GitLab Pricing 2026: Free, Premium $29 and Ultimate

GitLab costs $0 on Free, $29 per user a month on Premium, billed annually, and a custom quote on Ultimate. Free includes 400 compute minutes a month and caps private top-level groups at 5 users. Premium includes 10,000 compute minutes for the whole group, and Ultimate includes 50,000. Prices read on GitLab's pricing page on 19 October 2026.

The seat is the bill. A 10-developer team on Premium pays $3,480 a year before it runs a single extra minute, and the compute allowance does not grow with headcount: 10 seats and 100 seats draw on the same monthly pool, so every new hire raises the bill without adding a single CI minute. That makes GitLab a strong buy for teams that want source control, CI, security scanning and planning from one vendor, and an expensive one for teams that only need a place to run pipelines.

Toolradar data: Toolradar, the software directory we run, tracks 116 CI/CD tools as of 19 October 2026 in its CI/CD ranking, and the median cheapest paid plan among the 27 that publish a price is $20 a month. GitLab's entry seat sits above that median, and GitLab's Toolradar profile shows it listed as an alternative to 33 other tools.

GitLab plans at a glance

Self-managed GitLab uses the same tiers. Free and Premium carry the same prices when you host the instance yourself, and Ultimate is again quoted. The difference is that self-managed customers run their own runners and storage, so the compute and storage columns above stop mattering and your cloud or hardware bill replaces them.

Premium shows no monthly billing option on the pricing page. You commit to a year of seats, which is the first thing to settle with finance before you upgrade.

What counts as a GitLab user?

GitLab counts every person or machine with access to the software as a user, and every user in a top-level group is billed unless they fall under GitLab's non-billable rules. Machine accounts that need access are part of that count unless a non-billable rule covers them, so check automation accounts before you size the order.

Guests are the main exception, and it only fully applies on Ultimate, which lists unlimited guest users. On Premium, a stakeholder who only reads issues still takes a paid seat. Ultimate customers can also buy Enterprise Agile Planning at $15 per user a month, a lighter seat for product managers and other non-developers, though it does nothing for Premium shops.

The Free tier's 5-user cap applies only on GitLab.com, to a top-level group with private visibility. Public groups and self-managed Free instances are not held to it, so a public open-source project can grow its contributor list without a paid seat.

How do GitLab compute minutes work?

Compute minutes pay for CI jobs on GitLab-hosted runners. The allowance belongs to the top-level group, resets to zero on the first day of each month, and does not scale with seats. GitLab's compute minutes documentation applies a cost factor per runner type, so a minute of job time can consume up to 12 minutes of allowance.

Our arithmetic: extra minutes cost $10 per 1,000, so each allowance minute is worth one cent, and the last column multiplies that cent by the cost factor. Rounded down to whole job minutes.

Runner size is the hidden lever. A team that moves its builds from small to medium runners to cut wait time halves its effective allowance overnight. On Free the effect is sharper still: 400 minutes on a medium runner is 200 minutes of real job time, roughly ten 20-minute pipelines a month.

Self-hosted runners consume no compute minutes at all. For teams with steady CI load, a runner on a box from the best cheap VPS list or a machine from best VPS hosting for developers moves CI spend from GitLab's meter to a flat monthly server bill.

Public projects in GitLab's open-source program get a 0.5 cost factor, and public forks of those projects run at 0.008, so community pipelines barely touch the meter.

What does a real team pay on GitLab?

Devshot data: we built this table on 19 October 2026 from GitLab's published seat price, its pack price for 1,000 extra minutes and the runner cost factors above. Seats are users times the monthly seat times 12. Packs are bought in whole thousands to cover each month's overage and kept up for the year. Storage add-ons, promotional credits and taxes are excluded, and Ultimate is left out because it has no list price.

Two things stand out. First, minutes are a rounding error next to seats: even the 50-developer team running heavy medium-runner pipelines spends under 9% of its bill on extra compute. Second, the fixed group-wide pool means a large team runs out long before a small one, so the 25-developer row stays inside the allowance only because it keeps its jobs on small runners.

Purchased packs soften the overage math. GitLab's compute minutes purchase docs say bought minutes are used only after the monthly allowance runs out, roll over to the next month if unused, and are valid for 12 months from purchase. A team with lumpy release months can buy a larger block once rather than topping up every month.

