Bitbucket Pipelines: "This step was stopped because you've run out of build minutes"
Each Bitbucket plan comes with build minutes for the month: 50 on Free, 2,500 on Standard and 3,500 on Premium (Atlassian's Limitations of Bitbucket Pipelines). On Free, once they are used up, a step on Atlassian's machines stops with the line above, as quoted in a 2024 community thread. Standard and Premium don't stop: Bitbucket charges $10 for every 1,000 minutes over the allowance, at the end of the billing cycle (Manage your plan and billing).
What counts
- The time a step is in progress, its Build setup included. Waiting for a runner is not counted (Atlassian's post on build minutes).
- Multiplied by the step's size. A 5-minute step on a 2x runner counts as 10 minutes; 4x counts four times, 8x eight times. Sizes of 4x and up need Standard or Premium (Atlassian's guide to build minutes, September 2026).
- Each parallel step on its own. Four parallel 1x steps of 5 minutes count as 20 minutes, though they finish in 5.
- Not steps on a self-hosted runner. Builds on your own runners don't count toward build minutes.
- The whole workspace shares them, every repository and every user.
Find where they went
- Workspace settings → Plan details: minutes used and left in this billing period, for the whole workspace (workspace admins).
- Workspace settings → Pipelines usage: minutes by repository and by build, for this period and the one before, so you can find the build where the spike started (workspace owners and admins, monthly plans).
- On a build's page, hover a step's duration to see the build minutes it used.
Use fewer
Size each step by what it uses. Atlassian's guide says the quickest saving is usually a step that was given a bigger size once and never checked again. A step's Metrics tab shows its memory and CPU over its run (kept 14 days, not for self-hosted runners). Set the size on the step that needs it, not for all steps under options:
- step:
name: Unit tests
size: 1x
A bigger size doesn't give the Docker service more memory; it keeps 1 GB until you set it ("Container 'docker' exceeded memory limit.").
Stop steps that hang. A step without max-time can run to the 120-minute limit and count all of it ("Exceeded build time limit").
Stop pipelines nobody needs. A second push to the same branch or pull request does not stop the first pipeline: both run to the end and both count (stopping older pipelines on a new push).
Download less. Caches keep steps from downloading the same dependencies every time (the cache is not used), and a long Build setup counts too (Build setup takes too long).
Run heavy steps on your own machine. A step on a self-hosted runner uses no build minutes:
- step:
runs-on:
- self.hosted
- linux
Pipelines doesn't run at all for a push that involves more than five branches or tags, to keep an accidental push from using up the minutes.
Out of minutes, with a self-hosted runner
A step on a self-hosted runner still starts for a new commit or when you run a pipeline by hand, even with no minutes left. But Bitbucket's Rerun of a stopped or failed pipeline fails with Your account has run out of build minutes, runner or not: BCLOUD-23883, open and in Atlassian's long-term backlog when we checked. Its workaround is to start the pipeline again from the commit, as a new pipeline. A report from the Free plan, where the Rerun button is grayed out with User account has run out of build minutes., was closed as its duplicate (BCLOUD-23916).
October 26 and December 3, 2026
Atlassian is moving usage billing to Atlassian Administration (Manage your plan and billing):
- Monthly plans, rolling out from October 26, 2026: the allowances are pooled for the whole organization instead of each workspace. With one workspace, nothing changes in practice.
- Annual plans, from December 3, 2026: so far they weren't billed for build minutes over the plan's limits. From then on, minutes over the allowance are billed at the published rate, pooled for the organization, as on monthly plans.
Billing admins see the usage under Usage → Meters in Atlassian Administration; Bitbucket's own pages above stay.
From IntelliJ IDEA
Pipeline Inbox for Bitbucket Pipelines, a plugin by Lesstep for JetBrains IDEs 2024.1 or later, lists the pipelines of all your Bitbucket Cloud repositories in an IDE tool window, with each run's and each step's duration (multiply by the step's size for build minutes). With Pro, Stop ends a pipeline that hangs or was started by mistake without opening the browser, and Run again starts a new pipeline on the same commit, branch or pull request; it isn't Bitbucket's Rerun, so it takes the path of BCLOUD-23883's workaround (we haven't tried it on a workspace with no minutes left). The list, steps and logs are free; running, re-running and stopping pipelines are Pro (US$1.50 a month, with a 30-day trial).
Get it on JetBrains Marketplace
Atlassian, Bitbucket and Bitbucket Pipelines are trademarks of Atlassian; Docker is a trademark of Docker, Inc.; IntelliJ IDEA is a trademark of JetBrains s.r.o. This page is not affiliated with or endorsed by any of them.
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