@fool As a follow up question, if the most recent commit was by a git contributor without a corresponding paid Netlify seat, does the build triggered by the hook use that latest commit?
I understand that the act of doing the commit itself wouldn’t trigger a build & deploy, but I’m not sure what the subsequent build hook would cause to happen.
I’m also not certain how that would behave (I expect as I described above, but I’ll check to whether a blocked pending build that you haven’t approved will prevent this from working as expected). I’ve put in the question to the team for us, Nathan.
Hi @fool, thank you for getting back to me!
I think these are what you are after? These were for a build on May 19 at 4:17 PM.
buildId: 62865f9645b502455027444e
deployId: 62865f9645b5024550274450
Also very good point @nathanmartin - I’d also like to know this please! Even if it doesn’t use the latest commit, would it still be able to deploy or would the ‘blocker’ prevent anything from deploying?
Thanks for your patience!
Can confirm that both:
Thanks for the confirmation @fool.
Based on the email just received:
All planned changes will now go live again on Tuesday, June 7th.
I believe previous indications were that it would go live May 31st.
The email confirms that there have been no changes to the new pricing model.
It reiterates the functionality changes:
Those with Pro or Business plans and “7 or more members” will still need to move to an Enterprise plan.
The Agencies section of the email again uses the phrase “mutually beneficial business” to describe what I presume is the Agency Team’s insistence that a per-client account within Netlify is “best practice”. I still fail to see how that configuration is “mutually beneficial”. I’d love for someone to explain how it benefits the agency.
Has anyone gotten confirmation if the new “Git Contributor” people count towards the 7 person limit before we’re forced into the more expensive Enterprise plan? Also how will this happen? Will my account just stop working in 4 days?
Also as a new customer how was I supposed to find out about this before you emailed me out of nowhere just now? It’s not mentioned on the Pricing page that I can see, nor is there any kind of warning in the dashboard.
hi coderanger,
I have some answers to your questions:
1.) Yes, git contributors do count towards the 7 person limit, this is correct.
2.) There will be some banners announcing these changes in the UI - i think these are already active, but you should definitely see them starting tomorrow.
3.) No, your account won’t stop working, but you are encouraged to either a.) limit your contributors to six or below, or b.)chat with our sales team at some point soon to discuss your usage and what upgrading would look like if a.) isn’t feasible.
4.) Good to hear that you received this most recent email. We’re the first to admit that our original roll out of these changes wasn’t communicated as well as it could have been and we made mistakes in doing so - some people were not notified when they should have been, or notified to their billing email addresses which not everyone checks. For complete transparency on how the rollout went, this thread is the place to start reading: Upcoming changes to Netlify plans
if you have any technical questions about your account, please do let us know.
Sorry, you’re planning to announce this in-application on the day it goes live? That’s certainly a choice. I hope that’s not how you plan to announce all disruptive product changes? Or am I responsible as a user to regularly monitor your support forums to find out about major updates?
Hi coderanger, we sent out several emails regarding these changes most recently - to the account owner email address. As far as we know, there have been no other complaints from people who said that they didn’t receive them this time around (as mentioned, we did make some mistakes and did not send to everyone a while ago when we first sent emails).
can you confirm that this is the account ownership email you have for netlify?
n***+netlify.com@g********l.com
I believe previous indications were that it would go live May 31st.
this is incorrect.
customers were able to opt-in to changes starting may 31st to give more time to communicate changes and make adjustment for new workflows.
changes will be actually turned back on (after being turned off until May 31) today, June 7.
I can only go from the information (or lack of) provided.
Until that new email the only date that had been mentioned at all was May 31st.
Unfortunately customers don’t have the same clarity that Netlify staff do.
It’s also a rather odd thing to take issue with, considering it was said a week ago.
How about instead of arguing over minutiae you provide answers to other questions that have been asked.
Are Git Contributors branch specific? I’m willing to get on board and I am COMPLETELY accepting and on-board with the idea of my published branches being subject to cost for people who commit and trigger a build costing money. Didn’t used to love it. I used to hate it. I drank the Kool aid. Take my money. I am on board with Git Contributors. Praise the Lord.
CASE STUDY: Let’s say I have a data driven GIT repo. A team of ten plucky and sadly paid University students are doing background data entry on a poorly funded research project repo. They sit in a dim room, over noodles and Bon Iver, smoking hash and entering data points to text files. They commit to their own branches, and are completely apart from any code. They don’t even know the repo publishes somewhere or even contains software. Later the team lead (one of the ten) merges their branches to master, which causes a build.
Is this one Git Contributor or ten Git Contributors?
@Perry Rephrasing the question above: am I able to make intentional choices about my total Netlify cost through good GitOps, to prevent junior users from committing to published branches? Or on a big project with lots of contributors, will no amount of GitOPs help me? It’s a question where I value the answer at tens of thousands of dollars. Either I can stay with Netlify or I can’t. Moving away (130 projects will be expensive) , staying will be expensive. My goal is to use GitOPs to limit commits to senior team members on all projects so team stays reasonable and cost stays reasonable, and I don’t have to move
Hey ferg, so, after chatting with product folks responsible for this (this is a great opportunity for me to repeat that, i, personally, am not a decision maker, merely the messenger who i promise, is carrying feedback both ways - same goes for all members of the support team) here is an update. It’s actually a good question so I am glad you asked it and we are going to make sure our docs also get updated shortly to clarify.
