GitLab CI on GitLab.com Free
- Free allowance
- 400 compute minutes a month per namespace; 5 users per top-level group; 10 GiB of repository storage
- Verdict
- caveatusable, with a named limit or an unprobed read path
- Cost
- free tier
- Identity
- emailno card, no phone
- Binding limit
- request-rate400 compute minutes a month on Free; a job consumes duration divided by 60 times the cost factor; cost factor 1 for small Linux, 2 for medium, 3 for large, 6 for xlarge, 12 for 2xlarge, 6 for macOS M1
- Evidence
- documented2 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-11-23checked 2026-10-23 (live); stale on 2026-11-23
| Free tier | 400 compute minutes a month per namespace; 5 users per top-level group; 10 GiB of repository storage unit minutes; metered on wall-clock |
|---|---|
| Price | none stated |
| Limits |
a 1,000-minute grace period exists before jobs are dropped when the quota is exceeded; the 300,000-minute cap applies only to the community-contribution programme |
| Identity | email email signup; identity verification is required for some namespaces |
| Egress | the container registry is excluded from the namespace storage quota; storage beyond the purchased amount is billed free allowance: 10 GiB per namespace |
| Per-object cap | no published per-job cap on the small Linux runner; the binding limit is the monthly pool and the cost factor |
| Retention | artifacts expire per job configuration, default 30 days; compute minutes reset on the first of the month (30 days) |
| Interface | git, cli a .gitlab-ci.yml pipeline; instance runners on GitLab.com; self-managed runners are free of the vendor cap |
| Tooling | the runner images; any shell; docker-in-docker on the Linux runners |
| Composes with | the only free pool here with a cost-factor discount that makes open-source work cheaper: 0.5 for a GitLab-for-Open-Source project and 0.008 for a public fork of one |
| Reliability | no reliability event recorded |
| Notes | 400 minutes is 6.7 hours, and a medium runner halves that. The open-source discount is the interesting part and it needs the project to be accepted into the programme, which is a review. |
| Evidence note | documented the compute-minutes doc and the storage-quota doc were read. |
| Parsed numbers |
|
Evidence 2
| date | source | what it proved |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-22 | docs.gitlab.com/ci/pipelines/compute_minutes/ | 'Free tier namespaces receive 400 compute minutes per month'; cost factors small 1, medium 2, large 3, xlarge 6, 2xlarge 12; public projects in GitLab for Open Source 0.5 and public forks 0.008; usage resets on the first day of the month |
| 2026-10-22 | docs.gitlab.com/user/storage_usage_quotas/ | the container registry is excluded from the namespace repository quota |
Unknown values 1
$.reliability_notenothing of this kind was observed