Unwanted extra building minutes

Hello there,

Is it possible to pause builds until end of month, instead of automatically being billed extra building minutes ?

I use Netlify for a side project, builds are triggered for every push on the master branch. I was billed $7 for extra minutes, but I don’t care that much if the site is not up to date until next month.

Is there an option somewhere? And can the $7 bill be canceled ? :pray: :innocent:

Thanks in advanced,

Hey @kaayru, at the moment, it is not possible to pause builds, but, we are actively working on more fine-grained control of the build process so that what you are describing will be a thing of the past.

I can’t quite give you a timeline just yet, but I promise we’ll publish an update when we are ready to say more.

Hello. How is this going? I’m on the same situation, and I don’t want those extra minutes you’re trying to bill me.
I didn’t get notifications at 50% nor 70%, so this is a bad surprise for me this month.
If this is not configurable I will just deactivate my site builds and move to a different provider

hi there @danielo515 - sorry to hear you are having trouble with this as well.

i’m interested in hearing why you may not have received the notifications we sent - if something isn’t working here, thats definitely a concern!
is the email associated with your netlify account where we would be sending notifications r******o@gmail.com? did you receive the notifications in your spam folder? thank you for checking for us.

Hello @perry, what should I search for? All my other netlify notifications reach my inbox without problem. I searches for the words “netlify” and “70%” and nothing came up.

hey there @danielo, so sorry to not have an answer for you.

i am going to try and see what the email should look like exactly. which other netlify emails have you been receiving? the reason i ask is we send different notifications from different services, for example, the netlify newsletter comes from a different mail service than any account notifications/billing things etc.

if one set of emails is getting to you but not the other, then something might be wrong on our end, and knowing what you are receiving would be helpful.

if you could let us know the last time you got an email from us and what kind if was, that would be great. thank you!

hello @perry, this month I received the 50% notification.
What I am more interested in is to disable the build commands when the maximum minutes had been reached.

hi Danielo,

I’ve passed the feedback back to the relevant teams - i don’t have anything specific to share at the moment, but if our approach to building and extra building minutes changes, we can let you know.

In the meantime, have you tried optimizing your site’s build so it uses less build minutes?

Hello @perry, it’s not an optimization problem, at least I don’t see it that way.
My problem is that I commit often, and that I push it several times a day. Because I have preview activated that leads to a lot of unnecessary builds.

When you link a site to a repo, by default we will build each time new commits are pushed upstream. However, if you have done many commits, we should only build the most recent one for the branches configured to build at Netlify.

So, with that in mind, one workflow would be to hold off on pushing commits to upstream until you are ready to test at Netlify. You commit locally but don’t run a git push until you want to trigger a build.

There are other workflows. For example, if you would prefer to be able to commit and push throughout the day repeatedly and not worry about triggering builds at Netlify, you can disable and re-enable builds at any time with the stop builds setting:

With that setting you can stop all builds for the site at Netlify while you work. Then, once you are ready to start testing the site on Netlify again, you can enable the builds again.

Does that setting meet your requirements, @danielo515? If not, would you please describe in more detail what your ideal solution or workflow would look like?

No, that does not meet my requirements. I want to configure Netlify to meet my needs, not to change my habits to avoid problems with Netlify.
All I want is Netlify stop building AND NOT AUTOMATICALLY BUY build minutes when I run out of build minutes.

Please make clear if you don’t plan to implement such feature for whatever reason.

I wrote a plugin to handle this for me:

2 Likes

Awesome! That was the kind of solution I was looking for.

Hi, @william. I just saw this now and I agree with @danielo515:

I also want to say “thank you” for sharing your plugin here! :thank_you: