GitHub Actions monthly cost for a team of 20
At twenty developers the included minutes of GitHub Team are gone in the first few working days, and almost all of the month is billed. This page prices one stated twenty-person workload with this site's calculator, first on Linux alone and then on a three-runner mix.
Assumptions
- Twenty developers working in private repositories on GitHub Team.
- Each developer pushes 4 times per working day and each push starts 3 jobs: 240 jobs per working day.
- The average job is billed as 5 minutes, after GitHub's rounding of each job up to a whole minute.
- 22 working days a month.
- Standard GitHub-hosted runners, compute only. Seat prices, storage, larger runners and taxes are not in the figures.
That is 5,280 jobs and 26,400 minutes a month. GitHub Team includes 3,000 minutes, so 23,400 are billed. The workload per developer is the same as in the five-person example on this site; only the head count changed. Your own team may push more or less often, so treat the figures as a worked example, not a benchmark.
All jobs on one Linux runner
| Runner | Rate per minute | Cost per month | Cost per year |
|---|---|---|---|
| Linux 2-core, x64 | $0.006 | $140.40 | $1,684.80 |
| Linux 2-core, arm64 | $0.005 | $117.00 | $1,404.00 |
On Linux 2-core x64 the compute comes to $140.40 a month, which is $7.02 per developer. The five-person team in the smaller example pays less per head because the same 3,000 included minutes are spread over fewer people.
A three-runner mix
Now suppose 85% of the jobs run on Linux 2-core x64, 10% on Windows and 5% on macOS, a common shape for a product with a desktop or mobile client. The calculator shares the included minutes between the runners in proportion to their minutes.
| Runner | Minutes | Included minutes used | Minutes billed | Cost per month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Linux 2-core, x64 | 22,440 | 2,550 | 19,890 | $119.34 |
| Windows 2-core | 2,640 | 300 | 2,340 | $23.40 |
| macOS | 1,320 | 150 | 1,170 | $72.54 |
| Total | 26,400 | 3,000 | 23,400 | $215.28 |
The mix costs $215.28 a month, or $2,583.36 a year. The macOS jobs are one twentieth of the minutes and about a third of the bill. Because the included minutes are really used in the order jobs run, the month can land anywhere between $144.24, if the macOS and Windows jobs used the allowance first, and $224.88, if the Linux jobs did.
What about GitHub Enterprise Cloud?
GitHub Enterprise Cloud includes 50,000 minutes a month. The whole 26,400-minute workload fits inside that, so the overage is $0.00 on any standard runner mix, with 23,600 included minutes left over. That tells you what the larger allowance is worth in compute for this team: the $140.40 to $215.28 a month in the tables above. The seat prices of the two plans are not in this site's data, so the comparison of the plans themselves is yours to make from GitHub's pricing page.
Where a team of 20 can save
- Move Linux jobs to arm64. If the jobs take the same time there, the all-Linux bill drops from $140.40 to $117.00 a month.
- Trim the macOS share. In the mix, 1,170 billed macOS minutes cost three times as much as 2,340 billed Windows minutes. Run on macOS only the jobs that need it.
- Cancel superseded runs. With 80 pushes a day, some runs are out of date before they finish. A concurrency group that cancels them removes whole jobs from the count.
- Cache dependencies. Each minute shaved from the average job removes 5,280 minutes a month at this job count.
Replace the assumptions with your figures. The free calculator takes jobs per day, average job length, working days and the share of jobs on each standard runner, and shows the range for a mixed setup.