Why is pipelines billing double the minutes used?

[Daniel Grigg]

When running a pipeline the 'build minutes used' is double the actual build minutes.  Eg, in one case:

Build duration: 28min 18s

Build minutes used: 1h 16s

A tooltip also says 'advanced features used in this pipeline consumed extra build minutes.

A few questions come to mind:

1. Why on earth is it using over double the duration?

2. What are these 'advanced features'?

3. How many minutes are they using?

4. Where on earth is some information on the pricing structure for all this? The only resources seem to just mention the number of minutes for your plan and a bit about excess minutes being charged at a rate.

It's pretty dodgy business practice to make this information so opaque.

[Caroline R]

Hi, @Daniel Grigg! 

Thank you for reaching out to Atlassian Community!

You can use the Advanced configurations on your YAML file for running services and running tests in parallel, or do things such as configuring a manual step and setting a maximum time for each step and configure 2x steps to get 8 GB of memory. By specifying the size of 2x, pipelines will use twice the number of build minutes.

In case you would like to read more about Advanced configuration, you can find this information in our documentation Configure bitbucket-pipelines.yml:

• https://support.atlassian.com/bitbucket-cloud/docs/configure-bitbucket-pipelinesyml

With that said, the most likely cause is that you are using Pipelines advanced features which would cause your build times to be discrepant with the real-world time the builds have actually run for.

If you feel comfortable sharing the configuration of your YAML file, you can post it here, so we can analyze this together (you can mask any info you don’t want to be visible).

Answering your question number 4, when accessing your Plan details page (workspace > Settings > Plan details), Bitbucket currently shows the build minutes used during this billing period and the build minutes remaining.

However, if you would like to see more details about your build minutes, we have released bitbucket-build-statistics Pipe to collect the build statistics at the repository level. This has been announced in the Bitbucket Pipes digest: October 2020 blog.

The Pipe is available here and with this Pipe, It is very easy to get the build statistics at the repository level. An example YAML file is below -

script:
  - pipe: atlassian/bitbucket-build-statistics:0.2.1
    variables:
      BITBUCKET_USERNAME: $BITBUCKET_USERNAME
      BITBUCKET_APP_PASSWORD: $BITBUCKET_APP_PASSWORD

We also have a feature request to improve the Pipelines usage and build minutes report:

• https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/BCLOUD-13637

I would suggest that you add your vote there (by selecting the Vote for this issue link) as the number of votes helps the development team and product managers better understand the demand for new features. 

You are more than welcome to leave any feedback, and you can also add yourself as a watcher (by selecting the Start watching this issue link) if you'd like to get notified via email on updates.

Implementation of new features is done as per our policy here and any updates will be posted in the feature request. 

I hope this helps, but do let me know if you have any questions. 

Kind regards,
Caroline