What do I get with 2,500 free credits / week?
Users on our Free plan can build up to 250 minutes per week using their 2,500 credits.
On the Free plan, users can build with the Medium compute option (2 vCPUs
with 4 GB of memory) on Linux machines, which uses 10 credits per minute. Users can also build on Windows with the Medium compute option (4 vCPUs with 15 GB of memory), which uses 40 credits per minute.
What if I am building open source?
CircleCI will be offering organizations on our free plan 400,000 credits per month
to use on medium Docker compute for open source repositories, but they can
only be spent on Linux compute. Orgs building OSS Windows projects can
still use the 2,500 free credits per week that all projects have access to
on those projects, and orgs building OSS macOS projects can request free
macOS access by contacting billing@circleci.com.
If you are building a bigger open source project and would like the
flexibility of our new plans,
let us know
how we can help you!
What are concurrent job runs?
Concurrent job runs refers to the number of jobs that can run simultaneously
without queueing.1 You pay for compute based on the total amount
of time you use compute resources, not the number of resources that you have
access to. This means you can choose the right plan for your team to maximize
concurrent jobs and parallelism for your jobs to minimize queuing.
For example, say you have a workflow with 10 jobs that each take 5 minutes to
run. If you are limited to 1x concurrency, each of these jobs runs subsequently,
and the workflow completes in 50 minutes. With scaling concurrency, you can
run all 10 jobs concurrently (at the same time), and the workflow completes
in 5 minutes. In both cases, your total usage time is 50 minutes since you
used 10 machines for 5 minutes each. With usage-based pricing, that means
you pay the same amount either way, but if you maximize your concurrency,
you save 45 minutes of time waiting for your workflow to complete.
1 To ensure our system remains stable and responsive for all
users, we set a soft cap of 40x concurrency for some of our resource classes - most
organizations never hit this limit. However, if you are on a paid Performance
or Custom plan and you are hitting this limit, you can request that we
remove the limit by submitting a support ticket.
How do I use credits?
Credits are used to pay for your usage based on machine type and size, and
premium features like Docker layer caching.
How do I buy credits?
Credits are purchased in blocks of 25,000. At the beginning of each
billing month (based on your purchase date), you are charged for your
credit package and those credits are added to your account.
If you reach 10% of your remaining credits during your billing month, you
will be refilled 25% of your credits. For example, if your monthly package
size is 25,000 credits, you will automatically be refilled 6,250 credits
when you reach 2,500 remaining credits.
Do credits expire?
Credits expire one year after purchase. Unused credits will be forfeited
when the account subscription is canceled.
How do I enable Docker layer caching for my builds?
To use Docker layer caching, your account must be on the Performance plan.
If your team is not yet on the Performance plan, the administrator on your
account can upgrade your team on the Plan Overview page within
the application. Then you can enable Docker layer caching at the job level
within your configuration file.
Learn how.
Docker layer caching uses 200 credits per job run in a pipeline. For
example, if your configuration specifies a workflow with three parallel
Docker build jobs, you will be charged 600 credits each time these jobs
are run in addition to the compute credits/minute usage.
How do I pay?
Once you have a CircleCI account, and if you are the admin on the account,
you can pay by logging into the CircleCI application and going to
Settings → Plan Overview. From there, you can pay via credit card.
Invoicing billing is available on custom annual plans and requires a spend
of $6,000 / year.
Why does CircleCI charge for Docker layer caching?
Docker layer caching reduces build times on pipelines where Docker images are built by only rebuilding Docker layers that have changed (more in docs here). Docker layer caching (DLC) costs 200 credits per job run.
There are a few things that CircleCI does to ensure DLC is available to customers. We use solid-state drives and replicate the cache across zones to make sure DLC is available. We will also increase the cache as needed in order to manage concurrent requests and make DLC available for your jobs. All of these optimizations incur additional cost for CircleCI with our compute providers, which pass along to customers when they use DLC.
To estimate your DLC cost, look at the jobs in your config file with Docker layer caching enabled, and the number of Docker images you are building in those jobs. Docker layer caching costs 200 credits per job run. There are cases where a job can be written once in a config file but the job runs multiple times in a pipeline, for example, with parallelism.
Note that the benefits of Docker layer caching are only apparent on pipelines that are building Docker images, and reduces image build times by reusing the unchanged layers of the application image built during your job. If your pipeline does not include a job where Docker images are built, Docker layer caching will provide no benefit.
We are looking at ways to optimize Docker layer caching over time in order to improve the experience and reduce the cost.
Why does CircleCI have per-active-user pricing?
Credit usage covers access to compute. We prefer to keep usage costs as low as possible to encourage frequent job runs, which is the foundation of a good CI practice. Per-active-user fees cover access to platform features and job orchestration. This includes features like dependency caching, artifact caching, and workspaces, all of which speed up build times without incurring additional compute cost. Our per-active-user charge also allows us to provide support to all customers and deliver additional features like insights and orbs.
Anyone who triggers a build on CircleCI is an active user, regardless of whether they have a CircleCI account. If a user without a CircleCI triggers a build, for example via a pull request on a repo, they are counted as an active user.
