It sure as hell isn't a per-minute cost

per-minute isn't a crazy unreasonable proxy for it though:

- logs are generally proportional to the length of the job

- other artifacts also usually correlate to an extent

- some of the cost for Github will be for the entire time the job is active: e.g. active connections for log streaming etc. - it's largely correlated to the value the end-user gets out of it

- it's easy to bill for because they can already do billing that way on the hosted runners

- the costs are easy to predict for end-users

It's not like the rest of the Github platform is a per-user cost to run, but that's how Github charge for most features.

per-minute is really just a way to express the cost in a human friendly name. Doing per-hour, per-second, per-day could all result in the same total value just at a different number. If anything per-minute is better than per-hour as you won't be charge for minutes you don't use.