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
- cardcard required, phone required
- 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
- documented13 sources; a first-party page was read and the sentence quoted
- Freshness
- stale on 2026-12-04checked 2026-11-03 (live); stale on 2026-12-04
| 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 | card an email address registers the account; the pricing FAQ requires credit/debit card details to run jobs on GitLab.com shared runners on Free, checked by a one-dollar authorization that is not charged; the identity-verification page makes the card conditional on a risk score (email verification for all users, a phone number for medium-risk users, a credit card for high-risk users) and the CI documentation names the same score with email, phone number or payment method; whether a new Free account is asked for a card before its first hosted-runner job is unverified: behind a sign-up, because the risk score is not published; a namespace that brings its own runner or disables shared runners needs no card |
| 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 | 3 hours per job on GitLab.com hosted runners, regardless of the timeout configured in a project; the monthly pool and the cost factor bind first |
| 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 13
| 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 |
| 2026-10-30 | about.gitlab.com/pricing/ | the pricing FAQ requires card details to run jobs on GitLab.com shared runners |
| 2026-10-30 | about.gitlab.com/pricing/ | the card is checked with a one-dollar authorization |
| 2026-10-30 | docs.gitlab.com/ci/runners/hosted_runners/ | a job on GitLab.com hosted runners is capped at 3 hours |
| 2026-10-30 | docs.gitlab.com/ci/pipelines/compute_minutes/ | a GitLab.com Free namespace gets 400 compute minutes a month on instance runners |
| 2026-10-30 | docs.gitlab.com/ci/debugging/ | on GitLab.com Free the identity check before hosted-runner jobs follows a risk score: email, phone or payment method |
| 2026-10-30 | docs.gitlab.com/ci/pipelines/compute_minutes/ | the default small Linux runner has cost factor 1 |
| 2026-10-30 | docs.gitlab.com/ci/pipelines/instance_runner_compute_minutes | running jobs continue until the namespace is 1,000 compute minutes over quota |
| 2026-10-30 | about.gitlab.com/pricing/ | the Free plan allows 5 users per top-level group |
| 2026-10-30 | docs.gitlab.com/user/gitlab_com/ | GitLab.com keeps job artifacts 30 days unless the job sets another expiry |
| 2026-11-02 | docs.gitlab.com/security/identity_verification/ | identity verification has up to three stages that depend on a risk score (email, phone number, credit card) |
| 2026-11-02 | about.gitlab.com/pricing/ | the pricing FAQ requires card details for GitLab.com shared runners |
Unknown values 1
- reliability note: nothing of this kind was observed