May 26, 2026 (today)
Written by Temps Team
Last updated May 26, 2026 (today)
Most small teams spend $0–$50/month on continuous deployment in 2026. GitHub Actions covers 2,000 minutes/month free for private repos (unlimited for public); Netlify Pro adds $19/seat; Vercel Pro runs $20/seat; Render starts at $7/month; self-hosted Temps runs ~$8/month. A 5-engineer team on GitHub Actions plus a managed platform pays $100–$200/month.
TL;DR: CD costs for small teams in 2026 break into two layers — CI runner costs (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI) and deployment platform costs. Most 5-engineer teams spend $0–$40/month on runners and $0–$100/month on the platform, totaling $100–$200/month. Vercel Pro ($20/seat) and Netlify Pro ($19/seat) dominate the managed tier. Self-hosting with Temps cuts platform costs to ~$8/month but adds server management overhead. Full breakdown by team size below.
Continuous deployment costs get conflated because there are two separate billing layers:
Most pricing comparisons only show the platform layer. But for a 5-engineer team pushing to main 20 times a day, runner minutes become the dominant cost line — especially if your build takes more than a few minutes. Understanding both layers is the only way to calculate your actual CD spend.
| Platform | Free Tier | Paid Rate |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub Actions | 2,000 min/month (private); unlimited (public) | $0.008/min (Linux) |
| GitLab CI | 400 min/month | $10/month (2K min) |
| Bitbucket Pipelines | 50 min/month | $10/month (1K min) |
| CircleCI | 6,000 min/month | $15/month (25K min) |
GitHub Actions is the default for most small teams because public repositories get unlimited free minutes and private repositories get 2,000 free Linux minutes per month — enough for approximately:
A 5-engineer team pushing 3–5 times daily per engineer — 15–25 pushes/day total — typically exceeds the free tier and pays $0.008/minute for Linux runners. That works out to roughly $15–$40/month for an active repository.
Teams doing preview deployments per PR burn minutes faster: every PR gets its own build, and reviewers requesting changes trigger additional builds. Ten active PRs rebuilt twice daily at 5 minutes each add 3,000 minutes/month before your main branch builds even run.
Related: How to set up preview environments for every pull request
Scenario: a 5-engineer team running a Next.js application with ~50K monthly active users, 100–500GB bandwidth/month, and preview deployments per PR.
| Platform | Monthly Cost | Included | Missing |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vercel Pro | $100 (5 × $20) | Edge CDN, preview deploys, 1TB bandwidth | Analytics, error tracking, session replay (add-ons extra) |
| Netlify Pro | $95 (5 × $19) | CDN, serverless functions, 1TB bandwidth | Analytics, monitoring (external tools needed) |
| Render | $7–$35 | Web services, databases, cron jobs | Limited preview env support, per-service pricing |
| Temps (self-hosted) | ~$8 (VPS) | Deployments, analytics, error tracking, session replay, monitoring | Server management overhead |
| Coolify (self-hosted) | ~$8 (VPS) | Deployments, 280+ app templates | No built-in analytics, error tracking, or monitoring |
Vercel at $20/seat/month is the most expensive managed option per engineer but the easiest for Next.js teams specifically. Build pipelines, preview deployments, and global CDN are zero-config. The per-seat pricing adds up linearly with no volume discount — 5 engineers is $100/month, 10 engineers is $200/month, before any usage.
The cost gap over Netlify ($1/seat/month) is minor. The larger issue is add-on pricing: Speed Insights ($10/project/month), Web Analytics ($0.00003/event), and error tracking each require separate services — or a separate invoice.
Netlify Pro at $19/seat/month is comparable to Vercel for most use cases. The $55/100GB bandwidth overage (after 1TB) is identical in cost to Vercel's $0.15/GB rate, so bandwidth-heavy applications pay similarly on either platform.
Netlify handles React, Astro, Gatsby, Hugo, and SvelteKit more naturally than Vercel, which optimizes specifically for Next.js. If your stack isn't tightly coupled to Next.js, Netlify's framework-agnostic approach can be an advantage.
Related: Netlify pricing 2026: $55/100GB overage and hidden costs explained
Render breaks from the per-seat model. A Node.js web service starts at $7/month, background workers at $7/month each, and managed PostgreSQL at $19/month for the smallest persistent tier (a free ephemeral database is available but doesn't persist data between deploys). A 5-engineer team running one web service, one database, and two workers pays $40/month — still significantly less than $95–$100 on Vercel or Netlify.
The tradeoff: Render's preview environments require more manual configuration, and there's no native Next.js edge optimization comparable to Vercel.
Temps runs on a VPS you provision — Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Vultr, or any cloud provider. A Hetzner CAX21 (ARM, 4 vCPU, 8GB RAM, 20TB bandwidth) at EUR 7.49/month (~$8) handles a typical small-team workload.
What Temps includes at no extra cost: analytics, error tracking, session replay, uptime monitoring, and SSL — tools that cost $200–$400/month separately on managed platforms. The tradeoff is taking on server management (~2–4 hours/month).
