My next piece...

While BitBucket Pipelines, CircleCI and SonarCloud have free tiers there are limits. For example with BitBucket Pipelines you only get 50 build minutes a month on the free tier. The next step up is $15/month and then you get 2500 build minutes. On the free CircleCI tier you get 2500 build minutes per month, but you can only use public repositories, which means anyone and everyone can see your code. Private repositories start at ￡15 per month. With SonarCloud you can analyse as many lines of code as you like, but again you have your code in a public repository or pay $10 per month for the first 100,000 lines of code.

If you want Continuous Integration (BitBucket Pipelines/CircleCI) and a Static Analyses repository which includes Code Coverage (Sonarcloud) - let’s face it, all but the most trivial of projects do - and you need to have your source code private, you’re looking at $15 per month, if you can manage with only 50 build minutes per month or more likely $30 per month, $360 per month.

That’s not a lot of money for a large software company, although as the number of users goes up so does the price, or even a well funded startup or SME. For a personal project without funding it’s a lot of money. 

Cost isn’t the only drawback with these approaches, you can lose some flexibility as well.

The alternative is to build your own development pipelines. I bet you’re thinking that setting up these tools from scratch is a royal pain in the arse and will take hours when the cloud solutions can be setup in minutes. Not to mention running and managing your own pipeline on your personal machine and don’t they suck resources when they’re running in the background all the time? And shouldn’t they be setup on isolated machines? What if I told you you could set all of this up in about an hour and turn it all on and off as necessary with a single command? And if you wanted too, you could run it all on a Digital Ocean Droplet for around $10 per month. Interested?