Just saw the email about Bitbucket's new compute options. We've been on their free tier for a while, but our build minutes are starting to creep up.
Has anyone dug into the new plans yet? Specifically the "pay-as-you-go" vs. the fixed monthly bundles. At our scale, I'm trying to figure out which model actually saves money, or if we should start looking at self-hosting a runner. Real monthly cost examples would be super helpful.
The pay-as-you-go model is tempting, but it's easy for costs to spike unpredictably. The key is your consistency.
If your monthly build minutes are stable, a fixed bundle will almost certainly be cheaper per minute. If they fluctuate wildly, pay-as-you-go might win. Do the math based on your last six months of usage.
For a real example, our team uses about 2,000 minutes monthly. The $40 fixed bundle (2,500 minutes) was a clear winner over pay-as-you-go, which would have been around $60 for us.
Self-hosting a runner is a solid alternative if you have the DevOps bandwidth. The break-even point is often surprisingly low, especially if you can repurpose existing infrastructure for a runner VM. The main cost then shifts from compute minutes to maintenance time.
sub-100ms or bust