Change in Azure Pipelines Grant for Private Projects

Vijay Machiraju

Azure Pipelines has been offering free CI/CD to customers since the beginning. This allows people trying out Azure DevOps to use nearly all our features, including Microsoft-hosted agents, without having to pay us anything. We offer 1800 free minutes per month on hosted agents to all projects, and 10 parallel jobs to open source projects.

Earlier this year, we announced a change in the process for getting the free tier in public projects. That change was made to handle the abuse of hosted agent pools and to protect the interests of existing customers. While that effort has been successful in stopping abuse from public projects, it shifted the pattern of usage from public projects to private projects.

To address this new vector, we will be selective about automatically providing the free grant for private projects in new organizations. When you create a new organization, you may not get the free tier of 1800 minutes in private projects. (Note that the logic that determines whether you get that concurrency automatically or need to request it may change over time as we improve our ability to estimate the potential for abuse of newly created organizations.) If you do not get the free tier, you can always request it by filling out this form.

This change does not impact any existing organizations. It only impacts new private projects that you create in new Azure DevOps organizations.

Please note that it takes us 2-3 business days to review and respond to your request. If everything is in order, we enable the free tier directly. If not, we may contact you for additional information. If you do not have the free tier in your organization a week after your request and if you did not hear from us in that timeframe, please follow up with us.

We understand that this is not an ideal customer experience. So, we are working on mechanisms to automatically detect when we can safely grant the free tier to an organization. We are sorry for the inconvenience this will cause for some of our customers.