What a nightly build costs per month on GitHub Actions
A scheduled nightly build is the easiest workload to price: one run a night, about the same length every time. This page multiplies it out for five build lengths on the standard runners, compares running every night with weeknights and weekly, and shows when a nightly fits inside a plan's included minutes. The figures come from this site's calculator.
The formula in words
Multiply the billed minutes of one nightly run by the number of nights it runs in the month. That is the nightly's minutes. Multiply them by the per-minute rate of the runner to get what the nightly adds to the bill once the plan's included minutes are used up. A run of several jobs is the sum of its jobs, each one rounded up to a whole minute: a build of 29 minutes and 10 seconds is billed as 30 minutes.
Assumptions
- One job per night, every night of a 30-day month: 30 runs.
- A private repository on standard GitHub-hosted runners.
- Compute only: seats, storage of build artifacts and taxes are left out.
Every night for a month, by build length
| Nightly build | Minutes per month | Linux 2-core x64 | Linux 2-core arm64 | Windows 2-core | macOS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 minutes | 300 | $1.80 | $1.50 | $3.00 | $18.60 |
| 20 minutes | 600 | $3.60 | $3.00 | $6.00 | $37.20 |
| 30 minutes | 900 | $5.40 | $4.50 | $9.00 | $55.80 |
| 60 minutes | 1,800 | $10.80 | $9.00 | $18.00 | $111.60 |
| 120 minutes | 3,600 | $21.60 | $18.00 | $36.00 | $223.20 |
These are the amounts a nightly adds when the daytime CI of the account already uses up the included minutes, which is the common case for a team. A one-hour nightly on Linux 2-core x64 adds $10.80 a month. The same hour on macOS adds $111.60, and a two-hour macOS nightly adds $223.20.
Every night, weeknights or weekly
The schedule is the other factor. A 60-minute build priced at three frequencies:
| Schedule | Runs per month | Minutes per month | Linux 2-core x64 | macOS |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Every night | 30 | 1,800 | $10.80 | $111.60 |
| Weeknights only | 22 | 1,320 | $7.92 | $81.84 |
| Once a week | 4 | 240 | $1.44 | $14.88 |
Skipping weekends saves 8 runs: $2.88 a month on Linux and $29.76 on macOS. On Linux the frequency hardly matters to the bill; on macOS it is worth asking whether a build nobody looks at on Sunday needs to run.
A nightly that fits in the included minutes
If the nightly is the only thing the account runs in private repositories, the plan may cover it. GitHub Free includes 2,000 minutes a month and GitHub Team 3,000. Every nightly in the first table up to 60 minutes, 1,800 minutes a month, fits in both and costs $0.00.
The 120-minute nightly uses 3,600 minutes. On GitHub Free, 1,600 of them are billed: $9.60 a month on Linux 2-core x64 and $99.20 on macOS. On GitHub Team, 600 are billed: $3.60 a month and $43.20 a year on Linux, $37.20 a month and $446.40 a year on macOS.
In a public repository, standard GitHub-hosted runners are free, so a nightly of any length there costs $0.00 and uses none of the included minutes.
Entering a nightly in the calculator
The calculator multiplies jobs per day, minutes per job and days. For a nightly, enter the jobs of one run as jobs per day, the billed minutes of a job, and 30 in the working-days field, or 22 for weeknights. To see a nightly together with daytime CI, work out the two monthly minute totals separately and add them: the plan's allowance is used once, by the sum.
Keeping a nightly cheap
A nightly usually exists because the work is too slow to run on every push, so its length is the lever. Run the long suite on Linux and keep the macOS and Windows parts to what only those systems can test. Skip the run when nothing was merged since the last one. Split the build into parallel jobs only if that is worth the extra rounding: parallel jobs finish sooner but bill the same minutes or slightly more.
Price your own schedule. Enter your nightly's jobs, their length and the nights it runs in the free calculator, choose your plan and read the month and the year.