How does this promotion works exactly? Is it only valid for one month (unlimited mac builds) or do I have 30 * 24 * 60 free mac build minutes credited to my account? If so, where can I see how many minutes do I have left? Or how can I be sure this promotion was applied to my account?
They answer this question if you read other forum threads.
Mind pointing out to the discussion? Can’t find it
Sure. There is this thread: DevOps Pricing??
But which promotion exactly are you referring to? (I would assume it’s 1 month calendar time and then after that no longer free, otherwise they would state it in terms of minutes)
Thanks, but that is not exactly what I’m referring to.
Here’s part of the email I received:
Notice the "if you migrate before June 18, you will receive one month of Mac Build minutes free of charge, starting when your Teams Advanced subscription ends."
Which is kind of confusing because from that sentence I would assume that means ~ 30 * 24 * 60 minutes credited to my account. But judging from the pricing increase, that seems to good to be true, but then why not just says something like free unlimited mac build for one month?
Not a big fan of the recent price change, having build time metered by actual time instead of CPU hours and no way to automatically delete old builds to free storage space doesn’t inspire trust to the service. And doing a little back of the napkin math, it doesn’t make sense financially, I don’t get to whom this service is targeted to specifically, too pricey for indie / individual and even low to mid size studio would have their own build machine with jenkin… Even for small project doing one build is measured in $ not cents…
Anyway, I was a pretty happy customer but look like I might just bit the bullet and buy a mac mini soon.
I see what you mean now.
Yeah I have yet to properly do the math estimates but I hear you and am in the same boat to a large degree. But I also recognize that all “tech” companies are right now in the midst of downsizing and tightening their belts. Massive amounts of layoffs across all the major and minor players (the bigger names just get more news coverage). The era of courting “indies” and subsidized pricing is over, not just at Unity but other game services (eg: PlayFab). This shift aligns their services to be similar to the like of Azure, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, etc who do metered billing.
I discovered today that they have a budgeting and alert system and it looks really easy to set up, so at least runaway costs can be prevented rather quickly with that.
EDIT: Regarding what you said about deleting old builds. In another thread, a Unity staff said the builds don’t take up space in the repository. I took that to mean it doesn’t incur any usage, but you’ve got me curious again. Let me know if you figure that one out.
Yeah I understand their issue of having to be profitable and whatnot (still think it’s a better investment long-term to court indies into using their platform tbh but I’m no business man and is biased for sure).
It just seems really not competitive at all when all alternatives seems to be way less costly.
If only they would have a reasonably priced bundle tier of 1000 (or 2000) minutes per month or something, so I could be comfortable with a fixed price per month for my nightly builds for 1 project and pay the extra if I go over the limit.
The budgeting / alert system is great, I wish more metered services would do that (although somewhat buggy right now as if I activate it, I’m lock out of doing any builds because their system think I’m above the limit… Despite my usage showing 0 and having only done about 2-3 builds since migrating).
Basically from what I understand (from this thread ), previous builds artifacts from before the migration are not counted toward the usage (for now). But let say you configure a nightly build (and don’t delete them manually ever), the storage of artifacts will keep increasing, and those builds, if not deleted, will still count toward the usages for the next month, and the next one after that. So you have to actually manually delete your nightly builds to be sure you don’t rake up an insane bill as time goes on.
I’ve been using this service for 3 or 4 years, and never deleted any builds, I just assumed they had some build retention setup behind the scene that all artifacts would get deleted after 60 days or something. I mean, storage is incredibly cheap. From their own example (they are talking about a somewhat extreme case but not impossible when considering a project has multiple targets and is doing nightly build) of $478 per month (storage alone) for 3450GB. I mean, that seems extremely costly considering they could just send that to some cold storage like Glacier for way less than that. Obviously this is a case where someone never delete their builds but still surface how bad the pricing is.