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Gitlab reducing free tier CI/CD minutes from 2000 to 400 minutes
- immago 6y agoHonestly 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.
- bovermyer 6y agoThis seems totally reasonable.
- avolcano 6y ago$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.
- jstummbillig 6y agoAlas, I doubt they care much. Post-Microsoft-acquisition-GitHub is playing a different game.
- riyadparvez 6y ago> Post-Microsoft-acquisition-GitHub is playing a different game. Excatly. Microsoft owned GitHub is more interested into getting more customers for Azure than GitHub itself.
- ldoughty 6y agoAt $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
- watermelon0 6y agoCI/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.
- deastman 6y agoToday, 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 and Windows Runners, we will offer more GCP machine types. For our soon to launch macOS Build Cloud beta, we are planning to start with one virtual machine size and then possibly offer different machine configurations at GA. So as you get going initially with GitLab SaaS, you don't have to set up your Runners for your first CI/CD jobs. Then, depending on your requirements, and as your use cases evolve, you can easily set up your own Runners but still benefit from the included minutes. Darren Eastman - Product Manager GitLab Runner
- sushshshsh 6y agoMetering 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 pricing like ermmm well every cloud provider has.
- pkaye 6y agoIt seems you can already use your own runners.
- swebs 6y agoWell you can already self host Gitlab on your own server if you want.
- viro 6y agoI honestly don't understand what he is complaining about.
- sushshshsh 6y agoI'm suggesting that $4 per month where I have to estimate the number of requests I will actually make is actually not that good of a value compared to self hosting on a raspberry pi. The devices will pay for themselves within the first year and generally my philosophy is to avoid building your operation around 50 services cobbled together because there is a possibility you will spend more dev time trying to understand a service's idiosyncracies than actually just rolling your own.
- viro 6y agoFair enough, I know I self host everything. I would just suggest that a pi is probably a bad example. Since its ARM and you would want your ci/cd to run as close to production(x86) as possible.
- sam0x17 6y agoThey 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.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- cpb 6y agoCan you reproduce this behaviour in local runners?
- deastman 6y agoCan you raise an issue in the GitLab Runner project? This way we can take a closer look at the errors you have experienced. And no, we don't do this on purpose in order to have you buy more minutes. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/issues https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-runner/-/issues Darren Eastman - Product Manager GitLab Runner
- atonse 6y agoSeems like they’ve done it in a pretty reasonable way.
- dmm 6y agoThis is only about seven builds per month for my Rust project, not too bad but something I'll have to keep in mind. 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...
- YorickPeterse 6y ago> 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... I presume this is some kind of joke. If not, why on earth would GitLab campaign against the use of dyn types? GitLab doesn't even use Rust.
- rumanator 6y ago> Does anyone else think this is a Gitlab campaign against overuse of monomorphization in Rust projects? No,not really. I mean, in healthy projects build times are dwarfed by the time it takes to run tests. In web development projects even the delivery and deployment steps dwarf build times.
- dmm 6y ago> 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 running thousands of tests only takes a few seconds, even on relatively slow gitlab runners.
- oehtXRwMkIs 6y agoPlus 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.
- bachmeier 6y agoTheir 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.
- vorpalhex 6y agoYou can also run your own CI/CD runner for free and use their platform for coordination. I do this and it works well, as easy as running a docker image. Runs on my homelab.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoWill also run on a Synology NAS using Docker (I do this).
- time0ut 6y agoThis is the way to go. I've got a whole fleet of executors running on spot instances orchestrated by a runner on a t3.nano. Works great.
- acoard 6y agoCan you share a bit more about this? I'm interested in setting this up myself. A link the docker image or name I can google? To be clear, you store all your code on Gitlab's servers (i.e. not self-hosting git instance) but just "outsource" the CI/CD work to your homelab? That's my ideal.
- time0ut 6y agoYou run an agent called the GitLab runner. You configure it with a token from your Gitlab.com group or repo (depending on where you want the runner to be available). You tag the runner and reference it by tagging CI jobs you want to run on it. The runner polls for outstanding jobs and then executes them. It is extremely flexible in how it does this. In our case, the runner manages a fleet of executors using docker+machine. I believe this is similar to how Gitlab does it internally. See https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/ https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/
- nrclark 6y agoI'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"?
- sushshshsh 6y agoProbably a lifetime :) Just kidding. Either they went the cheap route and stuck it on some price efficient EC2 instances, or they went the vogue-but-expensive route of lambdas for "rapid processing and ease of development"
- MichaelBurge 6y agoPresumably they're the same machines as before, so anyone affected already knows the translation.
- JoshTriplett 6y agoWhat would be the most immediately understandable way to present that? Suppose they added new, faster servers in the future; what unit would make the most sense to offer that won't change in the future?
- ivalm 6y agoI mean like other public cloud providers it would make sense to have instances and per minute pricing for an instance. If there is only one instance type that's fine.
- JoshTriplett 6y agoWhat about if there's one instance type, but sometimes that instance gets upgraded so that the same things take less time? Is there a unit that would make more sense than "minutes", and be stable over time? For instance, "time to compile XYZ well-known project"?
- aaomidi 6y agoI know I work at Microsoft and this is going to sound bad but...at what stage is it other companies doing EEE?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- agarzenm 6y agoDo 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? 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. This was before github decided to allow private repos for free.
- coding123 6y agoThis doesn't change anything for us, we use our own runners.
- interrupt_ 6y agoI wonder what would be the response here if GitHub did the same.
- nscalf 6y agoFor 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.
- davnicwil 6y agoThis thing of spending like an hour setting up a runner is one of the things I wanted to address with https://boxci.dev https://boxci.dev - A CI service I’ve built with a similar bring your own runners model but where “setting up the runner” consists of just installing a package, literally done in seconds :-) You should check it out.
