CI/CD Cost Optimization#
CI/CD costs grow quietly. A team of ten pushing five times a day, running a 15-minute pipeline on 4-core runners, burns through 2,500 build minutes per week. On GitHub Actions at $0.008/minute for Linux runners, that is $20/week. Scale to fifty developers with integration tests, matrix builds, and nightly jobs, and you are looking at $500-$2,000/month before anyone notices.
The fix is not running fewer tests or skipping builds. It is eliminating waste: jobs that use more compute than they need, caches that are never restored, full builds triggered by README changes, and runners sitting idle between jobs.
