Depot pricing in 2026
./depot --per-second --runners --sandboxes
Depot has no perpetual free tier. Paid plans start at $20/month (Developer, 1 user) and $200/month (Startup, unlimited users), each with included minute allowances across three products. On top of the plan fee, compute is metered per second: Depot-managed GitHub Actions runners at $0.004/min (2-vCPU Linux), Depot CI sandboxes from $0.006/min (2-vCPU), and container builds at $0.04/min. The runner rate undercuts GitHub-hosted's post-January-2026 $0.006/min by about a third.
Depot is a build-acceleration company that started with remote Docker container builds and has grown into a full CI/CD stack: managed GitHub Actions runners, a standalone CI product (Depot CI), and the original container-build service, all sharing a persistent distributed cache. The pitch is speed through caching and cheaper, per-second compute, rather than a new pipeline syntax to learn. This page works through what Depot actually costs in 2026, how the three metered products price differently, and where it beats or loses to running the same pipeline on GitHub-hosted runners.
Pricing here comes from the public Depot pricing page and Depot CI documentation, verified July 2026 (Developer $20/mo, Startup $200/mo; GitHub Actions runners $0.004/min, Depot CI $0.00005/vCPU-second, container builds $0.04/min). Check the live page before committing, as per-second rates and plan allowances change.
The plans and what each includes
Every plan bundles a monthly allowance across all three products; the flat fee buys the seats, the cache and the included minutes, and you meter above the allowance per second.
| Plan | Price | Users | Docker build min | GA runner min | Depot CI min | Cache |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Developer | $20 / mo | 1 | 500 | 2,000 | 2,000 | 25 GB |
| Startup | $200 / mo | Unlimited | 5,000 | 20,000 | 20,000 | 250 GB |
| Business | Custom | Unlimited | Custom | Custom | Custom | Custom |
# Allowances are per account per month and shared across the org. Minutes above the allowance are metered per second at the rates below. Source: depot.dev/pricing, verified July 2026.
Three products, three meters
The single most common Depot billing surprise is treating it as one meter. It is three, and they price differently. What you pay depends entirely on which product carries your workload.
| Product | Overage rate | What it runs |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub Actions runners | $0.004 / min | Your existing Actions YAML, on Depot compute |
| Depot CI | $0.00005 / vCPU-sec | Sandbox pipelines, 2 to 64 vCPU |
| Container builds | $0.04 / min | Remote Docker builds on managed BuildKit |
| Cache storage | $0.20 / GB-mo | Shared distributed build cache |
# Depot CI meters per vCPU-second: a base 2-vCPU sandbox is $0.0001/sec, i.e. $0.006/min; a 4-vCPU sandbox is $0.012/min, and so on. Everything is billed per second with no one-minute minimum. Source: depot.dev/pricing and Depot CI docs, verified July 2026.
What it actually costs per month
These are planning anchors, not quotes. Depot's value only shows up once you split your workload across the three meters honestly: a team that runs everything through the managed GitHub Actions runners prices very differently from one that leans on Depot CI sandboxes or container builds. Model your real minute split before you switch.
Depot versus GitHub-hosted runners
The clean comparison is the managed GitHub Actions runners, because they run the exact same workflow YAML. Depot bills a 2-vCPU Linux runner at $0.004 per minute against GitHub-hosted's $0.006 per minute since the January 2026 rate cut, and Depot bills per second rather than rounding every job up to the next whole minute. On raw rate that is roughly a third cheaper before you count the caching speed-up.
The catch is the plan fee. GitHub Actions gives you 2,000 free private-repo minutes and bills overage with no separate platform subscription; Depot charges $20 or $200 a month before the first metered minute. For a team whose usage fits inside GitHub's included minutes, GitHub is simply cheaper. The crossover comes when you are paying real Actions overage every month: at that point Depot's lower per-minute rate, per-second billing and warm cache usually win, and the faster wall-clock builds save engineer time that never shows up on either invoice. For a broader view of the alternatives, see self-hosted versus cloud CI and the full GitHub Actions pricing breakdown.
When Depot is the right pick, and when it is not
Depot fits teams that already feel their CI bill or their build times and want a drop-in fix rather than a migration. Because the managed runners keep your GitHub Actions YAML unchanged and the container-build service is a one-line swap for docker build, adoption is low-risk: you can move a single repo, measure the speed-up and the cost, and roll back trivially. Container-heavy monorepos with slow Docker builds and cache-cold pipelines are where the shared distributed cache earns its keep most visibly.
It is a weaker fit for teams whose usage genuinely fits inside a free tier, for macOS-heavy mobile pipelines (Depot's strength is Linux compute and Docker; iOS teams still look at Bitrise or self-hosted Macs), and for organisations that want a single-vendor CI stack rather than a compute layer bolted onto GitHub. There is also no perpetual free plan, so open-source projects that lean on GitHub Actions' unlimited public-repo minutes have less reason to switch.
Related platforms and comparisons
Frequently Asked Questions
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