Pricing Aligned with Productivity

The number of users is tracked by monitoring who triggered a Satellite build at least three times during a month. Builds may be triggered either directly by the user in their terminal, or indirectly by pushing code to a repository, and that push being picked up by a CI that uses Earthly Satellites to perform the build. 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. At the end of a billing cycle, if the number of paid users is greater than the number of actual users, the difference is refunded to the customer in the form of a statement credit. If you would like to estimate the number of users that a project has according to how we track users, please check out the github.com/earthly/lib/billing+active-users target.

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 build runners managed by the Earthly team. Satellites are used as remote executors in development workflows and with other CI tools. Satellites also power the Earthly CI backbone, and as such, every Earthly CI pipeline created runs on its own dedicated satellite. Common use cases for using 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.

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

The number of satellites you need depends on the workload they need to handle. For maximum performance, you can create a different satellite for each CI pipeline. This may be overkill for some setups though, where CI pipelines are small. The best method to determine the number of satellites you need 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, you can use the Pro and Team tiers for teams of any size.