- nscalf 6y agoAwesome! I’m a couple weeks from turning my attention to ci/cd for a side project. I’m going to bookmark this and I promise I’ll check it out!
- kdmytro 6y agoTo be fair, setting up a runner for Gitlab CI is very simple too. We self-host GitLab and we only have one runner on duty, but some projects have many stages that can be executed in parallel. I start a docker runner on my laptop before pushing new commits, which cuts the CI wait time by half.
- etaioinshrdlu 6y agoAre we in a "belt-tightening" cycle? Noticing that Docker and now Gitlab are reducing their super generous free tiers...
- ffpip 6y agoThey can only give away so much for free
- marcosdumay 6y agoThere is a global recession out there, of the kind that only happens once every 3 or 4 decades. Even if those companies aren't losing revenue (they probably are), there is less investment money too, so they are still impacted.
- swyx 6y agoit isnt evenly distributed. usage of cloud services is UP if aws results are any indication. gitlab should experience a similar lift.
- marcosdumay 6y agoInvestment money drying up is very well distributed. Even if none of those companies are looking for money right now, when it gets tight it's a good practice to reduce your spending so you need less of it. Those things the OP is talking about are all investment, so it's natural that they get cut.
- aaanotherhnfolk 6y agoGitlab might also be looking for where they can grow during the pandemic. 1.5% of 6m existing free tier users is 90k accounts who now need to reduce usage, pay Gitlab, or move to another platform. Only one of these options is fast! I don't think this is the only reason they are doing this, but it does sweeten the pot.
- tomcam 6y ago400 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.
- pyrox420 6y agoWhen can we address only offering yearly plans for the paid user seats? We would have upgraded months ago if we could go month to month....
- time0ut 6y agoGitlab'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!
- qppo 6y agoedit: I can't read, ignore my gripes on github actions. Gitlab is the best!
- Macha 6y agoThis is about gitlab, not github.
- mcintyre1994 6y agoFWIW Gitlab's default timeout is 60 minutes and you can view logs of a pipeline as it runs.
- badbanana 6y agoColleague of mine blogged about how to save on Gitlab runner costs using AWS Spot instances not too long ago, https://makersden.io/blog/reducing-gitlab-runner-cost-with-aws-spot-instance https://makersden.io/blog/reducing-gitlab-runner-cost-with-a...
- alexellisuk 6y agoGood timing with Docker being the first-mover with its Hub pricing change.
- slykar 6y agoThe 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.
- cornflake 6y agoCI 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.
- jsmeaton 6y agoCircle charges per seat and for credits. It’s ridiculous. Increase per minute pricing and remove seat pricing.
- ccday 6y agoInstall GitLab Runner on any EC2 instance you’d like, it’s simple. You can even run on Spot!
- danielheath 6y agoThe setup time isn’t cheap, though, and the UI is... confusing. If you’re using a dedicated ec2 instance, most providers (gitlab, buildkite, github, etc) will let you connect it as an agent for free. IMO using your own runner is a better way to go in general because the standard ones tend to be very underpowered and you can get much faster builds without spending much. At that point different providers are largely competing on price and UX (imo Buildkite have the best developer UX and the time saved as a result is well worth the price). (Not affiliated with buildkite other than as a user).
- whoisjuan 6y agoYou can install GitLab Runners on EC2. You can even GitLab install Runners on a Raspberry Pi or use some old computer and put it in a closet somewhere (uptime not guaranteed though).
- nakedgremlin 6y agoDoes 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.
- tyeager 6y agoGitLab PM here. We will enable view of previous months' usage in this issue: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/246844 https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/246844
- jrochkind1 6y agoOne 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 make it worth making this change? Or they anticipated that number going up if they didn't make the change? 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." What am I missing?
- lacker 6y agoThis sort of thing happens a lot when you first set up a free plan. Some part of it turns out to cost more money than you expected, and it’s a small but growing segment. If you’re going to have to pull back in it eventually, why wait? Waiting might just annoy twice as many people when you inevitably have to introduce stricter limits later.
- TimWolla 6y ago> and it’s a small but growing segment They could have grandfathered the existing accounts into the 2000 minutes. Then the segment would no longer be growing and stay small, no?
- foota 6y agoExcept in this case individual users will also grow. You'd have to do something like grant them their current usage plus some buffer (without letting them know ahead of time maybe, since otherwise this is gameable).
- skinnymuch 6y agoWhy do you need a buffer? If you’re grandfathering in old and limiting new users more, what is gameable? Besides a small portion of people registering accounts in the short time between announcement and implementation?
- aaronbrager 6y agoThis is cool, I love that gitlab lets you purchase extra minutes adhoc without a tier change. Neither GitHub nor CircleCi let you do that
- FpUser 6y agoAt 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.
- the_jeremy 6y agoThat page links to https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/program/ https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/program/ 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.
- ivanstame 6y agoHetzner 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...
- xuki 6y agoYou can get an AMD bare metal for that price: https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax?country=ot https://www.hetzner.com/dedicated-rootserver/matrix-ax?count...
- ivanstame 6y agoThanks for pointing this out, I am still on Intel hardware with 32G of RAM, this has double that :D
- wdb 6y agoI 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. 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 ️
- xuki 6y agoWhy many words when little would do? “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.” So tired of corporate PR BS.
- pm90 6y agoI work at a medium-ish enterprise and the comm team forbids engineering from sending out notices to customers without clearing past them. Not sure if it’s the same for Gitlab, but sounds like something similar...
- darthrupert 6y agoSure, and let's let the marketers make any changes they want directly to the master branch.
- axelthegerman 6y agoCan 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?) 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
- thiht 6y agoWhat would be the cheapest way (ideally free) to setup custom runners?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- downvoteme1 6y agoI 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.