Self-Hosted Gitea vs GitHub: Real Monthly Cost

GitHub charges by the person: Free costs nothing and includes private repositories, and Team and Enterprise add a price for each member. A self-hosted Gitea charges nothing per person; you pay for the server, and everyone you add shares it. So the comparison is not about whether you can host private code for free, because GitHub Free already does that. It is about what your team needs beyond Free. GitHub prices below are from its pricing page as of 2026-10-19.

The monthly cost

Gitea here is the one-click Gitea app on Veloxa 1 ($8 a month, $0.02 an hour), its recommended size, with 50 GB of disk.

Team	GitHub Free	GitHub Team ($4 per user)	Gitea on VeloxaHost
1 developer	$0	$4	$8
2 developers	$0	$8	$8
5 developers	$0	$20	$8
10 developers	$0	$40	$8
25 developers	$0	$100	$8

GitHub's pricing page lists Team at $4 per user a month and marks that price "for the first 12 months", without saying on the page what follows. Enterprise starts at $21 per user a month, marked the same way. Free includes unlimited public and private repositories, 2,000 Actions minutes a month and 500 MB of Packages storage; Team raises those to 3,000 minutes and 2 GB.

The difference between Free and Team is mostly about private repositories. On Free, the pricing page lists code owners, draft pull requests, multiple pull request assignees, and Pages and wikis for public repositories only. Team adds them for private repositories, along with required reviewers and repository rules.

What limits Gitea instead is the server. Gitea itself is light, but running Gitea Actions jobs on the same server needs more CPU and memory: Veloxa 2 ($15 a month, $0.03 an hour) doubles both, and the column becomes $15. Large repositories or many build artifacts may need the 160 GB of Veloxa 4 ($30 a month, $0.05 an hour).

What the VeloxaHost column leaves out

• HTTPS on your domain. Gitea's web interface and HTTPS clones on port 443 need a dedicated IPv4 address, a paid add-on with limited availability, because the shared IPv4 block does not include ports 80 and 443. The console shows its current price. SSH pushes work on a forwarded port of the shared block without it.
• CI minutes. GitHub's included Actions minutes run on GitHub's machines. Gitea Actions jobs run on runners you provide, on this server or another one, and their CPU is part of your server bill.
• Your time. You upgrade Gitea, watch disk space and keep backups. A snapshot before an upgrade gives a one-step rollback and is not charged.
• The network effect. Outside contributors, forks and stars are on GitHub. A self-hosted Gitea is visited by the people you invite.

Where GitHub is the better pick

• Small teams on Free. Private repositories with 2,000 Actions minutes a month cost $0 on GitHub, which beats any server.
• One or two developers on Team. At $4 per user, two people on Team cost the same $8 as the server, with nothing to maintain.
• Public projects. Open contributions, discovery and GitHub's integrations all depend on being where other developers already are.
• Hosted extras. Codespaces, GitHub's hosted runners and the wider Marketplace are not something a self-hosted Gitea replaces.

Where self-hosted Gitea is the better pick

• Growing private teams. At 25 developers, Team is $100 a month; Gitea on one server stays at $8, or $15 with room for CI.
• Your code on your server. Repositories, issues and packages live on a server you control, with backups on your schedule.
• No per-feature tiers. Every feature Gitea has is available to every user on your server.

FAQ

Is Gitea free?

Gitea is released under the MIT license and has no per-user fee. You pay for the server: $8 a month on Veloxa 1.

Can I move my repositories from GitHub?

Gitea's web interface has a migration tool that imports a repository from GitHub, including issues and pull requests if you give it an access token. Run it once per repository.

Does Gitea have CI like GitHub Actions?

Yes. Gitea Actions uses a workflow syntax close to GitHub Actions. Jobs run on a runner you install and register, which uses your server's CPU and memory rather than included minutes.

How many users can an $8 server handle?

There is no fixed number. Gitea serves a small team comfortably on 1 vCPU and 2 GB of RAM; heavy CI or many concurrent clones need more. CPU and memory can be raised from the console.

What does a month cost if I only run Gitea for part of it?

Its hours: $0.02 for each hour a Veloxa 1 runs, up to $8. A Git server is usually left running, so plan on the monthly price.