CI/CD Minutes For GitLab SaaS Free Tier

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This detailed customer FAQ outlines how you can manage and reduce your CI/CD minutes usage.

In order to publish your feedback regarding this change, please add a reply to this thread. Consider adding the following to your contribution:

• Your current CI/CD minutes usage
• GitLab Usecase (e.g., SCM + CI/CD, CI/CD only, CI only, etc.)
• Questions that aren’t answered in the customer FAQ

Thank you very much for taking the time to provide us with your perspective. Please allow our Product Team some time to review the input you add here.

Please note that this forum recognizes GitLab’s Code of Conduct.

Is there a way older free ci/CD users could get grandfathered in or retain the 1000 minutes we got prior?

I really enjoyed having that extra freedom, I don’t look forward to having to create my own runners now as well so.

Edit: I’ve been using gitlab CI/CD for a bit over two months regularly - I use around 800 minutes a month and would’ve liked to look into integrating other projects.

Hi @dan1229

Thank you for your comment. I’m glad you have been using GitLab for your projects.

We have detailed out a few options that can be used to reduce / manage your CI/CD minutes usage in the FAQ. Currently, we don’t have a plan to grandfather the old limits. The options available could be to bring your own runners, purchase additional CI/CD minutes at $10 per 1000 minutes (valid for a year) or upgrade to a paid GitLab Tier.

I’m obviously not happy about losing 600 free minutes, but the free tier is still a really great deal.
Thanks for keeping it that way, and adding features to it!
It’s also nice with the possibility to just add ci/cd minutes instead just referring to the higher tiers.

@mld - Thank you for your candor, and for taking the time to comment on this thread.

What about this post that was only sent back in March:

Well, this is a bummer of course. Currently our 6 member team is using nearly all 2000 minutes per month for our private competitive C++ AI-sports project. We recently migrated from BitBucket, exactly because GitLab provides 2000 CI minutes for free + more features compared to BB.

Hi @steve.lavigne, thanks for reaching out to us.

As we grow as a company, we are consistently trying to be more efficient while continuing to offer the free product to our community. We have continued to evaluate how we can be more efficient in our offering and recent analysis showed that over 98% of our users use less than 400 minutes. We’ve consistently increased the value of our product (including. the free product by bringing features down) and want to continue to do so. This recent blog by our CEO Sid outlines our thinking.

There are multiple options we are providing to our users - including reducing the CI/CD minutes usage (see this deep dive video), bringing your own runners, adding additional minutes or upgrading to a higher tier.

Hi @gikari, thanks for commenting on this.

As you rightly state, we offer a lot more features in our free product than other vendors and want to continue to do so - supporting the feature rich free product for our community.

We are offering quite a few options to help you manage your minutes - including reducing your usage using some techniques highlighted in this deep dive video. Please refer to the FAQ that outlines additional approaches of managing your minutes.

Hi

Thanks for the notification about this change.

I think https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/program/ ‘What are the benefits for projects hosted on GitLab.com?’ may need to be updated to mention that CI minutes are now/will be a big benefit?

As I understand it (as an open source project hosted on gitlab.com) we’ll now need to apply for this otherwise the 400 CI minute limit will be applied? (Or at least will be once https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/243722 is fixed.)

It’d also be great if https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/32837 could be addressed to reduce the number of unnecessary CI minutes burned.

Also out of curiosity “We evaluted CI/CD minute usage and found that 98.5% of free users use 400 CI/CD minutes or less per month” - what percentage use zero minutes, i.e. don’t use CI/CD? (Does this stat include public projects or did the above bug mean public projects were excluded in your analysis?)

@joseph.heenan Thanks for your feedback!

I agree, if you have an open source project hosted on GitLab.com and require additional minutes, consider applying to the program to benefit from it. We will consider updating the open source program benefits.

We have users using GitLab for different usecases - including only for a repository - in which case CI/CD minutes will not be applicable. The limits are applicable for public projects as well, as highlighted in the FAQ.

Hello, I’m not sure how this affects open source projects owned by personal accounts (rather than groups).

the FAQ says (Managing compute minutes FAQ | GitLab)

Members of our GitLab for Open Source […] programs will not be impacted by this change and will continue to enjoy GitLab Gold Plan benefits

on the page to apply for open source (Join the GitLab for Open Source Program | GitLab) it says

All public projects on GitLab.com automatically receive Gold functionality at the project level. Apply to this program if you need Gold functionality at the group level.

So for individual projects, do we need to apply for open source membership or not?

Hi @mattia.basaglia – it’s ok for projects owned by personal accounts to apply to the GitLab for Open Source program as long as they meet our program requirements:

1. OSI-approved open source license – All of the code you host in this GitLab group must be published under OSI-approved licenses
2. Non-profit – Your organization must not seek to make a profit. Accepting donations to sustain your efforts is ok
3. Publicly visible – Your GitLab.com group or self-hosted instance and your source code must be publicly visible and publicly available

Hope that helps! Let us know if you have other questions about this.

Can you clarify - I have a free tier repo that is private that hosts my GitLab pages site. It isn’t a part of a group. I can’t find any stats on my CI/CD minutes. I think it’s a fair amount, but I have no idea if this policy change will impact me.

Hi @0xdf,

Thanks for reaching out! Sorry for any confusion.

Shared Runner CI minute consumption should be listed in your Usage Quota at either the user or group level.

If the pages project is hosted in your personal user namespace, you can see your CI minute consumption here: https://gitlab.com/profile/usage_quotas#pipelines-quota-tab

If the pages project is hosted under a group namespace, the CI minute usage will be tracked in the group’s Usage Quota: https://gitlab.com/groups/<group_name>/-/usage_quotas#pipelines-quota-tab

These Usage Quota pages will show aggregated CI minute usage up top (total used by all projects), with per-project CI minute consumption laid out below.

Thanks, I see that now. Is there any way to see past months? I know that I’ve used 36 minutes this month, but that doesn’t tell me much about what my past months activity has looked like to know what to expect.

Do the new restrictions on minutes apply to people who host the agent themselves on their own runner or only those that use the shared runners?

Hi @jWorld. Great question, thanks for asking!

We only count minutes on the shared runners we provide on GitLab.com. As such, CI Minute limits only apply to GitLab.com projects using GitLab-provided runners to execute CI/CD jobs.

There are no CI minute limitations if you install, register, and use your own GitLab runner for CI jobs.

Awesome thanks!

Good suggestion! I started a merge request to add a mention of that in the header and in the FAQ section on that page: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/-/merge_requests/61604

It should be updated soon.

Thanks, @joseph.heenan!