How to Cut Your CI Costs by 10x with One Line of Code

Jan 27, 2025
3 min to read
DevOps
CI/CD
GitHub Actions
Cost Optimization

How to Cut Your CI Costs by 10x with One Line of Code

How to Cut Your CI Costs by 10x with One Line of Code

In a world where efficiency and developer velocity are paramount, CI costs can quietly eat into your margins. Here's how I slashed mine by 10x—literally—with a single line of code.

Continuous Integration (CI) is a cornerstone of modern software development. Whether you're shipping daily, hourly, or by feature branch, CI pipelines ensure your code is tested, built, and deployed in a reliable way. But for all their utility, CI platforms come at a price—and for many startups and solo developers, that price is too high.

The Cost of Modern CI

Platforms like GitHub Actions and CircleCI have become the industry standard for CI/CD. Their simplicity and rich ecosystems are attractive, but they also charge a premium for compute time—especially if you need larger runners, concurrency, or self-hosted capabilities.

For example:

At scale, that adds up.

Enter Ubicloud: Disrupting the CI Compute Layer

Ubicloud is a relatively new player that takes a fundamentally different approach. Instead of charging for CI minutes, they offer bare-metal, cost-effective cloud compute. This allows you to run GitHub Actions on fast, reliable runners—at a fraction of the price.

Ubicloud's offering is especially attractive because:

  • Runners are open-source compatible (just plug into GitHub Actions with self-hosted labels).
  • They provide standardized machine types, like ubicloud-standard-2, optimized for CI/CD.
  • There's no vendor lock-in—just lower-level access to compute.

The One-Line Change That Saved Me 10x

Here's the beautiful part. My existing GitHub Actions config looked like this:

runs-on: ubuntu-24.04

After switching to Ubicloud's self-hosted runners, it became:

runs-on:
  labels: ubicloud-standard-2-ubuntu-2404

And that's it.

With just that change, I was running my entire CI pipeline on infrastructure that costs roughly 10x less. No changes to my workflows. No additional YAML gymnastics. Just massive savings with minimal friction.

Real Results

Before the switch:

  • Monthly CI cost: ~$100 (for typical PRs + deploys across a small SaaS project)

After the switch:

  • Monthly CI cost: ~$10 (Ubicloud credits + highly efficient self-hosted runners)

Performance also improved in many cases, as these bare-metal runners have better startup latency and resource consistency.

Bonus: More Control & Visibility

Running on Ubicloud also means:

  • You can monitor and tweak performance at the infra level.
  • You avoid rate limits or surprises from shared runner throttling.
  • You gain sovereignty over your CI workloads—important for security-minded teams.

How to Try It

Ubicloud has excellent docs for GitHub self-hosted runners and supports Docker, Kubernetes, and raw systemd-based setups.

Getting started is straightforward:

  1. Sign up for Ubicloud and connect your GitHub repository
  2. Add a payment method (though they provide 1200 free minutes to get started)
  3. Register a self-hosted runner pointing to your repo or org

If you're currently using:

  • GitHub Actions, you can register a self-hosted runner pointing to your repo or org.
  • CircleCI, you can migrate jobs to a GitHub Actions equivalent and switch over.

Final Thoughts

This isn't just a cost optimization trick—it's a strategic decision. CI/CD is a vital part of your developer experience, but it shouldn't be where your budget disappears.

If you're looking to:

  • Lower costs
  • Increase speed
  • Maintain full GitHub Actions compatibility

... then it's hard to justify not trying Ubicloud.

🔗 Useful Links:

Want help switching to cheaper CI? Contact me here or follow me on X (Twitter) for more dev tips and infrastructure hacks.