Short answer
It matters most for short jobs. GitHub rounds each job up to a whole minute, so a 30-second job is billed as one minute: $0.006 on GitHub-hosted 2-core against $0.001 at $0.002 a minute billed per second. On the median jobs in CI Bench v1 the rounding added between 1% and 161% to the billed time of GitHub-hosted jobs, most on the shortest. Providers differ: per second (Vitko Runners, Depot, CRACI), per minute (GitHub-hosted, Blacksmith, WarpBuild, Ubicloud, Sengi), and Namespace rounds usage down to the nearest 15 seconds after a one-minute minimum. Maintained by Vitko, Inc., which sells one of the products measured.
Rounding on GitHub-hosted, median jobs of CI Bench v1
| Workload | Median job time | Billed minutes | Extra billed time from rounding |
|---|---|---|---|
| cli | 368 s | 7 min | 14% |
| codex-lint | 884 s | 15 min | 2% |
| container | 239 s | 4 min | 1% |
| fd | 92 s | 2 min | 31% |
| flask | 23 s | 1 min | 161% |
| guava | 1167 s | 20 min | 3% |
| monorepo | 384 s | 7 min | 9% |
| pydantic | 179 s | 3 min | 1% |
| ts | 784 s | 14 min | 7% |
| vite | 603 s | 11 min | 9% |
| vue | 121 s | 3 min | 49% |
Each provider's published rule
| Provider | Billing rule | Source |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub-hosted | Per minute; each job rounded up to a whole minute | GitHub Docs, read 2026-10-27 |
| Vitko Runners | Per second, no per-job minimum | Vitko Runners pricing, read 2026-10-27 |
| Depot | Per second | Depot docs, read 2026-10-27 |
| CRACI | Metered per second | CRACI pricing, read 2026-10-27 |
| Blacksmith | Per minute; rounding not stated on the pricing page | Blacksmith pricing, read 2026-10-27 |
| WarpBuild | Per minute | WarpBuild pricing, read 2026-10-27 |
| Ubicloud | Per minute, billed monthly | Ubicloud pricing, read 2026-10-27 |
| Sengi | Per minute of each job | Sengi, read 2026-10-27 |
| Namespace | Minimum 1 minute, then rounded down to the nearest 15 seconds (its FAQ) | Namespace pricing, read 2026-10-27 |
Rounding is computed from the median job time of GitHub-hosted (ubuntu-latest) in CI Bench v1; your jobs will differ. List price per minute is not cost per job; faster runners finish sooner.
More: all questions answered · 12 options compared · ranked by speed · ranked by cost per job · calculator.
Provider pages may have changed since 2026-10-27; they are the authority. Method: how the runs were made; data: results.json; every raw record: the repository. Maintained by Vitko, Inc., which sells one of the products measured. Page dated October 29, 2026.