We’d like to share a billing update with you. Starting from October 15, 2022, Semaphore will be rounding up smaller jobs. We will charge for the full 60 seconds for all jobs that take less than a minute to complete
This change will not affect in any way jobs that take more than 60 seconds to complete. For example, a job that takes 15 sec to complete is billed for the full 60 sec. Yet, a job that finishes in 2 min and 30 sec is still charged for 150 sec.
Why are we making this change?
With this update, we’re ensuring that we provide Semaphore users with enough resources to run their jobs in the fastest and most efficient way.
First, actions that happen in Semaphore’s backend, like initializing the machine for the job and freeing it up afterward, spend at least 60 seconds of machine time. This time is not visible to the end user, even though it occupies available cloud resources.
Second, by charging for a full first minute of the job, we are discouraging running a huge number of small jobs. Such use cases were reducing the availability of cloud resources for other users without being properly billed.
How will this affect your organization?
For most organizations, the increase in monthly spending will be less than 1% or 1$. In general, organizations usually have a small number of jobs that take less than one minute.
Most of the time those jobs are:
- after-pipeline jobs
- pipeline initialization job for monorepo workflows
- pipeline initialization jobs for parameterized promotion pipelines
- pre-flight check jobs
These jobs are set to run on the cheapest available resource by default.
When will the change happen?
The change will go live on October 15th. Any jobs that take less than 60 seconds will be rounded up to a full minute from that point forward. This means that the first charge with the job rounding applied will happen at the beginning of November.
In case you have any questions about how this change will affect your organization specifically, please feel free to reach out to us at support@stg-semaphoreci-dev.kinsta.cloud. We’ll be happy to clarify any questions.
