Metering of services like this only makes sense for organizations that don't have the time or expertise or desire to maintain the open source, self-hosted version themselves.
Raspi and similar devices will some day hopefully rid the world of this tyranny of having to trust a website like this and pay them for eternity and hope they dont go down and hope they dont raise prices (oops) and hope they dont obfuscate pricing like ermmm well every cloud provider has.
I'm suggesting that $4 per month where I have to estimate the number of requests I will actually make is actually not that good of a value compared to self hosting on a raspberry pi.
The devices will pay for themselves within the first year and generally my philosophy is to avoid building your operation around 50 services cobbled together because there is a possibility you will spend more dev time trying to understand a service's idiosyncracies than actually just rolling your own.
Build vs Buy is a very individual decision that should be based on your team and your product.
At my last employer, we used a free tier of CI/CD through CircleCI as it was sufficient enough and easy to spin up for testing a couple of small internal libraries we needed to hook things together with a SaaS product we were using. We weighed the benefits and came up with a number that balanced the estimated cost of implementation and running cost of self-hosted against the free tier offering and estimated cost of implementation there.
Once you factor in engineering costs and the additional server to maintain, it made sense to go hosted for us. But every team is different, and hardware cost isn't the only thing. You need to consider the running cost of utilities, maintenance, and in the case of larger equipment, even cooling costs.
That said, for personal projects, yeah, I just kick things onto my home file server, since it's running anyways, and normally has nearly no load other than managing my ZFS and occasional backup operations.
Fair enough, I know I self host everything. I would just suggest that a pi is probably a bad example. Since its ARM and you would want your ci/cd to run as close to production(x86) as possible.
Cool :) If I'm testing OpenJDK code on linux, it should be the same whether that linux device is running on arm or x86 right? I imagine C would maybe be different but I would hope that linux abstracts those differences for interpreted languages
> You could barely rent a dedicated server for that amount of money
You can get a Ryzen 5/64G for like $40/month on providers like hetzner. While I get your point about maintenance, it's not right to say that dedicated servers are that expensive (you also can't compare the performance of 2vCPU/4G with a dedi but that's beside the point)
Raspi and similar devices will some day hopefully rid the world of this tyranny of having to trust a website like this and pay them for eternity and hope they dont go down and hope they dont raise prices (oops) and hope they dont obfuscate pricing like ermmm well every cloud provider has.