Preventing Crypto Mining Abuse of Free Trials

Oct 20, 2021

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Travis CI, along with many other CI/CD providers, continues to experience abuse from cryptocurrency miners running builds using Free Trial credits. This abuse creates cost increases, performance issues, and diverts the attention of our Support and Engineering teams away from fixing other issues and making platform improvements. To reduce this abuse, starting October 20, 2021, Travis CI will require new Free Trial users (not paid users, existing trials, or Open Source users) to provide valid credit or debit card details in order to sign up. To repeat, this will only impact new Free Trial users.

How will this work?

When users sign up for a new Free Trial and provide their card details, a $1.00 authorization transaction will be added to the card for up to 7 days. This step helps us authenticate that the user is legitimate, and in turn will reduce the level of abuse. Users on the Free Trial will still be given 10,000 free credits and a 30-day trial period, and new users will be able to build during this hold period. To repeat: new Free Trial users will not be charged for Free Trial plans – the hold is temporary, and is only meant to validate the card.

We understand validating card details does not completely remove abuse from Free Trials. However, we do believe this is an important step in the right direction, and that this move will benefit all our customers.

About Travis CI

  • Travis CI is a Continuous Integration / Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) platform that enables developers to quickly and easily build, test, and deploy code. The ease-of-use and flexibility offered by Travis CI is core to software development as part of a modern DevOps toolchain.
  • Travis CI was founded in 2011 with a targeted mission of improving the creation of Open-Source Software (OSS). Since then, we have grown into one of the leading and most recognizable CI/CD providers in the market serving enterprises, individuals, and everything in between. Today, over 300,000 OSS projects use Travis CI, including Ruby on Rails, Ember.js, OpenSSL, Puppet, and Logstash, as well as large enterprises including IBM, Zendesk, BitTorrent, Heroku, MOZ and many others.
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Questions or feedback?

Tell us what you are thinking by emailing [email protected]!

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Tessa