When will the free minutes be increased to match Github actions?

Question

I'm a professional developer with a number of projects that make use of the Bitbucket Pipelines product.

What brought me to Bitbucket was the free private repos. What kept me here was the built in pipeline feature. While I could achieve the same with Github and third party services, having the ability to manage in one location was a drawcard for me.

The measly 50 minutes of free build time has always been a bugbear for me, especially when you are paying for time where the service is waiting from responses from cloud deployment commands. I was willing to live with it while there was nothing else comparable on the market and it was very convenient.

Now Github has actions and it has 2000 free minutes per month. See https://github.com/features/actions

As far as I can tell, this is functionally equivalent to pipelines.. Currently any month I do work on my apps, I am paying (My main pipeline runs to 10 minutes per go, so 5 builds and I am out)

Maybe I am missing some feature where I am getting so much more with pipelines that justifies the difference in the quota. 50 vs 2000

So the question is, are there any plans to increase the free tier on the pipelines product to make in competitive with Github Actions?

brbojorque · Answer

Hi @Aneita ,

I'm evaluating the pipelines and actions right now and it's really true that 50 minutes vs 2000 minutes is a no brainer especially if what you are doing is pretty much simple stuff.

Having said that, I don't want to move to Github just to avail of the benefits because all the tools I use are tightly integrated into Atlassian.

I'm hoping that Atlassian would increase the free build minutes from 50 to at least half of what Github's actions are offering, the other half actually compensates for the tight integration and seamless experience I'm getting using Bitbucket and other Atlassian tools.

I remember way back that Bitbucket is actually the first service that offers private repositories for free!

Aneita · Answer

Hi @adelosa

Thanks for reaching out and for the feedback! Keeping Bitbucket Pipelines a competitive tool is something that's very important to us.

We've recently increased the minutes in our Standard and Premium plans which was part of making our minutes inclusions for the plans more competitive. Increasing the minutes included on the Free plan is something that we're currently investigating and hope to be able to make some changes to in the near future.

Aneita