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:<p>> We evaluted CI/CD minute usage and found that 98.5% of free users use 400 CI/CD minutes or less per month.<p>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 make it worth making this change?<p>Or they anticipated that number going up if they didn't make the change?<p>It seems odd to me to say "This hardly effects anyone at all, almost everyone can keep doing exactly what they are doing for the same price (free in this case)", AND "this was necessary for the sustainability of our budget."<p>What am I missing?
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've never really understood "minutes" as a unit of build work.<p>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?<p>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"?
Honestly not that big of a deal given that(I would assume) most probably run their own gitlab runners. I personally use the free tier and have a bunch of my own runners.
For smaller projects who aren't ready to start spending yet, it's pretty trivial to spin up your own runners on a server. Not sure how it scales, but Gitlab has pretty solid guides on how to make one. It took me maybe an hour the last time I looked at it, worth checking out. Definitely easier to drop $10 than maintain that though, I'm a fan of Gitlab's CI/CD infrastructure.
$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.
Why many words when little would do?<p>“We want to reduce cost and make more money, therefore today we reduce the number of free minutes from 2000 to 400 for free accounts. There are options to buy more minutes. kthxbye.”<p>So tired of corporate PR BS.
This is only about seven builds per month for my Rust project, not too bad but something I'll have to keep in mind.<p>Does anyone else think this is a Gitlab campaign against overuse of monomorphization in Rust projects? I just can't get myself to use Dyn...
That page links to <a href="https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/program/" rel="nofollow">https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/program/</a> for determining if your project can have more free minutes. It sounds like that says if you have a public repo you get a bajillion (50,000) free minutes. That seems like a crazy good deal.
The feature that sold me GitLab was the ability to run your own runners. It's basically 10x (source needed) cheaper than other hosted CI/CD services. Most basic setup is like 3 commands.
Gitlab's SaaS offering is an excellent product. It is absolutely worth paying for. Their free tier was and still is very generous. I hope this isn't a signal that they are having trouble. I've kind of naturally shifted 90+% of my work over the Gitlab over the past year. I love it and want to stay!
400 minutes is plenty to decide if you need to pay for the service, and they need to stay in business. Eminently fair, and still far better than the typical 1 month free.
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.
Can anybody provide more info about how to set up your own runners? I have a VPS which runs dokku - can I spin up some containers there? Or can I just run it locally on my laptop (usually my laptop is connected to the internet when I push my changes and trigger CI so it could run there?)<p>edit: I had the look at the docs but they're quite overwhelming with lots of options. I run linux on my laptop. If the setup is too complicated I'll just purchase some minutes and call it a day
I see a lot of comments citing gitlab as devious or showing statistical lies. The basic point is that gitlab is a business that is competing in an area where competitors have infinite pockets. GitHub can allow users to use 2000 minutes and even make it free for teams because Microsoft has a huge war chest. Gitlab on the other hand is valued at 1/1000 and has to be profitable to survive.
I wish they would make there merge request work like GitHub’s pull requests. I always miss the messaging when there are merge conflicts. Also would be nice to have something similar to status checks with the annotations support like GH.<p>Now I am going to see if they fixed the bug were copy to clipboard stopped working a few months ago. Why would I want some JSON blurb intrad of branch name when copying it ️
Do they have metrics on how many free tier accounts actually use the CI/CD feature and of those how many exhaust the former 2000 minute quota?<p>I am asking because my use is definitely in the minority of the user base which is just slapping projects into a managed git repo that is not owned by Microsoft.<p>This was before github decided to allow private repos for free.
Colleague of mine blogged about how to save on Gitlab runner costs using AWS Spot instances not too long ago,
<a href="https://makersden.io/blog/reducing-gitlab-runner-cost-with-aws-spot-instance" rel="nofollow">https://makersden.io/blog/reducing-gitlab-runner-cost-with-a...</a>
At the end of the day it will all come down to a very simple thing: pay up or hit the highway. There is only so much charity company can afford if it is there to make money rather than vaporizing investments.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
They sort of hang themselves with this -- gitlab runners will occasionally hang and just run for the full 1 hour max, making it very easy to max out your hours. Presumably they don't fix this so people max out their hours and have to buy more, but it also hurts the bottom line of their free tier. I see this happen at least 2x a month on our project, and it doesn't seem to correspond with any particular docker image.
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.<p>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 pricing like ermmm well every cloud provider has.