Static sites from public repositories, up to 1 GB per site with a soft bandwidth limit of 100 GB a month; not allowed for online businesses, e-commerce or SaaS.
Verified ·Oct 15, 2026
Free allowance
What the free plan includes, as the provider states it.
- storage
- 1 GB
- Maximum size of a published site; source repositories have a recommended limit of 1 GB.
- bandwidth / month
- 100 GB
- Soft limit per site.
- builds / hour
- 10
- Soft limit; does not apply when the site is built and published with a custom GitHub Actions workflow. Deployments time out after 10 minutes.
Before you rely on it
Read with the default assumptions: a project that may grow and may make money.
- Notice: Commercial use is restricted on the free plan
The fine print
Each verdict links to the quote it rests on.
- Free for
- As long as you stay within the limits
- At the limit
- Not documented
- Spending cap
- None needed: the free plan cannot bill you
- Idle projects
- No pause rule documentedNo idle pause is documented. The limits are soft: over them, GitHub may stop serving the site or email the owner; rate limits answer with HTTP 429.
- Data retention
- No deletion rule documented
- Card at sign-up
- Not documentedOn GitHub Free, Pages works only from public repositories; private repositories need a paid plan. One user or organization site per account, one project site per repository.
- Identity check
- An email address
- Commercial use
- RestrictedNot allowed as a free web-hosting service to run an online business, an e-commerce site, or any other site primarily directed at facilitating commercial transactions or providing commercial software as a service (SaaS). Sites shouldn't be used for sensitive transactions like sending passwords or credit card numbers.
- Mainland China
- Partly reachableGreatFire rates *.github.io as mixed: some tested hosts are blocked, many intermittent or accessible. Custom domains were not assessed.
- Sign-up regions
- No restrictions documented
- Quotas apply per
- Project
Alternatives
Other free plans for the same need, ranked by the same neutral rules.
Changes
- Correction
Worse: Behaviour at the limit corrected: requests refused → not documented
- Oct 15, 2026
- Awaiting review
- GitHub Free