Compare GitHub Actions, CircleCI, GitLab CI, Buildkite & Depot — find the cheapest CI for your usage.
| Provider | Free minutes | Price/min | Monthly cost | Notes |
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This calculator estimates your monthly CI/CD bill by taking build minutes, runner type, and seat count, then comparing the total across GitHub Actions, CircleCI, GitLab CI, and Buildkite. Because most providers charge a per-minute rate that is multiplied for larger or non-Linux runners and layer a per-seat fee on top, the cheapest platform changes depending on whether your spend is driven by compute or by team size. Modeling both components together shows where included free minutes run out and how much each additional pipeline run actually costs.
GitHub Actions includes a monthly allowance of free minutes on standard Linux runners for private repositories, and public repositories are free on standard runners. Past the allowance you pay per minute, with Windows runners billed at roughly twice the Linux rate and macOS runners at about ten times, so runner choice often matters more than raw minute count. Billing rounds each job up to the nearest minute.
GitHub Actions and GitLab bundle CI with a per-user plan fee, while Buildkite charges primarily per seat and runs jobs on infrastructure you supply, so its compute cost lands on your own cloud bill instead. CircleCI uses a credit model tied to machine size plus a seat component. A small team with heavy pipelines and a large team with light pipelines will usually land on different winners.
Cache dependencies and build artifacts, cancel superseded runs on the same branch, and use path filters so unrelated changes do not trigger full pipelines. Moving long-running or macOS-only jobs to self-hosted runners removes them from per-minute billing entirely, though you then pay for the underlying machines and their maintenance.