I’ve been a Netlify user for a while now, and loved the 300 minute/month limit. Recently, I went to update one of my sites using the inbuilt AI. I had to turn on Credit-based billing to do so.
It has been ONE DAY (16 deploys, one AI request), and I have ALREADY used 277.6/300 credits for this month. That’s because 1 deploy is 15 CREDITS. IT’S INFURIATING, because now, I can’t deploy anymore, and I’m updating sites so often. But still, 16 deploys and one AI request costing 277.6 credits is insane. If we kept using the old billing, I wouldn’t have even used a quarter of my limit.
@SerialDesignationN I hear you, it’s quite unfortunate, but Netlify do have a bit of a history of introducing their price increases either “under the guise of” or “in tandem with”new features.
The introduction of credit based pricing was also a price increase for most use cases.
I believe by Netlify’s logic, to reduce your usage you should be trying to perform as many builds as you can as a “preview deploy”, which apparently don’t consume credits.
To get the most out of Netlify don’t use any build credits and deploy with the API.
We did 460 deployments in last 90 days and used 0/300 build credits.
Keep bandwidth usage to minimum by aiming for maximum page weight of 100Kb and using a digital media service with its own free plan to serve images.
Netlify’s free plan is ridiculously generous in order to support the popular but hugely inefficient git→ssg→deploy process.
Replace git→ssg with your own server process that deploys directly using the API and you won’t use any build credits at all. Manage your source for all assets in the server process so that deploys only send data when required - e.g. only send HTML/CSS/JS etc when source has changed since previous deploy. Deploying 100 page blog site for example using API takes maximum 50 seconds when all assets are deployed; deploying same 100-page blog when only 1 HTML has changed takes 2 seconds.
