The availability of some of the GitHub features discussed in the previous unit depends on the product type. Other features, however, are "rate-based". A rate-based feature gives you a certain number of execution minutes or storage capacity, and then requires you to pay for additional usage.
In this unit, we'll look at a few different ways that GitHub licenses and prices certain rate-based features.
GitHub Actions is free for public repositories and self-hosted runners. For private repositories, each GitHub account receives a certain number of free minutes, depending on the product used with the account.
By default, your account will have a spending limit of $0, which prevents additional usage of minutes after you reach your limit. If you increase your spending limit above the default of $0, you will be billed for any minutes beyond the limits, also called overages. GitHub charges usage to the account that owns the repository where the workflow is run.
Jobs that run on GitHub hosted Windows and macOS runners consume minutes at 2 and 10 times the rate that jobs on Linux runners consume. For example, using 1,000 Windows minutes would consume 2,000 of the minutes included in your account. Using 1,000 macOS minutes, would consume 10,000 minutes included in your account.
The following table compares the minute multiplier for the different operating systems.
| Operating system | Minute multiplier |
|---|---|
| Linux | 1 |
| macOS | 10 |
| Windows | 2 |
Finally, the free minutes reset each month. You cannot "roll over" unused minutes from previous months.
If your account's usage surpasses these limits and you have set a spending limit above $0, you will pay per-minute usage based on the operating system used by the GitHub-hosted runner. GitHub rounds the minutes each job uses up to the nearest minute.
Note
For current prices, please refer to GitHub's pricing page.
Storage for GitHub Packages works in a similar way, except that GitHub Packages storage capacity does not reset every month.
The storage used by a repository is the total storage used by GitHub Actions artifacts and GitHub Packages. Your storage cost is the total usage for all repositories owned by your account.
GitHub calculates your storage usage for each month based on hourly usage during that month. For example, if you use 3 GB of storage for 10 days of March and 12 GB for 21 days of March, your storage usage would be:
3 GB x 10 days x (24 hours per day) = 720 GB-Hours 12 GB x 21 days x (24 hours per day) = 6,048 GB-Hours 720 GB-Hours + 6,048 GB-Hours = 6,768 GB-Hours 6,768 GB-Hours / (744 hours per month) = 9.0967 GB-Months
At the end of the month, GitHub rounds your storage to the nearest megabyte. Therefore, your storage usage for March would be 9.067 GB.
If your account's usage surpasses these limits and you have set a spending limit above $0, you incur an additional fee per gigabyte of storage used per month.
At the end of the month, GitHub calculates the cost of minutes and storage used over the amount included in your account.
Note
For a specific scenario that demonstrates how your bill is calculated with actual dollar amounts, see the following article in GitHub's Docs, titled "Calculating minute and storage spending".
By default, your account will have a spending limit of $0 for GitHub Actions usage. To enable using minutes and storage for private repositories beyond the amounts included with your account, you can increase the spending limit or allow unlimited spending.
If you pay for your enterprise account by invoice, you cannot manage the spending limit for your enterprise account on GitHub. If you want to allow organizations owned by your enterprise account to use GitHub Actions beyond the storage or data transfer included in their accounts, you can prepay for overages. Because overages must be prepaid, you cannot enable unlimited spending on accounts paid by invoice. Your spending limit will be 150% of the amount you prepaid.
If your account has outstanding unpaid charges:
- The storage or minutes included in your account for GitHub Actions and GitHub Packages will not reset until the payment has been successfully processed.
- For accounts with storage or minutes remaining for the current billing period, GitHub Actions and GitHub Packages will continue to be available until any included usage has been reached.
- For accounts that have reached the included usage for the current billing period for GitHub Actions or GitHub Packages, both GitHub Actions and GitHub Packages will be disabled to prevent any further overages. If you pay your account by invoice, you must contact our account management team to process payment and reset your usage.
As of this writing, Codespaces is beta and during this period it is free to use. When Codespaces becomes generally available, you will be billed for storage and compute usage.
Compute costs are incurred only when a codespace is active. When you're using a codespace, the codespace is active. After 30 minutes of inactivity, a codespace becomes suspended automatically.
