This post is originally published on yoursunny.com blog https://yoursunny.com/t/2020/TravisCI-credits/

"Welcome to Travis CI!"

This morning I waked up to an email titled Welcome to Travis CI!.

Travis CI is a cloud-based Continuous Integration platform that automatically compiles and tests my code whenever I push a commit to GitHub, and warns me by email if there is an error.
I started using Travis CI in 2014, so it feels weird to receive a "welcome" email today.

The email reads:

You are on Free.

You have 1,000 credits left - these will begin counting down automatically as soon as you run your first build.
You can use your credits to build on both private and open-source repositories using Linux, macOS, and Windows OS.
1,000 credits will be replenished automatically monthly. Additional Credits purchase is not available for Free Plan.

10,000 Credits

Logging into my account, I see a red warning message at the top:

Builds have been temporarily disabled for public repositories due to a negative credit balance.
Please go to the Plan page to replenish your credit balance or alter your Consume paid credits for OSS setting.

On the Plan page, it indicates that I am on the Free Plan with 10,000 credits, replenished monthly:

The Plan Select page describes the Free Plan differently:

There are a lot of inconsistencies:

On Travis CI blog, an article The new pricing model for travis-ci.com says:

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).

I guess there are two different free plans, and I'm on the latter one:

• "Trial" Free Plan: one-time 10K credits for new users.
• "Open Source" Free Plan: monthly 10K credits for existing users who have been building on public repos.

Are They Enough?

My biggest question is, are 10K credits enough for my projects?
To answer this question, I looked into my recent usage:

At the rate of 10 credits/min on Linux and 50 credits/min on macOS, these builds would consume 6,050 credits monthly.
I'm not in trouble yet.

The Way(s) Out

GitHub Actions, backed by software giant Microsoft Corporation, has no usage limits for open source projects.
I migrated NDN-DPDK and NFD nightly to GitHub Actions.
It seems that I should move more of my own projects over there.

ndn-cxx-breaks is now suspended.
I can't have visitors click the button a few times and use up all my credits.
It will come back when I have it moved to GitHub or another service.

For the projects I fork and contribute to, such as ndn-python-repo, it is unnecessary to trigger Travis CI builds before I send a pull request.
To achieve that, I can go to Installed GitHub Apps page, and change repository access to only allow the repositories I want to build.

The end is nigh.