It's been another exciting month iterating on Depot! We have been adding new features, fixing bugs, and ironing out what pricing looks like. We have many exciting developments and updates, so let's dive in.
Project tokens
Project tokens have launched, allowing you to create an API token that can be used to build just a single project. We now support three ways you can authenticate builds: user access tokens, OIDC tokens, and project tokens.
Project tokens provide a better method for authenticating builds from CI providers where OIDC tokens are not supported. They are tied to a specific project in a single organization, unlike user access tokens that are tied to a user and grant access to all projects and organizations that user can access.
In GitHub Actions, we support OIDC tokens and recommend them over project or user tokens. OIDC trust relationships allow GitHub Actions to retrieve a short-lived access token for the build that, similar to project tokens, can only access the projects that have been allowed for that repository.
For all other CI providers, we recommend using project tokens for authentication.
Usage-based pricing
Our usage-based pricing for Depot is live 🎉
We are charging $25 per project and 5¢ per build minute. So, an organization with 4 projects and 1000 build minutes in a month would pay $150 — $100 for the projects and $50 for the build minutes. An organization with 0 projects and 0 build minutes would pay nothing.
Originally, we had planned to charge the standard good/better/best flat-rate pricing, with increasingly more expensive and larger plans, but the initial perception was that you would always be overpaying for "unused" resources. With the usage-based model, we are now charging you just for the resources you use!
We also heard that it can be easy to overcomplicate usage-based pricing, so we've kept the calculation simple, billing only on number of active projects and time actually used to run builds.
New onboarding flow
We made some improvements to our onboarding flow to help get you started with Depot, with better organization, a dynamic checklist flow to guide you through setting up your org and projects, and a getting started page for running your first build.
Let us know if you have feedback or other pain points we could eliminate!
What's next?
We are excited about a couple of big projects we are working on as we move closer to our vision of faster builds for all CI providers and technologies:
CircleCI integration
Today, Depot provides fast remote Docker builders, focused on speeding up container builds in both continuous integration environments and on local machines.
However, our vision for Depot is to make everything in CI faster, automatically, and without any additional configuration, using our specialized builder compute technology.
Our first step in that direction is an integration with CircleCI that allows Depot to be connected as a remote builder (CircleCI self-hosted runner). This routes build requests to our builders, accelerating builds automatically. We are prototyping this integration today, however after CircleCI, we plan to expand to other CI providers like GitHub Actions.
Please reach out if you want to give it a try, both to speed up your Circle builds and lower your overall CI spend.
Self-hosted Depot builders
We are also working on the option to launch Depot builder instances inside your own cloud account. We are starting with initial support for AWS and the new CircleCI builders, but plan to expand to other builder types (e.g., Docker) and other clouds in the future.
Today, we launch and manage all aspects of your builder instances for you. However, some organizations have specialized needs that require them to self-host their CI builders. With our new self-hosted support, those organizations can continue to use Depot as the "management plane" for their CI builders, but the builders will launch inside the customer's cloud account instead.
We're planning to support self-hosted builders on a per-project basis, so organizations can additionally choose for each project where its builds should execute.
More details about self-hosted builders will be available soon.
Get started
- Get started with Depot today: depot.dev/sign-up
- Follow us on Twitter: @depotdev