Compute usage is billed per hour, at a rate that depends on your codespace's instance type. During the beta, Codespaces offers a single, Linux instance type. At general availability, GitHub will support three Linux instance types.
- Basic (2 cores, 4-GB RAM, 32 GB SSD)
- Standard (4 cores, 8-GB RAM, 32 GB SSD)
- Premium (8 cores, 16-GB RAM, 32 GB SSD)
Compute pricing may vary for additional instance types and operating systems supported in the future.
Each codespace also incurs monthly storage costs until you delete the codespace. Storage costs for all instance types incur a small additional fee per month per gigabyte of storage used.
The GitHub user interface makes it easy for you to find statistics of license usage for a specific organization, across organizations, enterprise accounts, or instances. Also, you can view details about your license usage for machine accounts and peripheral services.
Licenses for paid products are available to an organization on a per user basis. Each of these licenses is referred to as a seat. It is possible to set up a machine user: a GitHub account that is attached to an SSH key and used exclusively for automation. A machine user also consumes a license.
Organization or enterprise owners who are responsible for multiple accounts need easy access to those accounts. The GitHub user interface enables context switch, which is the flexibility to log in to more than one account and move between the accounts.
As an owner, you can click on your profile photo and choose the option to switch to a different account.
:::image type="content" source="../media/multiple-accounts.png" alt-text="Screenshot of multiple accounts dropdown menu.":::
Context switching demonstrates GitHub's capability to enable usage management across accounts.
An Organization owner seeking to manage and monitor the number of seats licensed to their organization can click on their profile photo and then navigate to Billing & plans.
As it is possible to have multiple organizations, the user interface requires the organization owner to select the organization for which they would like to view licensing.
:::image type="content" source="../media/select-org.png" alt-text="Screenshot of settings option.":::
After selecting their organization, they can view their current plan and choose to add to or remove seats from it.
:::image type="content" source="../media/remove-seats.png" alt-text="Screenshot of remove seats option.":::
Enterprise owners that manage multiple enterprises or enterprise instances can also easily view and manage licensing for one or more enterprises.
After clicking on their profile photo, the enterprise owner can select Your Enterprises from the drop-down menu. If the enterprise owner is responsible for multiple enterprises, GitHub lists the ones available. This listing shows GitHub's ability to accommodate license management across multiple enterprises.
In the same scenario, the enterprise owner continues by selecting an enterprise. The enterprise may have multiple licensed server instances. Next, the enterprise owner has the option to view and manage the number of seats for each of these server instances. Each of those instances has a set number of seats licensed. The owner can remove or add seats.
As you have learned, metered products are billed by the number of minutes or gigabytes consumed beyond the allotted, basic amount. GitHub Actions and GitHub Packages are examples of metered products. The GitHub user interface also enables you to monitor statistics for metered products.
The Billing & plans provides an overview of your current plans, up-to-date minute usage for GitHub Actions, and storage usage for GitHub Packages.
In addition to viewing data in the GitHub user interface, you can also have CSV reports sent to your email.
:::image type="content" source="../media/actions.png" alt-text="Screenshot of actions usage overview.":::
:::image type="content" source="../media/storage.png" alt-text="Screenshot of storage usage overview.":::
You can set limits that control your spending for actions and packages usage. Adjust the limit at any time and according to the growth of your operations.
The safety and control offered by this feature is also noteworthy. Enabled spending limits safeguard you in the event that a configuration error causes your organization to be billed. The billing is capped and the damage is kept to a minimum. This could be thought of as maximum risk.
When misconfiguration is not the case, a spending limit simply assists you in budgeting your IT expenses.
The GitHub user interface enables management of Git LFS (Large File Storage) Data providing feedback on the amount of storage and bandwidth used. Every account using Git Large File Storage receives 1 GB of free storage and 1 GB a month of free bandwidth. You pay when assets are pushed to or downloaded from your account.
:::image type="content" source="../media/lfs.png" alt-text="Screenshot of Git LFS usage overview.":::
Switching between settings for your different accounts
Managing your GitHub Enterprise license
Viewing your GitHub Actions usage