.org -> .com migration unexpectedly comes with a plan change for OSS. What exactly is the new deal?

Oh hey though. I just realized, it turns out that open source will no longer be offered free service on travis-ci.com either. In case some of you had missed the announcement.

https://www.jeffgeerling.com/blog/2020/travis-cis-new-pricing-plan-threw-wrench-my-open-source-works

I had realized my builds stopped working on .org [1] , and was moving them all over to .com – where they started working as expected again – but I hadn’t realized that was just buying me a tiny bit of time.

It looks like legacy open source accounts on .com will get a certain number of hours credit, and after those are out… you can open a support ticket to ask for a share of “an allotment of OSS minutes that will be reviewed and allocated on a case by case basis”, “should your run out of credits again you can repeat the process to request more or discuss a renewable amount.”

The FAQ Travis staff linked to above says,

Q. Will Travis CI be getting rid of free users? #

A. Travis CI will continue to offer a free tier for public or open-source repositories on travis-ci.com and will not be affected by the migration.

That would seem to not be correct information.

Sounds to me like basically no more free hours for open source. I just realized this myself AFTER moving my stuff to .com to get it to work again. Oops. So I figured I should come share the bad news, it did not seem this thread was necessarily aware.

I already moved my open source projects over to .com, which DID get the builds running again – but I haven’t yet figured out how many hours of credit I have until they stop working without paying. Oops. So something to know before you move over to .com.

[1] Despite the FAQ saying “we’re making a number of changes to the travis-ci.org infrastructure to ensure the service will remain as reliable and available to you as it always has been until the migration is completed.” Migrating repositories to travis-ci.com - Travis CI .

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Following up on that, I know I’m an outlier with my ~200 projects, but I burned through the 10,000 credits in less than a day. And now unless I email and request more, it seems that none of my open source builds will be allowed to run on Travis CI unless I pay at least $60/month for one runner.

I’m not mad about the fact that what was once free is no longer, it’s more about the communication.

Even earlier in this thread, it was suggested moving from .org to .com would solve problems for us OSS maintainers. So many of us did that or planned on doing it. But it did not, because once you run out of the 1000 minutes of build time (a one-time allotment), you cannot build any more OSS projects on Travis CI, ever, unless you convert to a moderately expensive paid plan.

Anyways, I’m moving all my projects to GitHub Actions as quickly as possible so I don’t out on CI failures, or have issues running builds that push images to Docker Hub or packages elsewhere for new releases.

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Well. My dashboard on .com says the free credits get replenished monthly, but that’s hardly relevant. The point is that we were told OSS would have the same access as always (or at least it was very heavily implied), and the reality is… mismatched.

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This is what shows up on my plan page (ignoring the grammar issues):

image

and from the blog post with the updated pricing:

For those of you still kicking the tires on the Travis CI product, we are switching the plan from 100 builds on private repositories to our trial (free) plan with a 10K credit allotment. This will allow you to build on whichever environment you’d like to test out. Trial plans expire when you use all of our credits or after a year.

Both appear to say the 10,000 credits is a one-time deal (and the blog post seems to say that 10,000 expires after a year regardless of usage)

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As a counterpoint, here’s my Plan tab:

image

I have an info box at the top specifically stating that credits are replenished monthly.

Maybe this is because I went in and actually “selected” the Free plan, instead of doing nothing? Perhaps doing nothing leaves you on a “trial” plan with no replenishment. If that’s the case, the messaging from Travis could be better. This whole process of migrating users off of .org and restructuring plans for .com has been plagued by poor communications, unfortunately.

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This is certainly not a solution for the project I code for - it is a F.O.S.S. project that has been using Travis CI for several years to build both Linux and MacOs versions of the application (we were getting 2 MacOs and 3 Linux concurrent builds IIRC). Our builds on Travis stopped dead a couple of days ago and apparently we have “-8430 available credits” summed up as “You have used 18430 of 10000 credits”.

As a F.O.S.S. project the recent Travis documentation suggests that we can be allocated some OSS credits. However the documentation on “Billing overview: concurrency based plans” which claims to be close to what we were getting, now states that even if we could get those OSS they can only be used for Linux/Windows/FreeBSD and NOT MacOs.

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@SlySven the page you linked to says the exact opposite of your conclusion. As long as you have credits, you can run any kind of build. And the OSS allotment grants credits.

You should realize that Travis has announced they will not be giving free CI to open source any longer. You can move your builds to travis-ci.com, but that will only give you a temporary reprieve.

