CircleCI
Hosted CI/CD billed in credits; a free monthly credit allowance, then credit packs consumed per minute by resource class.
- Headquarters
- 🇺🇸 United States
- Parent jurisdiction
- 🇺🇸 United States
- EU self-serve plan
- No / not documented
- GDPR DPA
- Yes
- Billing
- payg
- Free tier
- 30,000 credits/month (3,000 min on Linux medium), up to 5 active users.
- Open source
- No
- Website
- circleci.com
- Source last checked
- 2026-10-06
- Pricing evidence
- Published rates
Pricing
Calculated from the listed vendor rates; exclusions still apply. How to read these estimates.
| Plan | Base fee / month | Build minute |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $0.006 |
| Performance | $15 | $0.006 |
Allowances, plan limits & calculation details
Rates are shown at their recorded precision. A zero means no charge in this calculation; the vendor may charge for things we leave out. See the notes for usage assumptions and currency conversions.
Free
- Base fee / month
- $0
- Included build minutes / month
- 3,000
- Build minute
- $0.006
- Modeled plan limits
- ≤ 3,000 linux build minutes / month
Performance
- Base fee / month
- $15
- Included build minutes / month
- 5,500
- Build minute
- $0.006
Linux Docker medium (2 vCPU, 4 GB) and Linux VM medium (2 vCPU, 7.5 GB) both cost 10 credits/min (circleci.com/pricing/price-list/). Credits are $15 per 25,000 ($0.0006/credit), so $0.006/min. Free: 30,000 credits/month, no credit purchases. Performance: from $15/month (one 25,000-credit pack) plus the same 30,000 free credits, so 5,500 Linux-medium minutes before further packs; credits auto-refill in 25,000-credit blocks. Five active users included, then $15/user/month (25,000 credits). Storage and network egress cost 420 credits/GB. Scale plan is annual and quote-based.
What companies report paying
What other customers have paid for CircleCI, with sources. Their usage, features and discounts may differ from yours; these are not quotes.
- $67,680/yr · Vendr marketplace benchmark; median across 281 purchases; range $16,788-$241,255; buyers saved 11% on average
“Median buyer pays $67,680 per year Based on data from 281 purchases, with buyers saving 11% on average. Median: $67,680 $16,788 $241,255 Low High”
Vendr purchase data, Oct 2026 - $2,300/yr · Small bootstrapped hardware business; line item in the founder's 2023 annual SaaS/cloud expense breakdown (from 'My sixth year as a bootstrapped founder'); no usage stated
“Here are the next top five: CircleCI: $2.3k Plane (contractor management): $1k”
Hacker News, Feb 2024 - $2,400/yr · Widely-used open-source project; annualized from $200/month; later offered a metered plan at $300/month; moved to GitHub Actions
“We used to pay CircleCI $200/month to run CI on a widely-used open-source project”
Hacker News, Dec 2022
Managed alternatives
At 50,000 Linux build minutes / month. Adjust usage and requirements.
CircleCI: $3,384/yr estimated.
- Ubicloud (GitHub Actions runners): $720/yr estimated · $2,664/yr bill differencePublished rates
- Namespace: $1,200/yr estimated · $2,184/yr bill differenceEstimated ratesDeveloper uses the overage rate because a separate pay-as-you-go rate is not published. Memory-heavy runners cost more.
- Blacksmith: $2,256/yr estimated · $1,128/yr bill differencePublished rates
- WarpBuild: $2,400/yr estimated · $984/yr bill differencePublished rates
- GitHub Actions (hosted runners): $2,520/yr estimated · $864/yr bill differenceModeled ratesAssumes ten platform seats. Existing seats are not an incremental runner cost; included minutes depend on the plan.
No cheaper managed estimate matches your filters. Adjust your usage or compare with your actual contract bill.
The price difference leaves out migration costs, operating costs and any features you’d need to replace.
Self-hosted options
Operating cost is not estimated. These options are not counted as savings against managed services.
Compare CircleCI
Found a wrong rate or plan restriction? Report a correction with a current source.