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Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works

jeffgeerling.com

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Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works

#41

Post by geerlingguy »

azdle wrote: post #12
tasogare wrote: post #4

> For almost a decade, Travis CI made it possible for me to build—and maintain, for years—hundreds of open source projects. Then what about paying for it? The service is definitely very valuable to this person.

Well, their lowest paid tier is $69/month. I dunno about you, but that's way more than I can justify spending to be able to support doing work for free. If they had a $50/year or so plan that just restored the previous open source plan, I'd be more willing to consider something like that, but >$800 a year puts it firmly out of my price bracket for what it offers me.

This. I am willing to pay but there's no way I can spend my yearly "save for a new laptop every couple years" budget on one SaaS for projects that generally contribute $0.00 to my bottom line.

Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works

#42

Post by xvilka »

I am rooting for the SourceHut CI[1][2][3]. Along with other services it has proven useful even at the current (alpha stage). Also it's the only one that supports both FreeBSD and OpenBSD (NetBSD support is unfinished [4])

[1] https://builds.sr.ht/

[2] https://man.sr.ht/tutorials/getting-started-with-builds.md

[3] https://man.sr.ht/builds.sr.ht/compatibility.md

[4] https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/builds.sr.ht/tree/master/images/...

Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works

#43

Post by manigandham »

est31 wrote: post #32
monkeybutton wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>do the minimum with these CI integrations to get my shell script to run This. 100%. Where I'm working is migrating from Bamboo to Jenkins. For my team the new process is just calling "./build-test $params" while others are stuck re-implementing various stages, tasks and blah blah blah. Also an added bonus to this is having the full history of changes to the CI/CD process tracked in git.

> while others are stuck re-implementing various stages, tasks and blah blah blah. Also an added bonus to this is having the full history of changes to the CI/CD process tracked in git. Can't those stages, tasks, etc. be specified in the CI specific config files of the repository? Specifying them via an UI seems horrible to me. At least Github actions is all file-specified (except for secrets).

It still requires conversion of config files and formats vs a script that is the same everywhere.

Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works

#44

Post by jrochkind1 »

Travis has an FAQ whose URL says "open source repository migration", but whose on-page title says "Migrating repositories to travis-ci.com"

Travis Staff accounts in the travis "community forum" were linking to this FAQ as recently as 9 days ago, which still at this moment contains a question:

> Q. Will Travis CI be getting rid of free users? #

> A. Travis CI will continue to offer a free tier for public or open-source repositories on travis-ci.com and will not be affected by the migration.

https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/migrate/open-source-reposito...

This would seem to be grossly misleading, if not simply wrong info? There are still a bunch of travis users on travis community forums trying to figure out what's going on and why travis-ci.org seems to have stopped working (also different from what the FAQ says), who don't seem aware of the pricing change.

The first line of the document is "On May 2nd, 2018 Travis CI announced that open source projects will be joining private projects on travis-ci.com!", which also includes this FAQ:

> Q. Will there be lower concurrency for free accounts on travis-ci.org?

> A. As part of the shift of infrastructure from .org to .com and needing to make sure all users have equal access to resources, free and open-source .org accounts will have concurrency reduced from 5 to 4 concurrent jobs. Concurrent jobs have not changed on .com, so please consider migrating your repositories as soon as possible if this is an issue.

So... that's all not quite right, it turns out. They're providing an FAQ about "free accounts" without saying there no longer is no such thing as a free account, and "open source projects" are "joining private projects on travis-ci.com" only in the sense they can choose to pay for the same plans as private projects.

It's true that nobody owes us anything for free, and the free support for open source CI for the past 9 years has been a gift...

It's also true that they are not being particularly transparent (an understatement; if they don't fix that FAQ soon I'm just going to call it lying) or gracious in how they are handling this transition, for an open source community that has come to rely on them.

Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works

#45

Post by geerlingguy »

sounds wrote: post #8

Hey Jeff, This is hitting me hard, too. I hope this is the right moment for me to pipe up and say this: I always just do the minimum with these CI integrations to get my shell script to run. I am grateful for the free minutes they offer open source projects - but any of the deeper integrations, the advanced automation? No, thanks. It's not like the other developers who use what I write have any more motivation than I…

Makefiles are the gold standard there, warts and all.

But in every case, unless you encode a whole plethora of hacks in your golden build script, you still need minimal environment setup, like Python + Docker + [insert library here].

Most of my Travis files are only 10-20 lines long, but I work in a lot of different types of environments, so it's not always as easy as "three lines of bash and a docker run command".

Plus I have a number of legacy projects which did use some of Travis' more exotic features, and those will take longer. Not just for myself, but I'm thinking of tons of smaller OSS libraries and projects that are minimally maintained yet have a large footprint under more popular and maintained software!

Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works

#46

Post by PebblesHD »

schoen wrote: post #36
PebblesHD wrote: post #11

After some of the previous TOS changes, I finally found the motivation to move to a self-hosted CI on a VPS. I’ve been entirely satisfied since migrating, and it’s been a truly low touch experience. Not for everyone I’m sure but for the low cost of the VPS I’m getting my value out of it, certainly not proving to be a maintenance drain as I’d feared, just updating it on a CRON has served me well.

