
Ask HN: Why Are CI SaaS Expensive? - csomar
I&#x27;ve been shopping for Continuous Integration SaaS and they seem to have a high starting price point.<p>Here are the three I know of:<p>Travis CI: Minimum $69&#x2F;month for 1 concurrent job.<p>Circle CI: Minimum $50&#x2F;month for 2 concurrent jobs.<p>Codeship: Minimum $50&#x2F;month for 1 concurrent job.<p>Circle CI and Codeship have free private plans with limited builds&#x2F;time builds per month. Otherwise the starting price is $50. My understanding is that CI only requires to spin a server to run the tests. So the actually cost should be 5-10$&#x2F;month depending on how powerful it is the machine they are spinning. But that assumes that the user is CI&quot;ing&quot; full time.<p>So is their software licensing fee sitting around $40&#x2F;month?<p>Do you find that expensive or reasonable?
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true_religion
I don't find that very expensive.

For a years service on 1 VM, its $600, which is cheaper than the 10 hour
minimum that it would take for an in-house dev to set it up and maintain it
for a year as a bare bones platform.

Plus there's all the other features like multi-user authorization, logging,
plugins to other systems, graphs of deployments, secure keychains, etc. that
we get for the same price and none of which we need to develop or maintain
ourselves.

It's worth it.

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onion2k
The key when it comes to working out how much you're going to charge for
something is to _completely ignore what it costs to provide it_ [1] and focus
on the value it provides to the customer and what your competitors charge. In
the case of CI products it appears the products provide a decent amount of
value and the competitors all charge at least $50/month.

[1] Obviously you don't go below that, because you'd be making a loss, but
still.

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csomar
Yes. What I'm wondering if there cost is how far their actual raw cost (beyond
development costs) is to $50.

