Update October 8, 2024: This blog is superseded by the blog post announcing upcoming changes to CI/CD minutes for free tier users on GitLab.com. Please refer to our pricing page for the full breakdown of usage limits per tier.
Effective Sunday March 15, 2020, UTC, we are making changes to the CI pipeline minutes offered to new free users. Moving forward, all free accounts will have 2000 pipeline minutes per group per month independent of the visibility of the project. Existing free users will not have their plans changed.
What are pipeline minutes?
As we share on our pricing page,
Pipeline minutes are the execution time for your pipelines on our shared runners. Execution on your own runners will not increase your pipeline minutes count and is unlimited.
Pipeline minutes are a crucial part of what makes GitLab special.
Where did this come from?
One of our core values at GitLab is efficiency. As GitLab grows and matures as both a company and a product, we've really focused on becoming a more efficient company. This includes making sure we're being efficient in our CI offerings.
As we work on some new improvements to CI, including Windows and MacOS runners, we evaluated usage by free users. From an internal analysis, we found that 95% of free users who used CI minutes in January 2020 used fewer than 1000 CI minutes. But we're not talking about 1000 minutes, we're talking about twice that. And 2000 minutes is a lot of minutes. That's over an hour of CI minutes every day.
We are constantly working to provide the most value to our community through GitLab. The best way we can do that is by strengthening our open source offering, including make any features open source that are eligible to be open source.
What if that's not enough minutes?!
If 2000 minutes isn't enough, free users can buy additional CI minutes.
Alternatively, you can bring your own runners. You can run specific runners for any of your projects. We only count minutes on the shared runners we provide on GitLab.com.
What's next?
Excited about all the cool things that can be done with CI? Me too!
Here are some other things coming down the pipeline in the next couple of releases:
