Is 50,000 minutes enough on GitHub Enterprise Cloud?
GitHub Enterprise Cloud includes 50,000 GitHub Actions minutes a month for standard runners in private repositories. That is a single figure for the whole account, not an amount per seat, so whether it is enough depends on how many people share it. This page finds the team size where it runs out and prices what comes after, with this site's calculator.
The workload per developer
The examples use the same developer as this site's other team pages: 4 pushes per working day, 3 jobs per push, 5 billed minutes per job, 22 working days a month. That is 12 jobs a day and 1,320 minutes a month per developer, all on Linux 2-core x64 unless stated. Compute only: seats, storage and taxes are not in the figures.
By team size
| Team | Jobs per day | Minutes per month | Minutes billed | Cost per month | Cost per year |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10 developers | 120 | 13,200 | 0 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| 20 developers | 240 | 26,400 | 0 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| 30 developers | 360 | 39,600 | 0 | $0.00 | $0.00 |
| 50 developers | 600 | 66,000 | 16,000 | $96.00 | $1,152.00 |
| 100 developers | 1,200 | 132,000 | 82,000 | $492.00 | $5,904.00 |
| 200 developers | 2,400 | 264,000 | 214,000 | $1,284.00 | $15,408.00 |
With this workload the allowance covers 37 developers: 48,840 minutes, with 1,160 left. The thirty-eighth takes the month to 50,160 minutes, 160 of them billed, $0.96. Running out is not a cliff: the first developer past the line costs cents, and each further one adds 1,320 minutes at the Linux rate.
So for a team of up to a few dozen on Linux the answer is yes. For an organization of hundreds the answer is no, and the allowance is better read as a discount of a fixed size than as a budget.
The same question in jobs per day
Spread over 22 working days, 50,000 minutes are 2,272 whole minutes a day. With 5-minute jobs that is 454 jobs a day across the whole account; with 10-minute jobs it is 227 jobs a day. One more job a day than that, every day, and the month ends with billed minutes.
Count billed minutes, not clock time. GitHub rounds every job up to a whole minute, so a job that runs for 4 minutes and 10 seconds uses 5 minutes of the allowance.
What the allowance is worth
Every standard runner uses one included minute per minute, whatever its rate. The same 50,000 minutes are therefore worth very different amounts depending on where they are spent:
| Runner | Rate per minute | 50,000 minutes at the rate |
|---|---|---|
| Linux 1-core, x64 | $0.002 | $100.00 |
| Linux 2-core, x64 | $0.006 | $300.00 |
| Linux 2-core, arm64 | $0.005 | $250.00 |
| Windows 2-core, x64 or arm64 | $0.01 | $500.00 |
| macOS 3-core or 4-core | $0.062 | $3,100.00 |
For a team that runs everything on Linux 2-core x64, the allowance replaces $300.00 of compute a month. The included minutes do not apply to larger runners at all: those are billed for every minute, and their rates are in the full version of the calculator.
Past the allowance, the runner decides
Take the 100-developer team from the first table, with 82,000 minutes billed, and put the whole workload on one runner:
| Runner | Rate per minute | Minutes billed | Cost per month | Cost per year |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Linux 1-core, x64 | $0.002 | 82,000 | $164.00 | $1,968.00 |
| Linux 2-core, x64 | $0.006 | 82,000 | $492.00 | $5,904.00 |
| Linux 2-core, arm64 | $0.005 | 82,000 | $410.00 | $4,920.00 |
| Windows 2-core, x64 or arm64 | $0.01 | 82,000 | $820.00 | $9,840.00 |
| macOS 3-core or 4-core | $0.062 | 82,000 | $5,084.00 | $61,008.00 |
No team runs every job on macOS; the row is there to show the slope. Each percent of the workload that moves from Linux to macOS moves the bill by far more than a percent.
Compared with GitHub Team
GitHub Team includes 3,000 minutes. The same 100 developers on Linux 2-core x64 would pay $774.00 a month for compute there, $282.00 more than on GitHub Enterprise Cloud. That is the whole value of the larger allowance on Linux, and it is the same $282.00 for any team big enough to use up both allowances. In a public repository, standard runners are free on every plan and the workload costs $0.00.
Check your own account. Enter your jobs per day, average job length and runner mix in the free calculator and pick GitHub Enterprise Cloud as the plan. It shows the included minutes used, the overage and the cost per month and per year.