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Comment by tasogare | Hacker News Reader

> For almost a decade, Travis CI made it possible for me to build—and maintain, for years—hundreds of open source projects.

Then what about paying for it? The service is definitely very valuable to this person.

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Well, their lowest paid tier is $69/month. I dunno about you, but that's way more than I can justify spending to be able to support doing work for free. If they had a $50/year or so plan that just restored the previous open source plan, I'd be more willing to consider something like that, but >$800 a year puts it firmly out of my price bracket for what it offers me.

This. I am willing to pay but there's no way I can spend my yearly "save for a new laptop every couple years" budget on one SaaS for projects that generally contribute $0.00 to my bottom line.

This is why I use GitLab with self-hosted runners for all sorts of esoteric platforms, then use their linux runners for the basics. I don't like to freeload, so I do have a Bronze subscription which includes a certain number of monthly CI minutes for private projects, as mentioned here: https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2020/09/01/ci-minutes-upda.... But I rarely make use of it. Also note that there are special arrangements for Open Source projects.

I can totally understand limiting the number of minutes available. It must cost an absolute fortune, and having it unbounded makes it easy to abuse. Having to pay makes developers have to consider if they really need to go overboard on huge build matrices and limit themselves to something reasonable. Likewise for constraining the amount of network traffic. If you don't want to blow your budget, then self-hosting is an obvious and easy choice.

This. If I had a cloud hosted CI tool, I would gladly allow open source projects to use it. But they would be lowest priority and there would be limitations on how often builds could happen and/or volume of contributions.

Large corporate backed opensource projects should absolutely be paying for tools like Travis CI. Just because it's open source doesn't mean there isn't money floating around.

It's not super hard to rent a VPS or Physical Server somewhere and spend a few hours setting up <insert ci tool of your choice).

It's not the setting it up that's preventing someone like me from self-hosting these kinds of tools. It's the maintenance, security, accessibility, etc.

More time on all that (or risking hacks and having more downtime) equals less time actually working on the projects being tested.

The point is, like with almost all open source work, the funding has to come from somewhere.

If I'm an open source software maintainer, and I make a project that is used by 3,000 companies, helping them generate $Xmm in revenue... how much of that money ever trickles back to the maintainers? The typical answer is $0.

Some maintainers are lucky to have some form of corporate sponsorship, others spend many cycles on some form of marketing to build up some kind of financial support (tip jars, Patreon, etc), but the pricing for Travis is astronomical for non-enterprise usage.

But as I said in the post, I'm grateful for what I got for the 8 years I had it. And I'm happy that GitHub/MS is now running with that gauntlet.

Reading your post, I realized that I'm a company (albeit a very small one) that profits from your work and doesn't pay you.[0] I use your Nginx role in my open source product[1], and I use several of your other roles in my development environment. I just signed up as a monthly sponsor.

Thanks for your fantastic contributions to the Ansible ecosystem and to open source in general. Apologies for my past freeloading!

[0] https://mtlynch.io/retrospectives/2020/11/

[1] https://github.com/mtlynch/ansible-role-tinypilot/blob/b56c1...

Ha, thanks so much! I'm trying (and having at least moderate success) to make it so I can devote half my weekly 'work' hours to pure OSS work, and the sponsorships are getting me close!

Interesting. You put in work, Travis CI puts in work, but the surplus accrues to a third-party. Hmm. Unfortunate.

It's possible that most OSS won't have CI servers in the future. I don't imagine that's the end of the world but it does suck.

Then your are in a position similar to Travis until now: offering a lot of value for free. You need to find a way to monetize the project(s). Only one of all those companies need to give 100 bucks a month to pay for the CI + extras.

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