The way we’re envisioning things in your above scenario is that you have one Git contributor who is a team lead and who is responsible for squashing and merging those commits from branches into main and triggering a build. So, to answer your question, super succinctly, 1 GC, not ten.
@perry Thank you for being helpful in this thread, I understand that being the liaison is quite difficult on a multitude of levels. I’ve been a Netlify customer for quite a while now but I understand that the product vision of Netlify doesn’t aligned with our org size.
While the Git Contributor change is one we didn’t like, it was possible to just take it at our size. But I think the team size limit to 7 really does highlight the misalignment for our organization. It seems that Netlify would prefer to cater only to Enterprise customers. To be fair its a similar plan to what Vercel has (they require you to move at 10 engineers).
I personally don’t quite see the value of per contributor billing but that may be due to the Netlify products we use and the kind of value we get out of them. Either way, its been great being a Netlify customer. The support engineers on this forum are always really nice. But I think this will be the end of my journey with Netlify for now at least.
My analysis for other people watching this, upon a fairly deep investigation is:
Just wanted to share this in case it was useful to anyone reading this thread.
TLDR - Netlify, Vercel and Gatsby Cloud make more sense in the context of Enterprises than smaller organizations. If you have limited budget (or just don’t want to spend more than needed), look elsewhere.
Platforms like Netlify, Vercel and Gatsby Cloud only make sense from a teams perspective once you have > 15 engineers working on several projects concurrently and a meaningful across the board usage of the platform. The enterprise plans range (annually from $20K to $36K at a base level). We are a small team and primarily liked Netlify as a cross-framework deployment tool that had cool features like Deploy Previews, Collaborative Deploy Previews (static sites only), Forms (very very basic but it was something) and Functions (barely used them but they were good). That’s neither a team large enough nor enough usage to be worth it
When would Netlify be worth it?
If you have a very very large team such that small developer productivity increases are meaningful and plan to use a wide array of features by a wide array of stakeholders then it makes sense. Especially if you leverage the Graph & API functionality. Or have stakeholders that need to be involved in the Deploy Preview process like designers.
Same thing can be said for platforms like Vercel and Gatsby Cloud
What will I be using after this?
I’ll be migrating to Cloudflare and DigitalOcean after this. I’m in general going to be staying clear of per seating platforms unless there’s a more clear connection between the value each additional engineer provides relative to what the platform provides (like GitHub, Slack, etc.). If you want the closest to the Netlify experience I’d recommend Render.com
To break it down
Cloudflare - Static websites through Cloudflare Pages & Workers
DigitalOcean - Next.js websites and things like that. I’ll just suffer without Deploy Preview. Though I’ve heard that DO might be working on that functionality in the future.
This has been a truly sad conversation to follow along with. I used to recommend Netlify to everyone, but for me personally, those days are over. Here’s why:
Netlify has a great free tier that is meant to hook people in. Previously, the free to paid cost was slightly high imho, but within reason at $15 / $19 a person. Largely, if I added team members to Netlify, that was likely (but not always) correlated to increased usage on the platform (more traffic, more builds, etc). However, the combination of counting git contributors + the Enterprise requirement at 8 seats throws scaling out the window. If my current team hit 8 seats, we would be forced to leave Netlify. Additionally, having worked for actual Enterprise level teams before (100s of engineers, not single digits… ), we likely wouldn’t have used Netlify anyways because there is so much organization specific internal devops tooling doing Netlify’s job. Maybe if an organization had Netlify from the beginning, it would be a part of your core devops, but is anyone really sticking around now from 7 to 8 seats?
Generally from my point of view, the business decision here also makes no sense. Why should a product owner who wants to fix a misspelling in some documentation incur a $15-$99+ seat - that single commit affects the bottom line cost to Netlify 0% and it doesn’t generate any value for us as customers. Additionally, as someone also highlighted in the previous thread, how do we as customers get 420% more value out of Netlify when we go from 7 to 8 seats (assuming Enterprise is at minimum $99/seat)?
Finally, the fact that someone can get the majority of the same value out of Netlify by simply squashing commits to a single committer highlights that this per seat pricing is simply broken. If Netlify was going to make a pricing change, why not evaluate existing seat to usage metrics, and switch to usage based pricing over some period of time?
With all that said, our team is also making plans to migrate away from Netlify. Thanks for all the value you’ve provided to the community over the last few years. Its been a good run 
I am very frustrated by this change. One of our devs was classed as a Contributor today. I would like to merge them with another account, and then delete that account so that I am not billed. There needs to be a way to opt out - I don’t want to enable Contributors unless I have specifically invited them as members.
hi there @wmclaxton , did the dev you are referring to merge some code that kicked off a build? if yes, then they are indeed considered a contributor. All devs who merge production-triggering changes are considered contributors at this time, so the best way to keep team sizes small is to make sure that you keep the list of people who are allowed to merge production changes as small as you can.
A post was split to a new topic: Cancel my account
Hey, I don’t really understand the purpose
of this change and what this change really is
and I’m concerned about it to be honest, will
it charge me every time someone makes a PR and I’ll
merge it? Like I don’t think it’s a fair price for one-time
contributor who made a PR for me to get charged $40
am I misunderstanding the feature?