CI minutes forecaster
Estimate next quarter's CI usage from how your team works: pull requests a day, pushes per pull request, jobs per run and job length. Get monthly minutes and the GitHub bill.
- Monthly minutes
- 48,384
- 1,008 runs a month
- Billable minutes
- 45,384
- 3,000 free
- GitHub cost
- $272.30
- $3,268 a year
Each job is billed as 8 minutes (rounded up). A 25% cut in job time would save about $68.08 a month.
Prices checked 2026-10-10 against the provider's published rates. Everything runs in your browser; nothing you type is sent anywhere.
How to use it
- Enter pull requests merged per working day and how many times each is pushed to.
- Enter jobs per workflow run and the average minutes per job. GitHub rounds each job up to a whole minute.
- Pick the runner and plan. The forecast shows monthly minutes, billable minutes and cost.
Frequently asked questions
Why does the forecast round job minutes up?
GitHub bills each job in whole minutes, so a 2 minute 5 second job is billed as 3. Many short jobs cost more than the stopwatch suggests.
What should I count as a push?
Every push to a pull request branch that triggers CI. Review iterations usually mean 3 to 5 pushes per pull request.
Does this include scheduled and main-branch runs?
No. Add those by raising the PR count or use the cost calculator with real minutes from your billing page.
How do I cut the number?
Cancel superseded runs with concurrency, skip unchanged paths, cache dependencies and shard long tests. Faster runners also shorten each job.
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- Cost of slow CI calculatorWork out what slow CI costs your team each year from engineers, waits per day, minutes per wait and hourly cost, plus the saving from faster builds.
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