Do purchased or granted credits expire?

@Montana And also, please, could you clarify if the credits purchased, or credits received as a grant from Travis to OSS, can at some point expire (e.g. sponsors prepay expected load for 3 years, but won’t we see them disappear after one year?) Is there any inflation anticipated (10 credits per Linux minute today… what would it be in a year?)

And as many posts and screenshots and tooltips keep confusing us about, if a project or user account clicks to accept the Free Mode - is it a one-time deal to expire the 10000 credits and cease CI for a project, or is this a monthly replenishable allowance? For smaller projects, that might actually suffice, barely…

Hey @jimklimov,

Travis credits do not expire at all, if you purchase them they will last forever until you actually consume them. Suppose you bought ~500,000 credits, these do not have any expiry. You can consume them in 1 month, 1 year, 6 years or even 10 years.

I hope this clears things up a bit.

Hello again, can you please clarify how an OSS project without external sponsorship, legal body or a “common pot” of money, is supposed to move forward with Travis CI?

I’ve tried e-mailing support asking for OSS allotment of credits as suggested in earlier posts, several times, but never got a response – not even a “canned” one like mentioned in .org -> .com migration unexpectedly comes with a plan change for OSS. What exactly is the new deal? for example.

I’ve also tried switching a Github organization account, as well as some team member accounts, into the travis-ci.com offering, and they just depleted some or all of their 10000 original credits into OSS CI builds and those never replenished “automagically”. While they did not exactly expire - they were used to run jobs - the OSS builds can not proceed any more.

I suppose, a never-ending free daily allotment might be reasonable for smaller projects doing a few build-hours per day while allowing a fair-usage policy for the overall commercial+freebie population, and perhaps then lagging in the end of queue at the lowest priority for the rest of the day – I suppose that is what people on forums would understand as a “free tier” wording, similar to cell service FUP when you get slow but non-zero mobile internet service after your payment for fast one runs out. I think this is a common point of misunderstanding about change of service, often stated in the forums - that Travis meaning of “free tier” seems to differ from how everyone else understands these words. As well as “tier” being a sort of a layer in the overall offer - something that is always there, maybe deep low in priorities, but not something that disappears after certain amount of use.

So at the moment I can not ask (as in a two-way dialog) to get the OSS credits from Travis, I currently cannot get someone to pay real money for that, and while the Travis docs including https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/migrate/open-source-repository-migration#q-will-travis-ci-be-getting-rid-of-free-users and this week’s https://blog.travis-ci.com/oss-announcement keep stating words like “Open source accounts, as always, will be completely free under travis-ci.com” the reality is that our and many others’ FOSS CI builds hit a wall, stop and never continue.

How should I practically proceed to keep building the free software for free, (re-)starting today or tomorrow? Can this happen with Travis or must we look for greener pastures elsewhere?

Thanks in advance,
Jim Klimov

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