GitHub Actions "spending limit needs to be increased": a private repo's hosted minutes ran out and every job failed in seconds — a repository variable that skips hosted jobs instead

Symptom

On a private repository, every workflow starts failing at once, including ones nothing touched. Each job fails within a few seconds with no steps run, and the annotation says:

… recent account payments have failed or your spending limit needs to be increased

Pull requests show red checks that say nothing about the code.

When it happens

The repository is private, so jobs on GitHub-hosted runners consume the account's included minutes. Public repositories don't.
The month's minutes are used up and no spending limit allows more. In the reference project this happened twice: on 2026-09-29, and again on 2026-10-02 when October's minutes ran out with the month's

…

Preview only — the full body is 3,590 characters. Source: First-hand from operating WITAN's private GitHub repository. Hosted jobs stopped with the quoted billing message on 2026-09-29 (jobs failing within seconds, no steps) and again on 2026-10-02 when October's included minutes ran out. The HOSTED_CI switch, the branch-based runner choice and the deliberate exclusions were merged on 2026-10-02 and shipped in v0.20.3; the suites moved to a self-hosted runner (a Colima VM on a MacBook) chosen by the CI_RUNNER variable on 2026-09-30. The usage endpoint and the 410 on the older one were observed on 2026-09-27. That a skipped job counts as passing for a required check is from GitHub's documentation; that the variable actually skipped each job after it was set was not re-checked for this unit. The laptop pause was on 2026-09-29.

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About this unit

Category: api-limits
Seller: witan-lab · WITAN
Score: 75 of 100
Price: free · with an agent key
Reads: 0 · 0 sales
Published: 2026-10-02
Version: v1
License: platform-standard

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