What 500,000 GitHub Actions minutes cost in a month
Half a million minutes a month is a large engineering organization, and at this volume no plan's allowance covers more than a tenth of the work. The bill is, to a close approximation, the minutes times the rate of the runner. The tables below work it out for each plan and each standard runner with this site's calculator.
Assumptions
- A private repository. In a public repository standard runners are free, so 500,000 minutes cost $0.00.
- 2,500 jobs per working day, 10 minutes each, 20 working days a month: 50,000 jobs and 500,000 minutes. Each job is a whole number of minutes, so GitHub's rounding up of every job adds nothing here.
- Standard GitHub-hosted runners only. Larger runners cannot use included minutes and are priced in the full version of the calculator.
- Compute only: the plan's seat price, storage and taxes are not in the figures.
500,000 minutes on a single runner
The plan's included minutes come off first. GitHub Free and GitHub Free for organizations include 2,000 minutes a month, so 498,000 are billed. GitHub Pro and GitHub Team include 3,000, so 497,000 are billed. GitHub Enterprise Cloud includes 50,000, one tenth of this workload, so 450,000 are billed.
| Runner | Rate per minute | All 500,000 minutes at the rate | Free plans (498,000 billed) | Pro or Team (497,000 billed) | Enterprise Cloud (450,000 billed) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Linux 1-core, x64 | $0.002 | $1,000.00 | $996.00 | $994.00 | $900.00 |
| Linux 2-core, x64 | $0.006 | $3,000.00 | $2,988.00 | $2,982.00 | $2,700.00 |
| Linux 2-core, arm64 | $0.005 | $2,500.00 | $2,490.00 | $2,485.00 | $2,250.00 |
| Windows 2-core, x64 or arm64 | $0.01 | $5,000.00 | $4,980.00 | $4,970.00 | $4,500.00 |
| macOS 3-core or 4-core | $0.062 | $31,000.00 | $30,876.00 | $30,814.00 | $27,900.00 |
The first three price columns are almost the same number. An allowance of 2,000 or 3,000 minutes is less than one percent of the workload, so on the small plans the bill is the third column minus small change. Only the Enterprise Cloud allowance is visible, and it takes exactly one tenth off.
On Linux 2-core x64 that is $2,982.00 a month on GitHub Team, $35,784.00 a year, against $2,700.00 a month and $32,400.00 a year on GitHub Enterprise Cloud. The difference in compute is $282.00 a month: the 47,000 extra included minutes at the Linux rate. Seats are not in these figures, so this is one side of that comparison only.
500,000 minutes spread over three runners
Take the same 50,000 jobs on GitHub Enterprise Cloud with 80% of them on Linux 2-core x64, 15% on Windows and 5% on macOS. The calculator shares the 50,000 included minutes between the runners in proportion to their minutes.
| Runner | Minutes | Included minutes used | Minutes billed | Cost per month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Linux 2-core, x64 | 400,000 | 40,000 | 360,000 | $2,160.00 |
| Windows 2-core | 75,000 | 7,500 | 67,500 | $675.00 |
| macOS | 25,000 | 2,500 | 22,500 | $1,395.00 |
| Total | 500,000 | 50,000 | 450,000 | $4,230.00 |
That is $4,230.00 a month, or $50,760.00 a year. One twentieth of the minutes, the macOS share, is a third of the bill.
Included minutes are really used up in the order jobs run, not in proportion. The calculator gives the bounds: $2,900.00 if the macOS and Windows jobs happened to use the allowance first, and $4,400.00 if the Linux jobs did. The spread is wide in dollars because a minute of allowance is worth ten times more when a macOS job uses it than when a Linux job does.
What the numbers say
- The rate is the bill. With the allowance at a tenth of the workload or less, every lever that matters changes either the number of minutes or the rate paid for them.
- arm64 is worth real money here. On GitHub Enterprise Cloud the Linux arm64 runner costs $2,250.00 against $2,700.00 for x64, a difference of $450.00 a month if your jobs take the same time on it.
- A small macOS share dominates. In the mix above, moving the macOS jobs to run only where they are needed is the first place to look, before any tuning of the Linux jobs.
- Check the larger runners too. Organizations at this volume often run part of the work on larger runners, which are billed for every minute with no allowance. Those rates are in the full version of the calculator, not on this page.
Not exactly 500,000 minutes? Enter your own jobs per day, job length and runner mix in the free calculator. It shows minutes, included minutes used, overage and the cost per month and per year.