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…
For a toy example, imagine one user uses 2k minutes, 10 use 100 minutes, and 1000 use 1 minute. In this case you have "Over 99% use 100 minutes or less", but 50% of your cost is going to the one 2k minute user.
I have no idea if this is their exact curve, just showing how a fat-head distribution could explain what they are saying. I'd expect the "demand" (i.e. minutes used if they were not constrained / all paid for) to be a power law distribution.
Also worth noting that there's a sort of bimodal selection effect going on here -- it's unlikely that you use exactly 2k minutes/month, since you'd be hitting your limit and that would be disruptive. So the closer you get to using 2k minutes, the more likely you are to pay for more than the free tier. So I'd expect this pricing change to also force some users that were previously on 400 minutes +- 100 to have to upgrade too; this will impact some of the 98.5% of free users that are using <= 400 _on average_ per month.