CI/CD Minutes For GitLab SaaS Free Tier

The document we were presented with at the time clearly said that renewal was at MSRP - which we took to mean renewal at full ‘Gold’ pricing:

Unless otherwise executed between the parties in writing, the OSS
Program shall terminate upon the conclusion of the Term of the
Subscriptions stated herein, and said Subscriptions shall renew at full
(MSRP) cost.

@hgrnnctwc We are working on several feature enhancements to the Runners on GitLab.com. We will introduce autoscaling to the Windows Runners and transition that product to GA early next calendar year. The macOS Build Cloud product (macOS Runners) is currently in closed beta. I expect that we will transition that product to open beta before the end of this year and GA early to mid calendar year 2021. For the Linux Runners, we are also working on introducing various build machine options. The current target for that is early to mid calendar year 2021. In short, we are investing heavily in the Runners on GitLab SaaS. So with that continued focus, I hope that we will continue to provide value for folks building their applications on GitLab.

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Hi @abartlet I checked with others who have been at GitLab longer than I have and they don’t remember having terms like this. This excerpt must be from terms from the really early days of the program.

Our current renewal policy states that users will be downgraded to Free if they do not renew their GitLab for Open Source membership (as stated above).

I’ll be working on improving the GitLab for Open Source program – feel free to continue to bring up questions or ideas about it!

For those following along with the “What happens if my OSS program membership expires?” topic…

We’ve updated the program application page to make it clearer that the account gets downgraded. Please see number 4 of the “Additional Information” section: https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/open-source/program/

You’ll also notice that the merge request step has been removed to simplify the application process.

More updates to the application process coming soon!

cc/ @abartlet @berrange

In the Gitlab open source application page it says to create a group.

If I have open source repos on my account, and I want to have the open source CI minutes, do I need to create a group and transfer the repos or can I get the open source status just for the projects?

Would transferring my existing projects to a group break existing clones?

Also it isn’t clear what you should put in “Supporting Evidence”, how do you prove you don’t generate money from a project? o_O

This is an optional field. Sometimes people have a website set up that mentions that they are non-profit. We just updated the application form to make it more clear that the question is optional.

Does this mean you have multiple open source projects that you run on GitLab? Can you please DM me with links to the projects you have and would like to transfer to the free OSS program? I’d like to have a better sense of what you mean.

Hi There,

With this change to free accounts, we’re regularly hitting the limit for free tier CI/CD minutes. I’m ok with purchasing additional minutes if needed, but when I look under CI/CD > Pipelines and total up the time listed for all of our pipelines this month, it doesn’t add up to anywhere near 400 mins.

I’ve pasted a screenshot below of part of the list I’m looking at on Pipelines > CI/CD. If I add up all the times there (in this case 00:07:11 + 00:05:20 etc etc) we’re at just over 90 minutes.

Is there somewhere I can look for a more detailed breakdown? or am I missing something about how our pipeline minutes are calculated? I had thought that the times given were our actual pipeline minutes used, but I’m not sure why there’s such a big discrepancy.

paid 1000 CI minutes pack. It thinks that Group x has exceeded its pipeline minutes quota. Unless you buy additional pipeline minutes, no new jobs. I thought we just need to pay 1000 CI minutes pack. It would solve the issue? I submitted a ticket to Gitlab. They closed my ticket automatically because I am using a free account. Why do they sell this product when it is not supported?

@sjhanna Thanks for the question!

Pipeline quota usage is calculated as the sum of the duration of each individual job. This is slightly different to how pipeline duration is calculated. Pipeline quota usage doesn’t consider the intersection of jobs.

A simple example is:

A (1, 3)
B (2, 4)
C (6, 7)

In the example:

A begins at 1 and ends at 3.
B begins at 2 and ends at 4.
C begins at 6 and ends at 7.
Visually, it can be viewed as:

0  1  2  3  4  5  6  7
   AAAAAAA
      BBBBBBB
                  CCCC

The sum of each individual job is being calculated therefore in this example, 8 runner minutes would be used for this pipeline:

A + B + C = 3 + 3 + 2 => 8

Note, I’ve create this MR to update our docs to include this distinction.

If you still find that your usage total is not accurate per these expectations, please open a support ticket and provide details about your account so they can investigate.

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Is there somewhere I can look for a more detailed breakdown? - @sjhanna

Great question! There is a Usage Quota interface you can use to visualize this across all projects. CI minutes are calculated by adding all CI pipeline times at the namespace level, so either per user or per group.

To see CI minute usage for your user: https://gitlab.com/-/profile/usage_quotas#pipelines-quota-tab
To check CI minute for a group: https://gitlab.com/groups/<group_name>/-/usage_quotas#pipelines-quota-tab

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@dominictse Thank you for bringing this up, I apologize for the delay.

It appears there was an issue provisioning the minutes to your group namespace, but this issue has been resolved. You should’ve received a reply from GitLab Support with updates on your Support ticket.

Can you verify if you still see the warning about exceeding the pipeline minute quota?

@arueda Thanks very much for the clear explanation and for adding this info to the documentation! Understanding this might help us streamline our pipelines a bit to (maybe) meet the quota.

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I’m confused about this. I had expected the self-managed version of GitLab not to put an arbitrary restriction on pipeline minutes (since I’m paying for my own hardware), but I can find little information to confirm or deny this.

Hi @tom.owen this is applicable to the SaaS version, not the self-managed version. Even for the SaaS version, if you get your own runners, you don’t have this limit. See the FAQ here for more details Managing CI/CD Minutes FAQ | GitLab

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@supadhyaya To resolve the confusion, why not change the title of this thread since GitLab now has two Frees: self-managed Free and SaaS Free?

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@tnir Done. Thanks for the suggestion.

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[This post is pointed to from the “managing your ci/cd minutes” FAQ as a “place to address your questions” - which is why I’m reviving it, though this is a one-off question by me and doesn’t reflect anything general about change in policy that triggered this thead.]

I’m on the SaaS free tier. Back in April 2021 I purchased 1000 CD Minutes ($10, INV00108052) and I don’t believe I’ve used any of them at all. But, actually, I don’t know where to learn how many I have used (or, alternatively, what I have left).

I’ve looked at Settings>Billing - which doesn’t show anything related to purchases, and also Settings>Usage Quotas, likewise. Also, although I see the invoice on the “Customer Portal” that also doesn’t have any indication of what’s used/what’s left.

Where can I discover this? And, related question: I assume these don’t “expire”, correct?

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@bakins-bits Recommend getting in touch with support related to your CI minute purchase, by opening a ticket.