What Is a Build Minute?
A build minute (or CI minute) is the common billing unit for hosted CI, representing one minute of runner time spent executing a job. Larger or specialized runners often consume minutes at a multiplied rate. Total cost is roughly the sum of job durations times their per-minute rate across all runs.
Why it matters
Build minutes are where CI cost accumulates, so slow tests, redundant builds, and oversized runners all show up directly on the bill. Caching, parallelism, concurrency control, and right-sized or spot-backed runners are the main levers for reducing minute consumption.
Related concepts
- Larger runners often bill at a multiplier
- Caching and concurrency control reduce consumption
- Spot-backed runners lower the cost per minute
Related guides
What Is a Spot Instance?A spot instance is spare cloud capacity sold at a deep discount that the provider can reclaim with little not…
What Is a Build Cache?A build cache stores intermediate build outputs so unchanged work can be reused across runs instead of recomp…
What Is a Concurrency Group?A concurrency group is a named key that limits how many workflow runs sharing it can execute at once, cancell…