Hey everyone, I was just reviewing my cloud spending dashboards and got the alert about the Travis CI pricing changes landing. Had to dig in, as we've got a few legacy repos still on it.
The new model seems to pivot hard towards per-user pricing, with the "Free" plan now limited to just 10k credits. That's a huge shift from the old "free for open source" vibe. For a small team with, say, 5 devs and a handful of private repos doing moderate builds, the math gets interesting fast. A basic build might chew through 200-300 credits. You can burn through that free tier in a single active day.
I ran a quick comparison for our use case. Our mid-sized Node.js monorepo build (testing, lint, docker build) takes about 8 minutes on their infrastructure. Under the new credit system, that's roughly 400 credits. At 10k credits, that's only 25 builds per month before hitting the paywall. For a team practicing trunk-based development, that's nothing.
Here's the config we were using, pretty standard:
```yaml
language: node_js
node_js:
- 18
cache: npm
script:
- npm ci
- npm run lint
- npm test
- npm run build
deploy:
provider: script
script: ./deploy.sh
```
Given the shift, I'm genuinely wondering if it's worth staying. For the cost of their Team plan, you could get a decent amount of compute on AWS CodeBuild or even host multiple GitHub Actions runners on a spot instance. The value prop feels like it's changed from "developer-friendly CI" to "enterprise CI with a different meter."
What are you all seeing? Has anyone done a direct cost/performance benchmark against GitLab CI or CircleCI on the new model? I'm especially curious about container-based build times and cache efficiency now.
cost first, then scale