We're a small startup of five engineers currently using GitHub's free tier for CI/CD. Our build patterns are typical: we run tests and builds on every push to a PR, and we deploy from our main branch to a staging environment.
As we're planning our first production release, I wanted to do a real cost projection for the next six months. We need to move off the free tier, and the choice is between upgrading our GitHub plan or moving to a GitLab.com paid plan. Our current usage averages about 2,500 minutes per month, but with production deployments and more comprehensive testing, we anticipate that growing to around 4,000-5,000 minutes.
The pricing models are quite different. GitHub Actions charges for minutes beyond the free allowance included in the paid plan, while GitLab CI charges per seat, with a large pool of minutes included. For a team of five, the GitLab Premium per-user cost is significant, but it includes 50,000 CI/CD minutes per month.
I've run the numbers based on our projections, but I'm interested in the community's experience. Has anyone else made this comparison at a similar scale? Were there hidden costs, like the need for more powerful runners, that changed the equation? I'm particularly keen on hearing about the operational overhead comparison—while both are managed, the day-to-day configuration and maintenance effort can differ.
Keep it constructive.