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.
Are you on a legacy pricing plan? From what I’ve read, any production deploy, whether using the automatic git deploys, the CLI, or the API, will consume 15 credits. I’d be happy to learn that I’m wrong here and there’s a way to reduce deploy credit usage.
If you don’t want to consume any build minutes then you have to re-think the conventional process involving git repository and static site generator. It’s entirely normal that Netlify should charge for this resource-intensive processing.
If you can manage your site content in your own database server then deployment in Netlify can be reduced to a minimal sequence of API calls as follows:
POST the site deployment - a JSON array of file names and their SHA1 values
PUT each asset required from the POST
This is exactly what a Netlify deployment does at the end of the build and why it incurs zero build minutes - the trick is to maintain and build your site assets yourself to replace the traditional build steps ivolving GIT repository and static site generator.
Another advantage of doing it this way is that shared assets across multiple sites incur zero deployment cost - you just POST entries with the “shared” SHA1 value - and Netlify won’t ask you to PUT the file contents. In this way, it’s highly efficient deploying test/live sites where the live site is basically a single POST with all the SHA1 from the previous test deployment.
I think you’re on a legacy pricing plan. I created my Netlify account last month. I’m not being charged for “build minutes”, but a flat 15 credits per production deployment. I don’t think there’s a way around this in their new pricing model.
I just created an account, then asked AI to create a site since I Did Not easily see a navigational path to creating my first site per guidance steps received from Claude, so I asked AI prompt to create a site, the AI generated some junk app and because I didn’t have time to figure out what had happened i let it sit, now it seems this is chewing up my credit when essentially the AI generated an app I never touched or deployed, how does that happen? Honestly, that’s a red flag for me.
