---
title: Estimate Native Builds Usage
description: Estimate your Capawesome Cloud Native Build usage — predict build minutes against your plan limits.
---

# Estimate Usage

Native builds are billed by **build minutes**. This guide helps you estimate your monthly consumption so you can pick the right plan. For the hard limits, see [Limits & quotas](limits.md).

## Estimate build minutes

```
Build minutes ≈ builds per month × average minutes per build
```

A few factors drive the average minutes per build:

- **Platform** — iOS builds are generally slower than Android.
- **Project size** — installing dependencies and building web assets takes longer for large projects.
- **Caching** — repeated builds of the same project are typically faster.

## Worked example

A team running **40** Android builds (~8 min each) and **40** iOS builds (~14 min each) per month:

```
(40 × 8) + (40 × 14) = 320 + 560 = 880 build minutes / month
```

## Reduce your usage

- Build only when needed — use [Automations](../automations/index.md) to trigger builds on the right events rather than every push.
- Keep dependency installation lean to shorten each build.