The difference between per-minute pricing and per-month pricing for JetBrains-hosted build agents

Question

What is the difference between per-minute pricing and per-month pricing for JetBrains-hosted build agents?

Answer

By default, when the JetBrains-hosted build agents are used, the build credits are expanded at the per-minute rate of that instance type.

If the high utilization rate is expected, there is an option to pay for that agent upfront to help reduce costs. Prepaid build agents are permanently connected, JetBrains-hosted build agents that allow unlimited builds and do not expand the build credits at a per-minute rate.

Prepaid build agents can provide cost savings, but one drawback is reduced parallelism: while per-minute pricing allows for an unlimited number of parallel builds, with per-month pricing, only one build at a time for each purchased per-month build agent can be started.