On October 18, right in the middle of shipping a multi-feature audit and a supplement tracker redesign on my personal life_os_app (my daily Flutter Web + Cloud Firestore operating board), GitHub Actions stopped scheduling jobs. The billing meter for my personal account's hosted runner minutes had hit 100%.

Look at what my .github/workflows/ci.yml and deploy-live.yml were doing on every push and pull request:

Spinning up an ubuntu-latest VM.

Pulling the Flutter SDK and warming the Pub cache (~90s).

Installing Python 3 and running 68 CLI sync unit tests (~15s).

Running flutter analyze and 466 widget and accessibility tests (~110s).

Compiling flutter build web --release --no-web-resources-cdn (~140s).

Authenticating via Workload Identity Federation ( google-github-actions/auth@v2 ) and deploying to Firebase Hosting target board (~35s).

That is 6.5 minutes per PR push and another 4 minutes on merge to main .…