For those of you who have been building on public repositories (on travis-ci.com, with no paid subscription), we will upgrade you to our trial (free) plan with a 10K credit allotment (which allows around 1000 minutes in a Linux environment).

… When your credit allotment runs out - we’d love for you to consider which of our plans will meet your needs.

Yes, I know we thought the new owners of travis said they planned to keep supporting open source. And that an FAQ still up says “Travis CI will continue to offer a free tier for public or open-source repositories on travis-ci.com”.

(It also says “we’re making a number of changes to the travis-ci.org infrastructure to ensure the service will remain as reliable and available to you as it always has been until the migration is completed”, which Travis staff in forums are clarifying is not the case?)

Either plans changed, or we misunderstood what they meant by “supporting open source” or “offering a free tier”. Travis has announced that the only “free tier” for open source or anyone else will be a trial plan with 1000 minutes (not a month; total).

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TBH It looks as though people with O.S.S. projects should not bother with migrating from the .org to the .com part of Travis but instead look to find a different CI/CB platform completely in the next 4 weeks or so that they have left…

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We also just hit the credit limit on a project I’m a member of and will be moving as it’s pretty clear that Travis is not interested in supporting OSS projects anymore.

I understand that Travis is a business and they’re free to stop offering a free service but it would have been nice if they could have skipped the hypocrisy and have warned projects maintainers earlier.

They also need to remove the:

Testing your open source

projects will always be free!

Seriously. Always. We like to think of it as our way of giving
back to a community that connects so many people.

From their main page because that’s clearly not the case anymore.

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@RipleyTom et al whose posts were moved, see the solution post in this topic for an official comment on the new deal for OSS.

@native-api I think travis needs to update the FAQ and other copy that still has misleading information about open source support.

The travis-ci.com home page (when not logged in) literally still says, in large font size, “Testing your open source projects will always be free! Seriously. Always.” This is simply not true, right? SOME open source projects can get a limited number of free minutes by application, that is not “testing your open source projects will always be free”, and certainly not “always”.

This FAQ also needs to be changed, while you can maybe make some convoluted argument that the program to apply for a limited number of donated minutes is a “free tier”, it is is not available to all open source (there are a limited number of minutes), it is not the common understanding of what “free tier” means, and the language hasn’t changed since the new pricing structure was announced.

I think you are being dishonest to your potential and current users. That home page text is pretty unforgiveable! I would call it false advertising.

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When I emailed support for credits, they gave this list of requirements for the so-called “Open Source Subscription”:

Thanks for contacting Travis-CI Support! I’d love to help!

We offer an Open Source Subscription for free to all non-commercial open-source projects. To qualify for an Open Source subscription, the project must meet the following requirements:

  • You are a project lead or regular committer (latest commit in the last month)
  • Project must be at least 3 months old and is in active development (with regular commits and activity)
  • Project meets the OSD specification
  • Project must not be sponsored by a commercial company or organization (monetary or with employees paid to work on the project)
  • Project can not provide commercial services or distribute paid versions of the software

Sounds like you and your project? We’d be very happy to support you. If your project does not match these requirements or you have questions, feel free to ask!

Looking forward to your response if you meet these requirements to proceed with the next steps.

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Thanks for that info!

I am a regular contributor or lead on a number of open source projects that formerly used travis; I think on every one at least some contributors at some times were doing their work while on the clock at their jobs. “employees paid to work on the project.” At most of them, most contributors, often including me.

I wonder if travis thinks they have something to gain in reputation by letting this info out in dribs and drabs, making it very hard to figure out what is actually going on.

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Been using Travis CI since its inception for my 200+ open-source repos, I ran through the limits immediately upon the plan change, so it forced my hand to finally migrate to GitHub Actions instead. Glad I did, it actually meets our needs much better. The complete migration for all the Bevry and DocPad repos will be complete this week.

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These requirements almost fit my scenario, but … I have a hobby project that doesn’t have “regular commits and activity” (I only get to spend time on it on weekends and sometimes weeknights), and until now I had a cron job on Sundays to rebuild with up-to-date library dependencies.on all 3 OSs on amd64 architecture.

I estimate that with my current setup (probably can be optimized further) it will cost me effectively around $5/month for macOS build credits which I’m perfectly happy to pay, but I definitely wouldn’t want to pay $69/month for the “1 concurrency” plan for Linux and Windows on this toy project.

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There are also usage-based plans lower on the same page.

Heh, and they very conveniently do not tell me how much my per-unique-user cost (which presumably includes anyone else “kindly” sending me pull requests :slightly_smiling_face:) at the end of the month will be, other than “contact support”. This sort of enterprise/B2B sales techniques do not sit well with open source.

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