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Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

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Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#141

Post by zucker42 »

toastal wrote: post #122
tootie wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GitLab earned their market position by offering free private repos. They leveraged that position to get the funding to massively ramp up their enterprise features while GitHub was burdened with thousands of open source users. Now GitLab is cashing in and I don't blame them. Their product is excellent. It's basically an all-in-one package for small to mid tech orgs.

Given the rise of Sourcehut as some people's new goto and Github finally offering container registry, it seems like a good time to pull that trigger too. I as a whole like GitLab as an all-in-one solution.

I love Sourcehut, but Sourcehut's only competitive right now in the indie/free software enthusiast market. I doubt Gitlab views them as a major threat.

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#142

Post by dchuk »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #95

One thing that always confuses me about the business factors in this kind of announcement, where they say that the vast majority of users won't be effected: > We evaluted CI/CD minute usage and found that 98.5% of free users use 400 CI/CD minutes or less per month. Okay, so just that 1.5% of free users, each using at most 1600 minutes more than the 400 under the new limits... is enough cost to actually matter and mak…

Pretty incredulous position to take when a company offering free stuff makes adjustments to their free stuff

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#143

Post by brodock »

rolleiflex wrote: post #80
bachmeier wrote: post #16

Their existing policy has never made sense to me. You can only give away so much stuff on a free plan. I don't think CI/CD is cheap. Buying extra minutes for $10 (not per month) is completely reasonable. At some point I feel uncomfortable using a free plan that is obviously unsustainable.

Relying on an obviously unsustainable free plan to build something always felt icky to me, because it will inevitably break, and then you will have to deal with the fallout of a perhaps now-unsustainable project of yours, your investment upon which then could end up possibly sunk, leaving you worse off than not having started the project in the first place. Paradoxically, a lower free tier makes me a lot more likely…

In general in any SaaS business, the free plan usually is written off as part of marketing budget.

The idea is that instead of paying Google/Facebook to display adds in the hopes that it will convert people as leads and hopefully down the line as a paying customer, it's usually much much cheaper to provide a free plan instead, which helps out as a "trial" of the final product.

Despite the sales factor, it also helps you get real users early on which can provide invaluable feedback to you, and help you prioritize the parts of the software that has real need versus what you imagine that people would want instead.

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#144

Post by watermelon0 »

ldoughty wrote: post #140
avolcano wrote: post #4

$4/mo for 2000 minutes is reasonable. GitHub Actions does 2000 minutes for free/3000 minutes for $4, wonder if they'll drop their free tier a bit without the competition.

At $4/month you can get a server from anyone for 700+ hours of CICD .. this doesn't sound like a great deal to me unless you're CICD can't exist without ~2gb/ram and the cpu limits... Or unless GitLab runners have 16+GB RAM and lots of CPU for large jobs

CI/CD is mostly burstable workload. You are not going to run it 24/7, but when you need to build/test/deploy a commit, you'd prefer to do it as fast as possible.

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#145

Post by supadhyaya »

mehrdadn wrote: post #119
nialv7 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are carefully constructed truthful statistic lies. Of all the free users, how many of them even have a repository? Out of all the users who have a repository, how many of them actually make any use of CI/CD? They are saying "1.5%" to make it sounds small, but those 1.5% could account for a significant portion of total minutes of CI/CD used.

This seems... ambiguous, actually. I for one automatically took "free users" to mean free users of the CI/CD feature , not free users of GitLab . Meaning, the set of people who use > 0 CI/CD minutes. I'm actually surprised if that's not what they mean, given the entire point of the discussion is about how this affects users of the CI/CD feature. It's one thing to state things clearly and let the reader make incorrect…

Hi, thanks for your feedback. We will consider making sure to clarify that going forward. Free users refers to users of the free tier of GitLab.

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#146

Post by brodock »

random_visitor wrote: post #55
zepolen wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

99$ for 50,000 hours is a steal. You could barely rent a dedicated server for that amount of money, let alone the maintenance.

> You could barely rent a dedicated server for that amount of money You can get a Ryzen 5/64G for like $40/month on providers like hetzner. While I get your point about maintenance, it's not right to say that dedicated servers are that expensive (you also can't compare the performance of 2vCPU/4G with a dedi but that's beside the point)

the minutes can be consumed in parallel, so there is a difference to that.

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#147

Post by [deleted] »

paxys wrote: post #115
nialv7 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are carefully constructed truthful statistic lies. Of all the free users, how many of them even have a repository? Out of all the users who have a repository, how many of them actually make any use of CI/CD? They are saying "1.5%" to make it sounds small, but those 1.5% could account for a significant portion of total minutes of CI/CD used.

This is exactly it. 1.5% of users does not equal to 1.5% of CI/CD minutes. And such messaging isn't always dishonest. If you have 99 users using 100 minutes each and 1 user using 10 million minutes, setting the max limit to say 1000 is a net benefit for the system and its users, at the expense of the one outlier.

[deleted]

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#148

Post by rumanator »

oehtXRwMkIs wrote: post #42
dmm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> in healthy projects build times are dwarfed by the time it takes to run tests I don't doubt that's often true but many Rust projects may be outliers here. A full, non-incremental build of a Rust project involves building all of its dependencies. This can add significant amounts of time if a project uses a big framework like Actix-web, which adds many dependencies. My tests however run very quickly, ~1ms each. So ru…

Plus Rust by design avoids all sorts of bugs leading to less tests imo. Python for example you really want a lot of testing, maybe even contracts, but with Rust I find that many of those tests are irrelevant.

> Plus Rust by design avoids all sorts of bugs leading to less tests imo.

This assertion on the amount to tests makes no sense at all. Tests are not about language features. Tests are about checking invariantes, checking input and output bounds, and checking behavior. Tests focus on the interface, not the implementation. Tests only work if test coverage is high.

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#149

Post by hinkley »

nrclark wrote: post #22

I've never really understood "minutes" as a unit of build work. What kind of server are we talking about? What CPU? How much RAM? How fast is the storage access? Is my instance virtualized? And if so, do I have dedicated resources? I have a build that takes around 70 minutes on an 8-core i9 with 32 GB of RAM and M.2 SSDs. What does that translate into for Gitlab "minutes"?

That probably dovetails with the free minutes. If you want to benchmark it before making a commitment, you can.

Re: Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes

#150

Post by ivanstame »

xuki wrote: post #138
ivanstame wrote: post #118

Hetzner VPS for $35, caprover and you can install many one click apps, plus there is gitlab ce and some CI/CDs...For just $35 a month...

You can get an AMD bare metal for that price: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax?count...

Thanks for pointing this out, I am still on Intel hardware with 32G of RAM, this has double that :D
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