GitHub Actions Getting Expensive? We Cut CI Costs to a Quarter With a One-Line Change
AI-driven development inflates CI cost on two axes at once: more runs, and more tasks you now want CI to do. We migrated our GitHub Actions runners twice, from GitHub-hosted to Blacksmith to Namespace, and measured everything along the way. Per-run CI cost dropped to roughly a quarter, p90 came down 37%, and silent never-finishing runs went from 32 to zero. Failure story included: we skipped estimating peak concurrency and had to roll back in two days.