GitHub Actions monthly cost for a team of 50
Fifty developers produce enough CI usage to pass the allowance of every GitHub plan, including the 50,000 minutes of GitHub Enterprise Cloud. This page prices one stated fifty-person workload on two plans with this site's calculator, so you can see what the larger allowance is worth in compute.
Assumptions
- Fifty developers working in private repositories.
- Each developer pushes 4 times per working day and each push starts 3 jobs: 600 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 13,200 jobs and 66,000 minutes a month. GitHub Team includes 3,000 minutes, leaving 63,000 billed. GitHub Enterprise Cloud includes 50,000, leaving 16,000 billed. The per-developer workload is an assumption for a worked example; measure your own before you budget.
The bill on each plan
| Runner setup | GitHub Team, per month | GitHub Team, per year | Enterprise Cloud, per month | Enterprise Cloud, per year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| All jobs on Linux 2-core, x64 | $378.00 | $4,536.00 | $96.00 | $1,152.00 |
| All jobs on Linux 2-core, arm64 | $315.00 | $3,780.00 | $80.00 | $960.00 |
| 85% Linux x64, 10% Windows, 5% macOS | $579.60 | $6,955.20 | $147.20 | $1,766.40 |
On GitHub Team with Linux 2-core x64 runners the compute is $378.00 a month, or $7.56 per developer. The rates used are $0.006 a minute for Linux 2-core x64, $0.005 for Linux arm64, $0.01 for Windows and $0.062 for macOS.
The gap between the two plans on the all-Linux row is $282.00 a month: the 47,000 extra included minutes at the Linux rate. That is the compute value of the larger allowance for this workload. It is not a comparison of the plans, because their seat prices are not in this site's data; set the seat prices from GitHub's pricing page against this figure yourself.
The mix on Enterprise Cloud, runner by runner
With 85% of jobs on Linux 2-core x64, 10% on Windows and 5% on macOS, the calculator shares the 50,000 included minutes in proportion to each runner's minutes.
| Runner | Minutes | Included minutes used | Minutes billed | Cost per month |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Linux 2-core, x64 | 56,100 | 42,500 | 13,600 | $81.60 |
| Windows 2-core | 6,600 | 5,000 | 1,600 | $16.00 |
| macOS | 3,300 | 2,500 | 800 | $49.60 |
| Total | 66,000 | 50,000 | 16,000 | $147.20 |
A wide range when the allowance is large
The $147.20 assumes a steady mix through the month. Included minutes are really used in the order jobs run, and with an allowance this large the order matters a great deal. If the macOS and Windows jobs used their included minutes first, only Linux minutes would be billed and the month would cost $96.00. If the Linux jobs used all 50,000, every Windows and macOS minute would be billed and the month would cost $307.20.
On GitHub Team the same mix ranges from $421.20 to $589.20 around the $579.60 headline: the top of the range is close to the headline, because 3,000 included minutes are a small part of 66,000. The larger the allowance next to the usage, the less a single headline figure tells you, which is why the calculator always shows the bounds for a mixed setup.
What to do with these numbers
- Budget on the high bound. For a mix that includes macOS, the upper figure is the safer planning number.
- Price the macOS share separately. On Enterprise Cloud, 800 billed macOS minutes cost three times as much as 1,600 billed Windows minutes.
- Test arm64 for Linux jobs. All on Linux, it takes the GitHub Team bill from $378.00 to $315.00 a month if job times hold.
- Look at self-hosted runners. GitHub does not bill minutes on them. At 66,000 minutes a month the break-even against your own machines is worth working out.
Run it with your own workload. The free calculator takes your plan, jobs per day, average job length and runner mix, and shows the overage per month and per year with its range.