Related: How to cut your Vercel bill by 80%: self-hosting cost breakdown
Related: How much does Vercel cost in 2026? Real numbers at 10K, 100K, and 1M MAU
| Component | Cost |
|---|---|
| GitHub Actions | Free (2K min/month) |
| Vercel Pro (1 seat) | $20 (or $0 on Hobby for non-commercial) |
| Total | $0–$20/month |
Vercel Hobby is non-commercial only. Any revenue-generating project requires Pro ($20/month minimum). Self-hosted alternative: $8/month VPS covers a solo developer's full CD needs including analytics and monitoring.
| Component | Cost |
|---|---|
| GitHub Actions | Free |
| Vercel Pro (2 seats) | $40 |
| Total | ~$40/month |
| Component | Cost |
|---|---|
| GitHub Actions (~$20 overage) | $20 |
| Vercel Pro (5 seats) | $100 |
| Bandwidth overage | $0–$75 |
| Total | ~$120–$195/month |
Self-hosted alternative: $8/month VPS + GitHub Actions free tier covers most activity when builds are fast.
| Component | Cost |
|---|---|
| GitHub Actions (~$60 overage) | $60 |
| Vercel Pro (10 seats) | $200 |
| Bandwidth and compute | $50–$150 |
| Total | ~$310–$410/month |
Self-hosted alternative: $15–$25/month (slightly larger VPS) versus $310–$410/month — a 12–25x cost difference.
Beyond platform and runner pricing, four costs regularly catch small teams off-guard:
1. Preview environment build minutes. Every PR triggering a preview deployment means a full build run. A 5-person team with 10 active PRs rebuilt 3–5 times per day burns 10,000+ build minutes/month — several times the GitHub Actions free tier.
2. Turbo machine defaults on Vercel. New Vercel Pro projects default to Turbo build machines at $0.105/minute since February 2026. Standard machines cost $0.014/minute — 7.5x cheaper. Switching machines for preview builds alone can save $100–$300/month on an active codebase.
3. Bandwidth from QA preview reviews. Preview environments don't just consume build minutes. Reviewers loading preview URLs pull assets through the platform CDN, counting toward monthly bandwidth limits.
4. Environment variable management overhead. Some teams add Doppler ($10–$30/month) or similar tools for secret rotation and per-environment config. Platforms that include encrypted env var management (Temps, some Render tiers) eliminate this line item.
Related: How to cancel stale deployments automatically
If you're on Vercel or Netlify and want to cut costs before committing to a migration:
Switch build machines from Turbo to Standard. On Vercel, Turbo machines at $0.105/min cost 7.5x more than Standard at $0.014/min. For preview deployments especially, Standard is sufficient — the difference in build duration rarely matters for review cycles.
Enable "cancel previous deployments." Without this, rapid pushes to the same PR trigger parallel builds, each billing independently.
Cache dependencies aggressively. A Next.js build that downloads 500MB of node_modules on every run adds 2–3 minutes per build. Proper layer caching cuts this to seconds.
Use path-based GitHub Actions triggers. If your monorepo has 5 packages, only rebuild the packages that changed. Matrix builds and path filters can cut runner minutes by 40–60% without touching the deployment platform.
Related: How to implement scale-to-zero for dev environments
Most small teams (2–5 engineers) spend $0–$200/month on continuous deployment in 2026. GitHub Actions free tier (2,000 min/month) covers most runner needs. Platform costs range from $0 (self-hosted VPS at ~$8/month) to $100/month (Vercel Pro, 5 seats). A 5-person team on GitHub Actions plus Vercel Pro typically pays $120–$200/month all-in. Self-hosting with Temps cuts platform costs to ~$8/month.
Self-hosting on a VPS is cheapest: a Hetzner CAX21 at ~$8/month runs Temps or Coolify with no per-seat charges. Among managed platforms, Render starts at $7/month for a web service with no developer seat fees (managed Postgres adds $19/month). Netlify and Vercel both charge $19–$20/seat/month, making them more expensive as team size grows beyond 2–3 engineers.
Vercel provides the deployment platform but not a CI runner. GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, or similar tools handle build and test steps; Vercel handles serving the built output. CI runner costs are separate — GitHub Actions is unlimited free for public repositories and free up to 2,000 minutes/month for private repositories. Vercel does bill build minutes (at $0.014–$0.105/min depending on machine tier) when the build runs within its own platform.
GitHub Actions is free for public repositories and includes 2,000 minutes/month for private repositories on the free plan. Paid plans start at $4/month for 3,000 additional minutes. On a pay-as-you-go basis, Linux runner minutes cost $0.008/minute. A 5-person team with moderate CI activity typically spends $0–$40/month on GitHub Actions depending on build frequency and build duration.
Yes. Self-hosted CD platforms like Temps and Coolify run on major cloud VPS providers (Hetzner, DigitalOcean, Vultr) with 99.9%+ uptime SLAs from the underlying infrastructure provider. Reliability depends on your VPS provider, not the CD software itself. Most small teams add a basic uptime monitor (UptimeRobot free tier, Betterstack) for alerting — often free for 50+ monitors.
Pricing reflects published rates as of May 2026. Runner minute costs and platform pricing change frequently — verify current rates before making infrastructure decisions. Use the PaaS Tax Calculator for side-by-side self-hosting comparisons.
