Developer kills CI on main after $6k/month bill with just 4 engineers
lightninglu10 · x · 2026-10-19
A developer shared that with 4 engineers shipping heavily, his CI bill approached $6k/month, so he decided to stop running CI on main after merges—planning to re-enable it only when revenue justifies the expense.
He also pushes back on AI assistants' common advice that a PR which already ran the same checks on an up-to-date main branch shouldn't rerun CI. He argues that's bad advice from pre-AI training data: at his clients' shipping velocity, PRs fall behind main more than 80% of the time, and enforcing "PRs must be up to date with main" would trigger even more builds.