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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

#81

Post by slykar »

zepolen wrote: post #49
sushshshsh wrote: post #5

Metering of services like this only makes sense for organizations that don't have the time or expertise or desire to maintain the open source, self-hosted version themselves. Raspi and similar devices will some day hopefully rid the world of this tyranny of having to trust a website like this and pay them for eternity and hope they dont go down and hope they dont raise prices (oops) and hope they dont obfuscate prici…

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

For 150$ I have the most expensive option with 20 cores and 256GB of RAM. o.O

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

#82

Post by mlyle »

woofie11 wrote: post #19
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.

Business models which leverage network effects often subsidize things to build out a network. I wouldn't feel bad about it. That said, this move seems 100% reasonable. I care about having a free tier. If they were killing the free tier, I'd be sad. But if I'm not paying anything, I'm okay being required to make my CI/CD pipeline efficient for my benefactor. I'd even take less than 400, gladly.

> I wouldn't feel bad about it.

I don't think he feels guilty. I think he feels the risk of becoming dependent upon a service when the service is clearly unprofitable.

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

#83

Post by cornflake »

CI pricing (gitlab, github actions, circleci etc.) is all extortionate. When they price by 'user seat' (gitlab) or 'credit' (circleci), comparing pricing is like trying to pick a cell phone plan.

AWS Code Build will always be an order of magnitude cheaper, it's just slightly harder to set up but it works very well. It's unclear how all these other services will ever compete with that.

For example, to run a CI server on Gitlab for a team of 8 that never spun down, it would cost $492 per month on their 'shared' runners. On AWS Code Build, you get a DEDICATED ec2 instance for $223 per month and only pay for what you use when it's running.

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

#84

Post by MayeulC »

deastman wrote: post #43
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"?

We define Pipeline minutes as the execution time for your pipelines. You bring up an interesting point, though. So today, for our Linux Runners on GitLab.com, those Runners are currently offered only on one machine type, Google Compute n1-standard-1 instances with 3.75GB of RAM. Our current Windows Runners on GitLab.com are Google Compute n1-standard-2 instances with 2 vCPUs and 7.5GB RAM. In the future, for Linux an…

> In the future, for Linux and Windows Runners, we will offer more GCP machine types.

I can see free plan users starting to see their CI jobs randomly timeout if they have access to those machines.

I get that execution time isn't a bad metric, all things considered. But I would have expected actual CPU `time` (1), maybe mixed with memory usage.

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

#85

Post by judge2020 »

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"?

In case anyone is wondering about GitHub (not GitLab), they're planning to add multiple runner sizes[0]. Unfortunately it was moved from Q4 2020 to 'future' so there's no expected release time.

0: https://github.com/github/roadmap/issues/95

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

#86

Post by jsmeaton »

cornflake wrote: post #83

CI pricing (gitlab, github actions, circleci etc.) is all extortionate. When they price by 'user seat' (gitlab) or 'credit' (circleci), comparing pricing is like trying to pick a cell phone plan. AWS Code Build will always be an order of magnitude cheaper, it's just slightly harder to set up but it works very well. It's unclear how all these other services will ever compete with that. For example, to run a CI server…

Circle charges per seat and for credits. It’s ridiculous. Increase per minute pricing and remove seat pricing.

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

#87

Post by ccday »

cornflake wrote: post #83

CI pricing (gitlab, github actions, circleci etc.) is all extortionate. When they price by 'user seat' (gitlab) or 'credit' (circleci), comparing pricing is like trying to pick a cell phone plan. AWS Code Build will always be an order of magnitude cheaper, it's just slightly harder to set up but it works very well. It's unclear how all these other services will ever compete with that. For example, to run a CI server…

Install GitLab Runner on any EC2 instance you’d like, it’s simple. You can even run on Spot!

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

#88

Post by usr1106 »

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.

I am not sure whether their CI/CD has been a main driver, but their investment rounds haven proven that they have built up a very positive image. So in a way attracting users for free can bring money to the company.

But you are right: Such model is not sustainable for very long.

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

#89

Post by jldugger »

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.

>Buying extra minutes for $10 (not per month) is completely reasonable.

I agree that free tier is moderately reckless, as it invites people like me who bookmark https://free-for.dev to devour your service with no gain.

The pricing question though is tough. How much would an instance in AWS cost you for 4000 minutes? Two dollars? Pretty sweet markup if you can find a buyer.

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

#90

Post by nakedgremlin »

Does anyone know how to see historical runner usage on GitLab? I'm digging into the interface, and I only see current month usage, no ability to go back to previous months. With this reduction news, I thought the interface would have updated with better details.
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