depmedic / calculator

How much are you wasting on GitHub Actions?

Plug in your numbers. The math uses standard GitHub-hosted runner pricing ($0.008/min ubuntu, $0.016/min windows, $0.08/min macos, free minutes excluded). The waste percentages come from auditing thousands of public workflows; your repo will be similar.

Ubuntu minutes / month

Windows minutes / month

macOS minutes / month

Free minutes (subtract)

What does your CI not have today?

No concurrency block Fast pushes run CI 2-4x for the same final state. No setup-* cache: Re-downloading deps on every run, 30-90s per job. No timeout-minutes Hung steps burn the default 6-hour ceiling. Matrix is wider than it needs to be Cross-OS or every Node version on every PR. fetch-depth: 0 on every checkout Full clone where shallow would do; 5-30s per job. Workflow runs on every push to every branch No path filter, no branch filter, no draft skip.

You are spending about

per month on GitHub Actions runner minutes.

Of that, you can recover roughly

0% of your bill, with the patterns the cookbook covers.

Get the patterns that move that number

The depmedic GHA cookbook has 30 paste-ready patterns and 5 hardened workflow templates that close exactly the leaks above. $19, one-time, MIT-licensed templates.

Get the cookbook

Free preview — first three patterns

1. Cancel superseded runs with concurrency

Without a concurrency block, a push-to-push-to-push streak runs CI three times for the same final state. On a busy repo with 50 pushes/day this is the single biggest leak.

concurrency:
  group: ${{ github.workflow }}-${{ github.ref }}
  cancel-in-progress: true

Catch: for deploy workflows use cancel-in-progress: false so an in-progress deploy finishes.

2. Use ubuntu-latest unless you genuinely need macOS or Windows

macos-latest runs 10x the cost. windows-latest 2x. A test job that "happens to be" on macOS doubles or worse the bill of every PR.

jobs:
  test:
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest   # not macos-latest unless you need xcodebuild

Catch: keep cross-platform tests, move them to a nightly schedule or workflow_dispatch.

3. Cache language tooling

Without cache:, setup-node/setup-python/setup-java re-download deps on every run. 30 to 90 seconds per job.

- uses: actions/setup-node@v4
  with:
    node-version: 20
    cache: npm

Catch: cache keys depend on lockfiles; set cache-dependency-path if non-standard.

27 more patterns + 5 hardened workflow templates

Concurrency for deploys, matrix collapsing, artifact retention, fetch-depth, path filters, draft-PR skip, sparse checkout, composite actions, reusable workflows, OIDC for AWS/GCP, dependency review, pinning, secret scanning, the lot.

Get the cookbook

Want a workflow-specific number?

This page estimates total monthly waste from category percentages. To price your actual workflow file, paste it into budget — matrix expansion, real per-runner pricing, monthly projection. To see what is wasteful and how to fix it, paste it into audit.

Or run all of this in CI

ci-doctor + gha-budget ship as CLIs:

npx ci-doctor             # audit
npx ci-doctor --fix       # auto-apply the safe ones
npx gha-budget            # price the workflow in dollars