We want to first say BIG THANK YOU for the service you guys provide.
2000 free minutes for OSX host is amazing and all of our team personally like the way you approached the workflows/(shell scripts abstractions) with .yml build steps and pretty workflow editor.
One thought that we have is that it would be really cool if you provide something like pay as you go subscription plans. Something like you would charge for build minutes after exceeding 10 minutes of build time and after exceeding 200 builds per month.
We are small team and we are 100% ok with single concurrency and 95% percent of cases our builds won’t exceed 10 mins, but there is pretty wide deviation for app store uploads in rare times can result in builds exceeding 10 mins. In this case we would be more then willing to pay for extra build minutes (instead of re-renning the entire workflow and wasting your uptime). It is also not reasonable to split the workflow in two since the build-archive takes around 6mins and 2~4 mins for iTunes Connect upload.
Also in the average case we are unlikely to exceed 200 builds, but in case we have really active development timeframes with large amounts of intra-day pull requests it would be also cool to have the option to pay for extra builds.
I think it’s difficult to grow a business and offer free resources. Is $50/mo too much? Have you tried contributing to bitrise which reduces a single concurrency to $25/mo?
Thanks, I am aware of contribution discount.
50 usd / month is reasonable.
Just a thought.
Or do you guys think Pay as You Go plan is unreasonable?
It also feels it fits well for hobby-style pricing which often has sporadic code contributions and so on.
@bootstraponline there is at least one, but we’re in general against the idea, as that might lead to unnecessary optimizations or leaving out things (tests) which would be useful but might take a long time and cost a lot.
We’re not saying we would not consider pay as you go, but we believe there should be a better approach which is cost effective but does not make you try to leave out tasks just because that would take more time = more money.
We have a couple of ideas, hopefully we can announce the first one soon
@viktorbenei Thanks for the feedback.
They solve similar goals definitely. I guess it is reasonable to merge them.
My personal usecase is probably similar to other hobby-style projects:
sporadic code commits -> many builds in one month, almost none in another one.
few or no pull requests that can eat up many builds in single day, which is why it is unlikely to exceed the 200 builds per month.
However, 10 minutes build times gives some issue due to the variability in app store upload / build time. In this case I would just rerun the workflow since It would on average case complete in time.
There are really few incentive to jump from Free Tier to 25$ usd per month, I can just rerun the workflow, but this kinda feels like a waste of the uptime.
I would be willing to pay for the extra 2 needed mins to have my builds cleanly and this would allow you guys capturing this value and saving extra 10 minutes of rerun.
I think it definitely makes more sense economically for me then monthly subscription given the fact that the majority of year everything will be idle. Even say if I pay monthly subscription which will then hit 100$ usd pay year. Probably my extra build minutes will only eat up 10usd extra in one month and that’s it.
Maybe giving the Pay As You Go on a larger premium is a way to ensure you don’t see the discreasing numbers in new subscribers conversion rates. But It feels that there might quite a considerable fraction of your addressable market that is quite unlikely to switch to monthly subscription anyway due to the similar application scenario like I have, but with Pay As You Go pricing that might actually work out.
Definitely makes sense and thank you for the details @ambientlight!
Good news is I believe we have a solution for your use case, which should roll out in the next couple of weeks
So the thing is, from an economical point of view it doesn’t really make sense to provide a pay as you go plan for a couple of dollars per month/year, but we definitely want to help in this case / for hobby/indie devs!
What we’re thinking about right now is a referral program, where if you introduce bitrise to a new dev who adds an app / starts to use bitrise you get +5 mins build time. We’re still working on the details, but that’s roughly how it’d work.
What do you think about this @ambientlight? Would you use the referral system or would you still prefer to pay for the extra mins/builds?
@viktorbenei Wow, thanks! sounds like a very smart approach. If a single user attracts 1.1 users - already a growth engine Looking forward and good luck with it!
Looking forward and good luck with it!