Add-ons and other GitLab costs

• Compute minutes: $10 per 1,000 minutes, a one-time payment available on Free, Premium and Ultimate. Packs do not renew, so a team that runs out mid-month has to buy again by hand or run into GitLab's quota enforcement.
• Storage: $5 a month for 10 GiB, billed annually, for Premium and Ultimate. Free's 10 GiB is the ceiling that most often pushes teams with container images or LFS assets to upgrade.
• GitLab Credits: $1 per credit on demand. Credits pay for the AI features, and Free can reach AI only by buying them.
• Enterprise Agile Planning: $15 per user a month, Ultimate only, for planning seats that do not need a developer license.

GitLab Credits and the AI promo

Premium currently includes $12 of GitLab Credits per user a month and Ultimate includes $24. These are promotional, not part of the subscription. GitLab's promo terms say the offer started on 15 January 2026, runs for a limited time with an end date GitLab will announce with notice, and that the credits are non-transferable and expire when the promo ends.

For a 10-seat Premium team that is $120 of credits a month, a useful buffer for code suggestions and chat. Budget it as zero anyway: after the promo, continued use needs a committed credit pool or on-demand credits at the list rate. Teams weighing GitLab's AI against a separate assistant can compare it with GitHub Copilot pricing.

How GitLab compares on price

Prices read on 19 October 2026 on GitHub's pricing page and Bitbucket's pricing page. GitHub prints no renewal price after the first 12 months, so a multi-year comparison against GitLab cannot be made from its public page.

Our arithmetic: for 10 developers, a year of GitLab Premium is $3,480, against $480 for GitHub Team and $2,520 for GitHub Enterprise at their first-year prices. GitLab's case is not the seat. It is that Premium bundles a shared minute pool, merge approvals and advanced CI in the seat, and Ultimate adds security testing and compliance in the same platform.

For the full CI bill side by side, our CI/CD pricing comparison prices GitLab against GitHub Actions, CircleCI and Buildkite for the same team, and CircleCI pricing and GitHub Actions pricing break those meters down. The repository and workflow side is in GitHub vs GitLab, the verdict on the product itself is in the GitLab review, and the wider field is ranked in best CI/CD tools. Teams planning to self-manage can start from best self-hosting tools.

Pick GitLab Premium if your team wants one platform for code, CI and reviews, keeps most jobs on small runners, and can commit to a year of seats. Stay on Free if you are under 5 users or working in public. Look elsewhere if you only need hosted CI, since a per-seat price this high buys a lot of minutes on a pay-per-use runner.

How we checked

Plan prices, allowances, user rules and add-on prices come from GitLab's pricing page, runner cost factors from its compute minutes documentation, pack rollover and validity from its purchase documentation, and credit terms from its promo terms, all read on 19 October 2026 in US dollars. Annual totals, per-minute costs and pack counts are our arithmetic on those printed prices. Toolradar figures come from its CI/CD ranking. We recheck GitLab's pricing when it changes and update the date above.

Cite this: Devshot, "GitLab Pricing 2026: Free, Premium $29 and Ultimate", November 2026.

The daily Devshot brief tracks price changes across the dev tools you pay for, from CI minutes to AI credits. Subscribe at devshot.co.

FAQ

How much does GitLab cost in 2026?

GitLab Free costs $0, Premium costs $29 per user a month billed annually, and Ultimate is sold on a custom quote. Free includes 400 compute minutes a month, Premium 10,000 and Ultimate 50,000, shared by the whole top-level group. Extra minutes cost $10 per 1,000.

Is GitLab free?

Yes. GitLab Free costs nothing and needs no credit card, with 400 compute minutes a month and 10 GiB of storage. Private top-level groups on GitLab.com are limited to 5 users; public groups and self-managed Free instances are not.

Can you pay for GitLab Premium monthly?

GitLab's pricing page lists Premium only as billed annually, so a seat is a 12-month commitment. A 10-person team commits $3,480 for the year up front on GitLab.com.

How many CI minutes does GitLab Premium include?

Premium includes 10,000 compute minutes a month for the whole group, not per user. Larger runners consume them faster: a medium Linux runner uses 2 allowance minutes per job minute and a 2xlarge uses 12, so the allowance can shrink to 833 minutes of real job time.

Do GitLab compute minutes roll over?

The monthly allowance resets to zero on the first of each month and does not roll over. Minutes bought in packs do roll over, are used only after the allowance runs out, and are valid for 12 months from purchase.

How much does GitLab Ultimate cost?

GitLab does not publish a price for Ultimate; it is quoted by sales. The tier includes 50,000 compute minutes, unlimited guest users, application security testing and compliance features, plus a promotional $24 of GitLab Credits per user a month.

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