Credit-Based Pricing vs. Fixed Pricing for Mobile CI/CD Platforms (Appcircle, Bitrise, Codemagic)

There has been a major change in Bitrise mobile CI/CD pricing from fixed pricing (concurrency-based) to a credit-based (pay-as-you-go) model without any option to stick with the previous concurrency-based pricing plans.

This raised questions about Bitrise alternatives with fixed pricing and fixed concurrencies, and in this article, I will walk you through why concurrency-based pricing is more beneficial for the majority of the users in the mobile CI/CD world.

These are my own opinions, of course and it’s natural that everyone may have a different perspective.

What are the Bitrise alternatives for fixed pricing?

With the recommendations below, you can get more information on to which mobile DevOps provider to switch from Bitrise for more predictable pricing. (e.g. Appcircle is a viable Bitrise alternative.)

Bitrise exclusively operates with pay-as-you-go pricing, whereas Codemagic uses pay-as-you-go in lower tiers and Appcircle uses concurrency-based fixed pricing in all tiers.

I believe in the advantages of a predictable, fixed model for mobile CI/CD and I recommend switching from Bitrise to Appcircle for fixed and potentially lower costs.

What are the differences between pay-as-you-go and fixed pricing in mobile CI/CD?

From the example of a different use case, you can purchase a movie (pay-as-you-go) from a digital media platform for each movie you’d like, or you can subscribe to a streaming service and stream as many movies as you like.

Some people will prefer the former and some the latter, depending on various factors. However, in all cases, you know exactly what you will get. The runtimes and the plots of the movies are predetermined.

However, in mobile CI/CD, the builds are unpredictable. There are so many parameters that affect the build time and the number of builds you will need before you get a successful build or a successful binary even if the build is successful.

So, you will never know the exact runtime of a build. Something may go wrong, and your automatic build may take hours before you realize that something is wrong.

In a fixed-price plan, this does not cause any trouble, it just takes away a concurrency and other builds may be delayed a bit. However, in a pay-as-you-go plan, this means that you will have to pay for these wasted hours. (So, the increased timeout period in a pay-as-you-go plan may actually be more beneficial to the provider than the user.)

Why do mobile CI/CD work better with concurrency-based costs?

Moreover, mobile CI/CD has additional quirks that can easily multiply the number of build minutes such as the need for building both for iOS and Android and sometimes separately for different target OS versions.

Suddenly, even the smallest app starts consuming high number of build minutes, which may be concerning in a pay-as-you-go setting. However, in a concurrency-based setting, you can just run multiple builds for different targets without worrying about additional cost of each target.

Is credit-based pricing a potential impediment to agility and flexibility?

The short answer is yes. (That’s why you can switch to Appcircle for concurrency-based plans.)

Especially for budget-conscious teams, pay-as-you-go plans goes against agility. Sometimes, you can make code commits after every line of code and on a pay-as-you-go plan, you would be reluctant to get automatics builds due to the cost and the unpredictability, causing you to miss the real benefit of mobile CI/CD.

However, in a fixed-price plan, you can initiate any number of builds in a high frequency without worrying about costs. Yes, there might be the issue of concurrency and queuing in this case, but you can then add a new concurrency as you wish, and your total cost will still be predictable.

Above all things, a developer should never worry about if their next commit will cause additional bills.

The same applies to the concept of “flexibility”. A pay-as-you-go plan indeed provides flexibility at the expense of predictability, but this shouldn’t be the case.

From the largest enterprises to the smallest developer team, the predictability is more crucial than it seems. What if the enterprise team runs out of the allocated budget before the next budgeting period? Or what if a small team gets devastated with an unexpected bill?

With the right mobile CI/CD platform like Appcircle, you don’t need to sacrifice flexibility to use concurrency-based plans.

What should you do if you want to keep your old Bitrise Plan?

You can migrate to a provider like Appcircle to continue using a concurrency-based plan.

All-in-all, for most mobile CI/CD users, concurrency-based fixed pricing is likely to be more preferable over credit-based fluctuating pricing.

For this reason, you can prefer Appcircle over Bitrise for a more predictable pricing model while maintaining a similar level of flexibility and performance.