Hi @alipang - Back in April we released the ability to purchase additional minutes for CI runners without upgrading to a more expensive tier.

https://about.gitlab.com/2019/04/22/gitlab-11-10-released/#p...

You can purchase directly from the customers portal at https://customers.gitlab.com and apply them to your group.

Hope that helps!

> Can I ask what plan you're on? I'm assuming since your company wants to pinch pennies you're also fairly small?

We are small compared to FAANG, but not "small" small (~4000 employees total).

We run our own self-hosted GitLab EE instance, so we have "infinite" CI minutes in that the runners are on all our own hardware. So CI is "free" (but we pay for and maintain our own hardware/VMs so I'm not sure how much that costs).

Take a look at https://medium.com/sharenowtech/serverless-gitlab-runner-bui...

Might be useful for you depending on how long your builds take. I haven't personally used it but I it's one of the things on my todo list for next month.

As sibling comments have said you can buy more minutes, but you can also setup your own runners and build to your hearts content on them.

And setting up your own runners is quick and super easy. You can have the administration thing and the build jobs run in their own docker containers, so you have no tough dependencies what distro to run on your CI machine. The only detail I find confusing is the terminology. The administration thing runs in a container called gitlab-runner. The build jobs run in something called runner executor IIRC. These are several containers per job, each with a machine generated name. Partly readable, but can still be confusing if you have lots of them and you need to debug something. On the other hand I assume you cannot debug in the cloud at all (have never tried) so the comparison is still "can be a bit painful" against "impossible" in favor of your own docker-based runners.

Hello! GitLab employee, could you elaborate? You should be able to purchase additional minutes without upgrading what tier you're on: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-foss/issues/37081#note_...