What are credits?
Credits are the currency of CircleCI. Credits are purchased up-front and are used to pay for CircleCI platform usage in real time. Platform usage consists of:
Monthly active users - By using credits to pay for monthly active users, your organization is never restricted to a static number of active users each month.
Compute time - Each resource type on CircleCI has an associated credit/minute price. Your credits are used in real time whenever your organization is actively using a compute resource on CircleCI.
Add-on features - Some features of CircleCI have additional credit costs associated with them. These costs may be represented in credits per use or in credits per minute.
Additional network & storage use - network and storage utilization beyond the plan-specified thresholds is charged at 420 credits/GB.
How do I buy credits?
Credits are purchased in blocks of 25,000. At the beginning of each billing month (based on your purchase date), you are charged for your credit package and those credits are added to your account. When only 2% of your credits remain anytime within your billing month, credits automatically refill to a level of 25% of your total credit package, with a minimum refill amount of 25,000.
For example,
• If your monthly package size is 25,000 credits, you will automatically be refilled 25,000 credits when you reach 500 remaining credits.
• If your monthly package size is 200,000 credits, you will automatically be refilled 50,000 credits when you reach 4,000.
Do credits expire?
Credits on the free plan expire after a month and do not roll over.
The Performance plan includes the 30,000 credits available to the Free plan; these expire and do not roll over month to month.
Performance plan users may purchase additional credits at $15 for every 25,000 credits. Any paid credits roll over month to month, and expire after a year.
Unused credits will be forfeited if the account subscription is canceled.
How do CircleCI credits translate to build minutes?
Example: 30,000 credits at a rate of 10 credits per min (using Linux Medium) is 3,000 minutes.
It’s important to note that a minute on CircleCI is different than a minute on other CI platforms. Access to more powerful resources, Docker Layer Caching, as well as concurrency and parallelism mean you can do more in a minute on CircleCI than anywhere else.
What are concurrent job runs?
Concurrent job runs refers to the number of jobs that can run simultaneously without queueing. You pay for compute based on the total amount of time you use compute resources, not the number of resources that you have access to. This means you can choose the right plan for your team to maximize concurrent jobs and parallelism for your jobs to minimize queuing.
For example, say you have a workflow with 10 jobs that each take 5 minutes to run. If you are limited to 1x concurrency, each of these jobs runs subsequently, and the workflow completes in 50 minutes. With scaling concurrency, you can run all 10 jobs concurrently (at the same time), and the workflow completes in 5 minutes. In both cases, your total usage time is 50 minutes since you used 10 machines for 5 minutes each. With usage-based pricing, that means you pay the same amount either way, but if you maximize your concurrency, you save 45 minutes of time waiting for your workflow to complete.
What if I am building open-source?
CircleCI offers free access to compute time and resources for organizations on our Free plan. Open source projects can access up to 400,000 credits per month (equivalent to 40,000 build minutes) to use on Linux, and 25,000 credits per month (equivalent to 500 build minutes) for macOS. Request free access to macOS by contacting billing@circleci.com.
Open source Windows builds or private repositories can use the 30,000 credits offered in our free plan.
If you are building a bigger open source project and would like the flexibility of our new plans,
let us know
how we can help you!
How is network egress measured?
Network egress is triggered by:
• Restoring caches and workspaces to self-hosted runners
• Downloading artifacts
• Job steps that push data outside of CircleCI
Any egress triggered by our cloud executors is not passed on to the customer. We only pass on the egress that is generated through customer-controlled actions.
Learn more about how to calculate and adjust network usage.
How is storage measured?
Activities that utilize storage include saving caches and workspaces in jobs, uploading test results, and building artifacts.
Learn more about how to calculate and adjust storage usage.
Can I use additional network and/or storage?
Yes, both network and storage beyond the monthly thresholds are charged at 420 credits/GB ($0.252/GB).
How is Docker Layer Caching (DLC) charged?
Docker layer caching uses 200 credits per job run in a pipeline (equivalent to $0.12/job run). For example, if your configuration specifies a workflow with three parallel Docker build jobs, you will be charged 600 credits each time these jobs are run in addition to the compute credits/minute usage.
How do I pay?
An admin for your CircleCI account, can pay by logging into the CircleCI application and going to Settings → Plan Overview. From there, you can sign up for a paid plan via credit card. If you are on a paid plan, updates to payment can be made in the billing portal, and also in the applications Plan Overview page.
Billing by invoice is available on annual contracts.
Why does CircleCI have per-active-user pricing?
Credit usage covers access to compute. We prefer to keep usage costs as low as possible to encourage frequent job runs, which is the foundation of a good CI practice. Per-active-user fees cover access to platform features and job orchestration. This includes features like dependency caching, artifact caching, and workspaces, all of which speed up build times without incurring additional compute cost. Our per-active-user charge also allows us to provide support to all customers and deliver additional features like insights and orbs.
Anyone who triggers a build on CircleCI is an active user, regardless of whether they have a CircleCI account. If a user without a CircleCI triggers a build, for example via a pull request on a repo, they are counted as an active user.
