Pricing

An active user is a user that has triggered a Satellite build at least three times during a month. Triggering a build can be done by either performing a Satellite build directly via the earthly CLI, or indirectly, by pushing code to a repository, and that push being picked up by a CI that uses a Earthly Satellites to perform the build.

The number of active users is tracked by monitoring who triggered the build. The build may be triggered either directly by the user in their terminal, or indirectly by a CI system. In the latter case, the triggering user is inferred via commit metadata. The triggering user does not have to be a user registered with Earthly. In some cases, if the triggering user cannot be inferred from commit metadata, then the user logged into Earthly CLI in the CI run is used as the triggering user. A triggering user becomes an active user if they trigger the build at least three times during a month. At the end of a billing cycle, if the number of paid users is greater than the number of active users, the difference is refunded to the user in the form of statement credit. If you would like to estimate the number of active users that a project uses, please check out the github.com/earthly/lib/billing+active-users target.

Ease-in pricing allows you to pay the price of lower tiers for the first few active users of the higher tier. This prevents drastic bill increases when jumping from one tier to the next.

Zero-margin compute is a pricing model where the cost of compute is passed on directly to the user, without any profit-generating margin. This allows us, the CI vendor, to better align our incentives with the end-user. Slow builds should not mean more profit for us.

The cost of compute is based on the AWS rack price for the instances that are used underneath, plus the cost of cache storage and the cost of network ingress/egress incurred. All of these costs are packaged as an all-inclusive per-minute cost and is then passed on directly to the user, without any profit-generating margin.

Satellites are single-tenant remote runners managed by the Earthly team. Satellites power the Earthly CI backbone, and as such, every pipeline created runs on its own dedicated satellite. Satellites may also be created manually, to be used as remote executors in development workflows. A subscription to Earthly Satellite allows you to use only satellites directly, without the Earthly CI web interface or automated GitHub triggers. Common use-cases for using standalone satellites include: - Using satellites on top of a traditional CI, in order to take advantage of the Earthly caching and parallelization capabilities without switching the CI system to Earthly CI - Using satellites in local development workflows in order to share compute and cache with colleagues - Using satellites in order to execute x86 builds on ARM (or Apple Silicon) machines, or vice-versa A subscription to Earthly CI allows access to both the CI capabilities, and also to the standalone satellite capabilities.

Satellites are remote runners managed by the Earthly team. The Satellite-only package contains the same features and limits of the respective CI tier, except that it does not include the CI functionality. Satellites can be used via the Earthly CLI, either from developer machines or from a traditional CI, but they do not trigger automatically from GitHub activity the way a CI would. To read more about Satellites visit the Earthly Satellites product page.

The usage of Satellites is tracked by monitoring the Satellites for active builds. If there are no active builds,the Satellite goes to sleep automatically after some time. When a Satellite is asleep, it is not billed for compute. When a build is started, the Satellite is woken up automatically and billed for compute.

The number of Satellites depends on the amount of workload they need to handle. For maximum performance, you can create a different Satellite for each CI pipeline. In some setups, where the CI pipelines are small, that might be an overkill. The best method to determine the number of satellites is to start with one or two, and add more as needed. Earthly prints information on build startup about how loaded the Satellite is currently. This can be used as a guide to determine if more Satellites are needed.

Yes, but you have to pay for 5 seats minimum for Starter, and 15 seats minimum for Team, even if you are only using a few active user seats.