Are there good tools to help with this for people who are used to a hosted CI and want to replicate some of its features? (I'm just curious, I'm not in that situation myself.) Or is the cloud/SaaS instinct so pervasive now that very few people are trying to do what you're doing?

If you’re comfortable with AWS or any other VPS provider, there are Ansible and Docker flavours of most common tools. I’m a fan of Jenkins but the competition also offers some well defined pathways to get this going easily, and all of them offer a somewhat similar way to define builds automatically in code. My go-to is the github org scanner plugin that can watch for new repos with a Jenkinsfile, and will happily manage creating the automatic commit hooks if a new one is found giving you a very similar level of ‘magic’ integration to what the SaaS tools offer.

Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works

#47

Post by jrochkind1 »

geerlingguy wrote: post #31
jrochkind1 wrote: post #19

Oh boy, I just moved my projects from travis-ci.org to travis-ci.com after the builds stopped happening on .org. (Despite the travis FAQ that said "we’re making a number of changes to the travis-ci.org infrastructure to ensure the service will remain as reliable and available to you as it always has been until [it goes away Dec 31]", that was not the case, builds simply stopped working on .org. https://docs.travis-ci…

All three companies I worked for that ended up paying for a beefy Travis CI enterprise plan did so after getting hooked through the open source offering and wanting more concurrent runners and faster builds. Without that funnel, and knowing it's all integrated deeply in both GitLab and GitHub, I wonder where Travis CI could ever expect growth again... but that's probably not the end goal anymore, just milking the cur…

"that's probably not the end goal anymore, just milking the current paying clients and maintaining the status quo."

Yep, that's private equity. I won't forget it again.

If it makes less and less profit every year even that's probably fine, eventually they'll shut it down, as long as they made back a multiple of what they paid by that point, then it was a good investment.

It's sad to me just as an engineer, that travis is actually really well-built product, it works magnificently and sets a high bar for ease of use, because of many hours of work that developers who cared put into it... and it's now just going to be allowed to slowly sink into the sea.

Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works

#48

Post by geerlingguy »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #44

Travis has an FAQ whose URL says "open source repository migration", but whose on-page title says "Migrating repositories to travis-ci.com" Travis Staff accounts in the travis "community forum" were linking to this FAQ as recently as 9 days ago, which still at this moment contains a question: > Q. Will Travis CI be getting rid of free users? # > A. Travis CI will continue to offer a free tier for public or open-sourc…

This is what hurt the most. I knew the migration to .com was happening. And I expected the perks (like 5 concurrent jobs) to be slowly removed over time.

But to go from the status quo to 1000 build minutes and that's it in one day, with literally no lead time.

That's what caused the wincing. I'm sure many of the engineers who were laid off at Travis after the buyout are shaking their heads this week.

Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works

#49

Post by microtherion »

013a wrote: post #18
azdle wrote: post #9

I've been using Travis on a bunch of my opensource projects and was wondering why builds were getting queued for ~a day before they'd run, I guess I got my answer. :/ I don't really want to lock myself into GH actions (ideally, I wouldn't be on GH at all), does anyone have any suggestions for alternatives? I don't mind paying some money, but the almost $1K/year for Travis' lowest tier is about an order of magnitude m…

Github Actions really is a freakin awesome product. Yeah, there's lock-in, but their free plan (and cheap Pro plan for individuals) offers a great value. And, really, CI is CI; if you ever need to migrate, even for this guy with hundreds of projects it should only take a couple days. Once you've seen one CI yaml file, you get the gist of what all of them do. Other options: * Gitlab CI. Good value, great integration w…

I'm quite happily using a self-hosted Drone (drone.io) instance, though I don't have much experience to compare it with with other CI systems and my use case is probably not the most sophisticated one. Team is quite responsive, especially considering I'm a free tier user.

Re: Travis CI's new pricing plan threw a wrench in my open source works

#50

Post by jrochkind1 »

geerlingguy wrote: post #48
jrochkind1 wrote: post #44

Travis has an FAQ whose URL says "open source repository migration", but whose on-page title says "Migrating repositories to travis-ci.com" Travis Staff accounts in the travis "community forum" were linking to this FAQ as recently as 9 days ago, which still at this moment contains a question: > Q. Will Travis CI be getting rid of free users? # > A. Travis CI will continue to offer a free tier for public or open-sourc…

This is what hurt the most. I knew the migration to .com was happening. And I expected the perks (like 5 concurrent jobs) to be slowly removed over time. But to go from the status quo to 1000 build minutes and that's it in one day, with literally no lead time. That's what caused the wincing. I'm sure many of the engineers who were laid off at Travis after the buyout are shaking their heads this week.

I expected perhaps they would eventually limit the number of build minutes you got per month.

I honestly did not expect they would eliminate free CI for open source altogether. With virtually no notice. Many people STILL haven't noticed the announcmeent, the FAQ is still misleading them.

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