference is attributed to (and limited by) the PAT owner’s Copilot entitlements rather than being billed centrally through the organization.

See Engines for a full list of engines and their authentication requirements, and Authentication for configuration details. For Copilot model pricing and AIC rates, see GitHub Copilot models and pricing.

Anthropic (Claude)

When using engine: claude or passing ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, inference is billed directly to your Anthropic account.

OpenAI (Codex / GPT)

When using engine: codex or passing OPENAI_API_KEY, inference is billed directly to your OpenAI account.

Google (Gemini)

When using engine: gemini or passing GEMINI_API_KEY, inference is billed directly to your Google Cloud / AI Studio account.

Estimating and Monitoring Costs

Before dispatching a workflow, establish a budget using a recent comparable run or the published model tables. For an existing workflow, inspect recent AIC and duration first, then treat the highest recent run as a conservative pre-run cap:

gh aw logs my-workflow --last 5 --json \
  | jq '.per_run_breakdown[] | {run_id, aic, action_minutes}'

For a new or materially changed workflow, compile first so the checked-in workflow and declared engine/model are final, then compare that configuration against the published pricing tables before enabling broad rollout:

gh aw compile .github/workflows/my-workflow.md

Use gh aw audit <run-id> after a representative run to validate the estimate against actual token usage and inference spend. See Cost Management for monitoring strategies, budget guardrails, and techniques for reducing spend, and Model Tables for current model pricing inputs.