What GitHub Actions costs a team of 100 per month
A hundred developers pushing to private repositories use far more minutes than any plan includes, GitHub Enterprise Cloud among them. This page works the month out on GitHub Team and on GitHub Enterprise Cloud, on Linux alone and with a share of Windows and macOS jobs, using this site's calculator.
The workload
- 100 developers, each pushing 4 times per working day.
- 3 jobs per push, 5 billed minutes per job: 1,200 jobs a day.
- 22 working days a month: 26,400 jobs and 132,000 minutes.
- Private repositories on standard GitHub-hosted runners. In public repositories the same workload costs $0.00.
- Compute only: seats, storage and taxes are not in the figures.
These are the per-developer assumptions of this site's other team pages, so the figures can be compared with those for 20 and 50 developers. Your own team may push more or less; the method is the same.
All on Linux, on two plans
GitHub Team includes 3,000 minutes a month, which leaves 129,000 billed. GitHub Enterprise Cloud includes 50,000, which leaves 82,000 billed.
| Plan and runner | Minutes billed | Cost per month | Cost per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| GitHub Team, Linux 2-core x64 | 129,000 | $774.00 | $9,288.00 |
| GitHub Team, Linux 2-core arm64 | 129,000 | $645.00 | $7,740.00 |
| GitHub Enterprise Cloud, Linux 2-core x64 | 82,000 | $492.00 | $5,904.00 |
| GitHub Enterprise Cloud, Linux 2-core arm64 | 82,000 | $410.00 | $4,920.00 |
On Linux 2-core x64 that is $7.74 per developer per month on GitHub Team and $4.92 on GitHub Enterprise Cloud. The difference between the plans is $282.00 a month in compute: the 47,000 extra included minutes at the Linux rate. A team of this size chooses its plan for other reasons, and seat prices are not on this page, but that figure is what the larger allowance is worth here.
With Windows and macOS in the mix
Now send 85% of the jobs to Linux 2-core x64, 10% to Windows and 5% to macOS. On GitHub Enterprise Cloud 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 | 112,200 | 42,500 | 69,700 | $418.20 |
| Windows 2-core | 13,200 | 5,000 | 8,200 | $82.00 |
| macOS | 6,600 | 2,500 | 4,100 | $254.20 |
| Total | 132,000 | 50,000 | 82,000 | $754.40 |
The mix costs $754.40 a month, $9,052.80 a year, against $492.00 for the same minutes on Linux alone. The macOS jobs are one in twenty and a third of the bill.
Included minutes are really used up in the order jobs run. The calculator's bounds are $492.00 if the macOS and Windows jobs happened to use the allowance first and $914.40 if the Linux jobs did. With an allowance this large the order matters: the gap between the bounds is more than half of the estimate.
On GitHub Team the same mix costs $1,186.80 a month, $14,241.60 a year, with bounds of $1,028.40 and $1,196.40. The bounds are closer together there because 3,000 included minutes are too few to move the result much, whichever jobs use them.
What halving the pushes does
Suppose CI ran on 2 pushes per developer per day instead of 4, for example by cancelling runs that a newer push has replaced and by not running on draft pull requests. The workload falls to 66,000 minutes. On GitHub Enterprise Cloud, all on Linux 2-core x64, 16,000 minutes are billed and the month costs $96.00 instead of $492.00, a saving of $396.00.
Half the minutes removed four fifths of the bill. The allowance is a fixed amount, so every minute removed comes off the billed part, and the closer a team gets to its allowance the more each saved minute is worth as a share of the bill.
What to take from this
- At 100 developers on Linux, hosted CI is a few dollars per developer per month. The assumptions carry the result: more jobs per push or longer jobs scale it directly.
- A twentieth of the jobs on macOS and a tenth on Windows add half again to the bill. Where the macOS jobs run, and how often, is the first thing to review.
- arm64 is a flat discount on Linux if your jobs take the same time on it: $410.00 against $492.00 on GitHub Enterprise Cloud.
Use your own numbers. Enter your team's jobs per day, average job length and runner mix in the free calculator. It shows minutes, included minutes used, overage and the cost per month and per year.