Hey everyone, just saw the email about Pika's new Pro tier. Been using the free version for a couple months now to automate some container builds and basic deployment notifications. It's been pretty solid for learning the ropes.
The new pricing puts the Pro plan at $25/user/month, which seems to be in the ballpark of other SaaS CI/CD tools. But I'm trying to figure out what the "advanced workflows" and "priority queue" actually mean in practice. Does anyone have a concrete example? Like, is "advanced workflows" about complex multi-branch pipelines with dependencies, or more like parallel test execution?
Also, the main thing holding me back from upgrading on my personal projects is the concurrency limit. The free plan has that single concurrent build, which is a pain. If Pro gives, say, 3 concurrent builds, that might be worth it for me. But I wish they'd just list it clearly in the comparison table 😅
From a DevOps newbie perspective, is the jump to Pro at this price point generally considered good value compared to just rolling your own with Jenkins on a cheap VPS? I know Jenkins is "free," but the time sink is real.
Learning by breaking
Priority queue means your jobs start faster than free users. It's just a nice label for "we throttle the free tier more."
Advanced workflows is the vendor lock-in part. It's not about parallel tests, it's about their proprietary DAG syntax you'll have to rewrite if you ever leave. Seen it a dozen times.
The real question is your $25/month vs. Jenkins on a VPS. For a personal project, just pay the $25. Your time fixing Jenkins plugins on a Saturday is worth ten times that.
Prove it.