CI minutes and serverless functions

In short: a small team's tests and deploys usually fit inside a free CI plan. Serverless functions are also free for most small apps, and at the builder's defaults cost $5 a month or less even at 100,000 users. The things that change the bill are the runner type for CI and CPU time for functions. All prices below were checked in October 2026.

CI minutes

CI (continuous integration) runs your tests and builds every time you push code. The machine that runs them is a runner. CI minutes are how long the runners work, and most services include a monthly allowance.

The stack builder assumes 300 CI minutes a month, which fits every free plan below.

GitHub Actions

GitHub Actions is free with no minute limit for public repositories on standard runners. Private repositories on GitHub Free get 2,000 minutes a month on standard Linux 2-core runners.

Without a payment method on file, jobs are blocked once those minutes are used. With one, extra minutes cost $0.006 on Linux, $0.010 on Windows and $0.062 on macOS. Larger runners are always billed. Each job is rounded up to the next whole minute, so many short jobs use more than you might expect.

GitHub Team is $4 per user a month for the first 12 months, with 3,000 minutes shared by the organization. GitHub's pricing page does not show the price after month 12. GitHub cut hosted-runner prices by up to 39% on January 1, 2026, so guides from before 2026 quote higher prices.

GitLab CI/CD

GitLab Free includes 400 compute minutes a month on GitLab's shared runners, for up to 5 users in a private group. To use the shared runners, GitLab asks for a card for a $1 verification that is not charged. Your own runners need no card and have no minute limit.

Compute minutes are job time multiplied by a cost factor: 1 on a small Linux runner, 2 on medium and 3 on large. Extra minutes come in packs of 1,000 for $10, which roll over. Premium is $29 per user a month, billed yearly, with 10,000 minutes shared by the group.

CircleCI

CircleCI bills in credits. The Free plan gives 30,000 credits a month for up to 5 active users. A minute costs 5 credits on a small Docker runner, 10 on medium and 20 on large, so the free credits buy 6,000, 3,000 or 1,500 minutes. On Free, jobs fail to run once the credits are gone. Performance starts at $15 a month and refills credits automatically instead.

Compared

Service	Free minutes a month	Notes
GitHub Actions	2,000 (private), no limit (public)	Linux 2-core; Windows and macOS cost more
GitLab CI/CD	400	Medium and large runners use them 2x and 3x faster
CircleCI	3,000 on a medium runner	30,000 credits, up to 5 users

Serverless functions

A serverless function is a small piece of backend code that runs only when something calls it. You pay per request and for the time it runs, instead of paying for a server all month.

Time is billed in one of two ways:

• GB-seconds: one gigabyte of memory running for one second. A function with 0.5 GB of memory that runs for 100 ms uses 0.05 GB-seconds.
• CPU time: processor time, measured in milliseconds or vCPU-seconds. A vCPU is a share of a processor core. Cloudflare Workers counts only the time your code uses the processor, not time spent waiting on other services. Cloud Run bills CPU for the whole time a request is being handled.

AWS Lambda

AWS Lambda includes 1 million requests and 400,000 GB-seconds free every month, on every account. After that, requests cost $0.20 per million and compute $0.0000166667 per GB-second on x86 in US East. Arm functions are cheaper per GB-second. Data transfer out is billed separately.

Cloudflare Workers

Cloudflare Workers Free allows 100,000 requests a day, shared with Pages Functions and reset at midnight UTC, with 10 ms of CPU time per request. Past the daily limit, requests stop until the next day.

Workers Paid is $5 a month and includes 10 million requests, then $0.30 per million. It also includes 30 million CPU milliseconds, then $0.02 per million. There is no charge for duration, data transfer or bandwidth.

Google Cloud Run

Google Cloud Run runs a container you provide and scales to zero when idle. With request-based billing, the first 2 million requests, 360,000 GiB-seconds of memory and 180,000 vCPU-seconds each month are free. After that, requests cost $0.40 per million, memory $0.0000025 per GiB-second and CPU $0.000024 per vCPU-second, in Tier 1 regions such as Iowa.

CPU costs about ten times as much per second as memory, so it is usually the larger part of a Cloud Run bill. The builder prices CPU using the "Function CPU (vCPU)" setting, 1 vCPU by default. It sits under Advanced, in "How usage is estimated". It assumes each instance handles one request at a time; if yours handles several at once, the real bill can be lower.

Compared

The builder assumes one function call per page view, 20 page views per user, 100 ms per call and 0.5 GB of memory.

Monthly users	Calls a month	Lambda	Workers	Cloud Run
1,000	20,000	$0	$0	$0
10,000	200,000	$0	$0	$0
100,000	2,000,000	$0.20	$5.00	$0.48

At 100,000 users, a busy day of about 133,000 calls is over the Workers Free limit of 100,000 a day, so the builder moves to Workers Paid. Lambda charges for the million calls above its free tier. Cloud Run's requests are still free, and it charges for the 20,000 vCPU-seconds above its free 180,000.

The builder does not include Workers CPU time beyond the $5 plan, Lambda data transfer or Cloud Run data transfer. If your functions do heavy work, CPU time matters more than the request count.

What to pick

• CI for a small team: GitHub Actions if your code is on GitHub. 2,000 free minutes on private repositories is over six times the builder's default of 300.
• CI with bigger runners or more minutes: CircleCI's 30,000 free credits, or GitLab if you run your own runners.
• Functions next to a static site: Cloudflare Workers. Free up to 100,000 requests a day, then a flat $5.
• Functions inside AWS: Lambda, with a large free tier.
• A whole container that sleeps when idle: Cloud Run. Watch CPU time.

Compare them in the stack builder, or browse CI/CD Pipelines and Serverless Compute.