GitLab CI pricing 2026
./gitlab-ci --free --premium --ultimate
GitLab bundles source control, CI/CD, security scanning, and project management in one product. The CI/CD pricing reflects that: seat fees are higher than competitors, but every plan ships with included compute minutes and unlimited self-hosted runners. GitLab CI is most cost-effective when you would pay for the bundled Premium platform anyway, or when you self-host runners so shared-runner minutes never enter the bill.
How much does GitLab CI cost in 2026?
GitLab Free is $0 with 400 compute minutes per month. Premium is $29 per user per month and includes 10,000 compute minutes. Ultimate is a sales-quoted custom price with 50,000 included minutes. The catch most calculators miss: included minutes are a flat pool per top-level group (namespace), not per user, so a 5-person and a 50-person team on Premium both start from the same 10,000 minutes. Once you exhaust the pool on GitLab-hosted shared runners, extra compute costs $10 per 1,000 minutes ($0.01 per Linux minute). Self-hosted runners consume zero minutes on any plan, including Free.
Sourced from the public GitLab pricing page, re-verified July 2026.
Plan structure / 2026
| Plan | Seat | CI mins / group / month | Self-hosted runners | Highlights |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 400 | unlimited | 5 users / namespace |
| Premium | $29 / user | 10,000 | unlimited | Approvals, protected envs |
| Ultimate | Custom quote | 50,000 | unlimited | Security scanning, compliance |
# additional minutes: $10 per 1,000 (=$0.01/min) on any paid plan
Cost at typical team sizes
Examples assume Premium plan, Linux shared runners, and 21 working days. The included pool is a flat 10,000 minutes per group regardless of headcount, so it does not scale with the team. Beyond it, compute is billed at $0.01 per minute ($10 per 1,000).
| Team size | Builds / day | Build mins | Mins / month | Included | Total / month |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5 devs | 30 | 6 | 3,780 | 10,000 | $145 |
| 20 devs | 120 | 8 | 20,160 | 10,000 | $682 |
| 50 devs | 350 | 10 | 73,500 | 10,000 | $2,085 |
| 200 devs | 1,500 | 12 | 378,000 | 10,000 | $9,480 |
# Only the 5-dev row stays inside the flat 10,000-minute pool. Above it, Total = seats + overage: e.g. 50 devs = $1,450 seats + 63,500 overage min × $0.01 = $635, so $2,085. Self-host the runners and the overage disappears.
Shared vs dedicated runners
GitLab supports three runner types. Shared runners are GitLab-hosted, on by default, billed per CI minute. They're elastic but you don't control the fleet. Group runners live on your infrastructure but are scoped to a GitLab group, useful for teams that want their own pool without per-project setup. Project runners are dedicated to a single project, the simplest self-hosted setup.
Self-hosted runners (group or project) consume zero CI minutes from your allowance. The trade-off is that you own scaling, OS updates, security patches, and runner registration tokens. For predictable workloads this trade is worth it. For bursty PR check traffic, shared runners win.
Tips to keep the bill down
- > Use needs: between jobs to drop unnecessary stages and parallelise the DAG.
- > Set rules: with changes: filters so backend jobs don't run on frontend-only commits.
- > Use cache:fallback_keys to keep partial cache hits when a key changes.
- > Self-host the long tail: nightly integration runs, big monorepo builds, anything that exceeds 30 minutes.
- > Check Compute usage on the namespace settings page weekly. Catch runaway loops before they cost real money.
Compare with other platforms
Frequently Asked Questions
# click any question to expand