Everything you need to know about build minutes in Bitbucket Pipelines

Compared to on-premise alternatives, cloud-based CI/CD tools eliminate the cost of acquiring, maintaining, and updating infrastructure and the dedicated teams needed to look after them. There are different ways cloud vendors charge for usage of their CI/CD tool, and it's wise to understand what costs might look like for your team.

Pipelines pricing is based off a simple, consumption-based model of build minutes used, and every Bitbucket plan includes build minutes. Unlike other cloud vendors we don't charge for concurrency, meaning you don't pay extra to follow CI/CD best practices and run your pipelines steps as fast as you can.

What are build minutes and how do they work?

Build minutes are minutes executing a pipeline on a runner, excluding time acquiring a runner. They’re the minutes when your pipeline status is “In progress”.

Each Bitbucket plan comes with a set number of monthly build minutes:

Plan typeBuild minutes per month
Free50 minutes
Standard2500 minutes
Premium3500 minutes

Tips for managing build minutes usage

Here are a few best practices that can help keep your build minutes usage in check:

  • You can check your team or account’s monthly minutes usage at any time by going to Avatar > Bitbucket settings > Plan details.
  • Accidentally triggering build pipelines can quickly use up your build minutes. To prevent this, we don't run any pipelines for pushes that involve more than five tags, bookmarks, or branches.

Adding minutes for more flexible usage

On average, we see small teams with fast builds using about 200 to 600 minutes a month on Pipelines.

If your team is growing in its usage or has surpassed your monthly limits, there are two ways to increase your minutes:

  1. Upgrade to Standard for 2500 build minutes a month, or Premium for 3,500 build minutes a month.
  2. You can buy build packs which add an additional 1,000 build minutes in $10 increments.

Once you store your credit card on file, whenever you run over your plan's included build minutes and file storage, we will automatically charge you $10 for every 1,000 build minutes.*

*If you’re on the Free plan, we’ll only add additional minutes or storage if you’ve specified that you want to pay for additions.


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