Free CI runs 50 to 6,000 minutes a month: a startup’s DevOps bill starts at ₹0

01The free tiers differ 120-fold on build minutes

Source control is free everywhere that matters. Build minutes, the time your CI pipeline spends on the vendor’s machines, are where the free tiers part company. CircleCI’s free plan gives 30,000 credits a month, which it equates to up to 6,000 build minutes on a small Docker machine, for up to five active users.³ GitHub Free includes 2,000 Actions minutes a month.¹ Azure DevOps gives one Microsoft-hosted parallel job with 1,800 minutes a month and the first five users free.⁴ GitLab Free gives 400 compute minutes, with a cap of five users in a private group.² Bitbucket Free lists 50 build minutes “to get started”, for up to five users.⁵

Minutes matter more than the seat cap for a startup with a test suite. A ten-minute pipeline run twenty times a working day uses about 4,400 minutes a month: inside CircleCI’s free tier, more than double GitHub’s, eleven times GitLab’s. The same team on Bitbucket’s free tier would be paying for minutes in the first week. The fix is not always a different vendor. A self-hosted runner on a spare machine costs no platform minutes on GitHub, GitLab or Azure DevOps, and the TechBag developer-tools guide flags metered minutes as the line that “routinely exceeds the seat bill”.¹⁰

02Ten developers: US$30 to US$290 a month on list

The free tiers stop at five users on three of the five platforms, which is when a startup first pays. For ten developers on source control and CI, at list: GitHub Team is US$4 a user a month with 3,000 Actions minutes, so US$40.¹ Azure DevOps charges US$6 for each Basic user after the first five, so US$30, still with one hosted job.⁴ GitLab Premium is US$29 a user a month billed annually, so US$290, with 10,000 compute minutes.² CircleCI’s Performance plan starts at US$15 a month for five active users on top of whichever repository you use.³

The sevenfold gap is not a rip-off. GitLab sells the whole toolchain under one licence, planning, packages and, at Ultimate, the full scanning set, and TechBag’s guide notes that the one-platform case is strongest “when you use most of it”.¹⁰ A ten-person team using source control and CI alone is paying for planning and scanning it does not touch. The rest of a small stack has free floors too: HCP Terraform is free up to 500 managed resources, SonarQube Cloud is free up to 50,000 lines of code and five members, and Postman’s API client is free for one user, then US$19 a user a month on Team.¹⁰

Put the 2023 list’s ten categories against those bills and they collapse into three. Version control, CI/CD, test automation and infrastructure as code are now one platform line: the repository host and its minutes. Containers and the cloud are the second line, metered by the hour by whichever cloud you already use. Monitoring, alerting and performance monitoring, three of the original ten, are the third, and they are where a small team’s spend grows fastest: our infrastructure monitoring analysis found published prices of US$8 to US$29 a host a month.¹⁶ Collaboration, the fourth category in 2023, is now part of the office suite most startups already pay for, and is not a DevOps purchase at all.

03The open-source tools changed their terms

Most of the 2023 list was open source: Jenkins, Ansible, Chef, Puppet, Docker, Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, Git, Nagios, Zabbix and the ELK stack. Eight of the eleven ship under the same licence as then. Three changed. Zabbix moved from GPL version 2 to the stricter AGPL version 3 from release 7.0 onward.⁷ Elastic added AGPL as a licence option for Elasticsearch and Kibana in August 2024, three years after leaving open source, so the “E” and “K” of ELK are open source again.⁸ And Perforce said in November 2024 that new Puppet binaries would move to a private repository in early 2025, free for development use up to 25 nodes, with a commercial licence above that; the source code stays Apache 2.0.⁹

Terraform was not on the 2023 list by name, but it is the tool most startups would have picked for the infrastructure-as-code category the list described. HashiCorp moved future releases to the Business Source Licence on 10 August 2023, three months after that post, and IBM completed its US$6.4 billion purchase of HashiCorp on 27 February 2025.^{6 11} For a startup using these tools internally, none of the changes stops anything working. They matter if you host a modified copy as a service, which is what AGPL and BSL are written to catch, or if you run more than 25 Puppet nodes and had assumed the packages were free.