Build minutes

What it is. Wall-clock compute time spent building. Vercel now meters this more precisely as CPU time on some plans; Netlify counts build minutes against your allowance.

What makes it go up.

• Monorepos without ignore rules. The classic trap: a change to one package rebuilds every project in the repo. One documented Vercel Community case reported a $602.21 bill of which $601.52 was build minutes.
• Preview deploys on every branch, including branches nobody looks at.
• A build loop — a misconfigured deploy hook, or a bot pushing commits.
• Slow installs, uncached dependencies, heavy test suites in the build step.

How to reduce it.

1. Set ignoreCommand per project so unrelated changes skip the build. The single highest-value fix for monorepos.
2. Turn off preview deploys for branches you never open.
3. Cache dependencies properly between builds.
4. Move tests to CI rather than running them inside the deploy build.

Related: Why is my Vercel bill so high?