Is 3,000 Actions minutes enough on the GitHub Team plan?
GitHub Team includes 3,000 minutes a month for standard runners in private repositories. For two developers that is plenty; for ten it covers less than a quarter of the month. This page shows where the line falls and what the minutes beyond it cost, using this site's calculator.
The formula in words
Multiply jobs per day by the billed minutes per job and by the working days in the month. Subtract the 3,000 included minutes. Whatever is left is billed at the per-minute rate of the runner; if nothing is left, the month costs $0.00. Each job is rounded up to a whole minute before it is counted. The calculator treats the 3,000 minutes as one monthly pool for the account, shared by everything that runs in its private repositories.
Assumptions
- Each developer pushes 4 times a working day and each push starts 3 jobs, so 12 jobs a day per developer.
- Each job is billed as 5 minutes.
- 22 working days a month. One developer therefore uses 1,320 minutes a month.
- A private repository on GitHub Team. Compute only: seats, storage and taxes are left out.
By team size, on Linux 2-core x64
| Developers | Jobs per day | Minutes per month | Minutes billed | Cost per month | Cost per year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 developer | 12 | 1,320 | 0 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| 2 developers | 24 | 2,640 | 0 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| 3 developers | 36 | 3,960 | 960 | $5.76 | $69.12 |
| 5 developers | 60 | 6,600 | 3,600 | $21.60 | $259.20 |
| 10 developers | 120 | 13,200 | 10,200 | $61.20 | $734.40 |
| 20 developers | 240 | 26,400 | 23,400 | $140.40 | $1,684.80 |
With this workload the 3,000 minutes are enough for two developers and not for three. The third developer takes the month to 3,960 minutes, 960 beyond the allowance, for $5.76. From there every extra developer adds 1,320 billed minutes. Ten developers pay $61.20 a month and twenty pay $140.40, or $1,684.80 a year.
Where exactly the allowance ends
Spread over 22 working days, 3,000 minutes is 136 whole minutes of runner time a day. With 5-minute jobs that is 27 jobs a day: 2,970 minutes, with 30 to spare. The 28th daily job takes the month to 3,080 minutes; 80 of them are billed, and the month costs $0.48. Longer jobs move the line in proportion: with 10-minute jobs it sits at 13 jobs a day.
The same ten developers on other runners
The allowance is counted in minutes, so it runs out at the same point on every standard runner. What changes is the price of the 10,200 minutes that follow.
| Runner | Rate per minute | Minutes billed | Cost per month | Cost per year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Linux 1-core, x64 | $0.002 | 10,200 | $20.40 | $244.80 |
| Linux 2-core, x64 | $0.006 | 10,200 | $61.20 | $734.40 |
| Linux 2-core, arm64 | $0.005 | 10,200 | $51.00 | $612.00 |
| Windows 2-core, x64 | $0.01 | 10,200 | $102.00 | $1,224.00 |
| Windows 2-core, arm64 | $0.01 | 10,200 | $102.00 | $1,224.00 |
| macOS 3-core or 4-core, M1 or Intel | $0.062 | 10,200 | $632.40 | $7,588.80 |
Not being covered by the allowance is a small cost on Linux and a large one on macOS. A team that builds only on Linux 2-core x64 pays $61.20 a month for the minutes beyond the 3,000; the same minutes on macOS cost $632.40. A job is not always the same length on every runner, so the minutes may not carry over one for one.
If the allowance is not enough
Running out of included minutes does not call for a bigger plan by itself: the minutes beyond the allowance are simply billed at the runner's rate, as in the tables above. GitHub Enterprise Cloud includes 50,000 minutes, so the ten-developer workload costs $0.00 there and leaves 36,800 minutes unused. Against that stands the price of the plan, which is not part of this data; compare it with the $61.20 a month the same workload costs in overage on Team before deciding anything on Actions minutes alone.
In a public repository, standard GitHub-hosted runners are free and none of this applies. For private repositories, the usual ways to stay under the line are to skip jobs for changes that do not need them, cancel runs that a newer push has replaced, and avoid splitting work into many very short jobs that are each rounded up.
Find your own line. Choose GitHub Team in the free calculator, enter your jobs per day, the average job length and 22 working days, and read the included minutes used and the minutes billed.