CI/CD Platforms Will Murder Your Budget

Every CI/CD vendor uses a different pricing model designed to extract maximum cash while keeping you confused about actual costs. Here's how they fuck you:

User-Based Pricing sounds straightforward until you see the actual numbers. GitLab Ultimate runs like $100 per person monthly - so your 50-person team costs 60K annually just for licenses. Azure DevOps starts at $6/user which looks cheap until you realize you get one parallel job and your builds queue up like it's fucking 2005.

Credit-Based Bullshit is CircleCI's thing. They give you 30K credits monthly which sounds generous until a GPU build eats through them instantly. We had our ML team burn through the entire month's allocation in a few days because nobody warned them how expensive those builds are. Extra credits are like $15 per 25K and they fucking expire.

GitHub's Mixed Approach charges $21/user for Enterprise, then hits you with Actions minutes at $0.008 each. Our bill exploded to something crazy like 15K one month when someone triggered infinite recursive workflows. The billing alert showed up weeks later because of course it did.

The Hidden Bullshit That Will Bankrupt You

The reality: "Hidden" costs like compute overages, storage fees, and support charges will double your actual bill within months.

Your CI/CD costs will triple after the first year due to shit they don't mention in sales demos:

Self-hosted runners destroy AWS bills. GitHub wants 2-core machines with 7GB RAM minimum - that's like $150/month per runner on EC2. You need way more capacity during release cycles though. We went from 5 runners to 20 when Node 18.2.0 builds started timing out. AWS bill went from like $700 to over 3K monthly when you include all the storage and networking bullshit.

Premium support is mostly bullshit. CircleCI wants an extra 2K monthly for 24/7 support. GitLab includes it in Ultimate but you still wait hours for responses. Azure DevOps support is classic Microsoft - they'll tell you to restart everything and bill you for it.

Migration costs are insane. Moving from Jenkins to GitLab took us 8 months and cost probably 150K in consultant fees, plus all the internal time. Every plugin needed rewriting, every integration broke. We spent months just figuring out artifact migration. The consultant charged us like $500/hour to tell us to restart containers.

Docker registry storage sneaks up on you. GitLab gives you 10GB which sounds fine until your team pushes 2GB images daily. Registry costs went from zero to like $800/month in a few weeks. Nobody warns you about this shit.

Real-world CI/CD costs scale exponentially with team size, build complexity, and compliance bullshit.

Stop reading the sales brochures. Here's what CI/CD platforms actually cost when you're dealing with real teams building real software that needs to ship on Friday.

Small Team (25-50 developers) - "We're Trying to Be Cheap"

Azure DevOps looks like a steal at $270/month for 45 users, until you discover you get one parallel job. Builds queue for hours during releases. Want another job? $40/month each. By month 3 you're paying like $350/month and devs are taking smoke breaks waiting for builds.

GitHub Enterprise runs about $1K/month for 50 users and includes 50K Actions minutes. Sounds generous but our React app with Jest tests takes 15 minutes per build. 20 builds daily across 10 apps hits 90K minutes. Overages start hitting a few hundred monthly pretty quick.

GitLab Ultimate costs almost 5K/month for 50 users. Expensive as fuck but includes everything. Sometimes paying more upfront beats debugging billing alerts at 2am.

Medium Team (100-200 developers) - "We're Getting Serious"

GitLab Ultimate runs like $10-20K monthly depending on team size, but the 50K CI minutes disappear fast. With 150 devs we'd burn through minutes by the 10th every month. Overages averaged like 2.5K monthly. Total cost around $14-15K/month.

CircleCI Scale sales promised "predictable costs" but we ended up paying way more when our ML team started using GPU builds. A single PyTorch training job costs a decent chunk of credits. Nobody warned the data science team about GPU pricing.

GitHub Enterprise seemed reasonable at like $3K/month for 150 users until Actions minutes became the bottleneck. Self-hosted runners on AWS cost another couple grand monthly. Registry overages added more. Real cost around 6K/month plus we kept hitting disk space errors.

The winner? Jenkins on Kubernetes. Costs like $800/month in AWS compute, takes months to set up properly, and requires a full-time DevOps engineer at 130K/year. Sometimes the "free" option costs more than everything else.

Large Enterprise (500+ developers) - "Money Is No Object (Until It Is)"

At enterprise scale, custom negotiations and compliance shit multiply costs way beyond list prices.

At 500+ developers you're in custom pricing territory where vendors smell money. Learned this when our GitLab migration brought down prod for 4 hours because nobody tested the registry failover properly.

GitLab Ultimate enterprise deals start around 400K annually with big discounts off list price. Sounds good until you see the "professional services" costs adding another 200K. Migration took over a year and went way over budget.

GitHub Enterprise negotiated down to like $8K/month base for 500 users plus unlimited Actions minutes. But Advanced Security costs extra $7/user monthly, adding 40K+ annually. Dedicated runners in your VPC cost another 15K/month. Total around 280K annually.

CircleCI Scale enterprise pricing is "call us." They quoted 50K/year base plus credits. Our builds ate through millions of credits monthly. Not terrible until traffic spikes triggered autoscaling and the CI bill exploded.

Self-hosted Jenkins on AWS with dedicated DevOps team runs around 300K annually but scales however you want. No vendor lock-in, no surprise bills. Takes years to build properly though.

Industry-Specific Bullshit

Financial Services - SOC 2 compliance adds 50% to every contract. GitLab Ultimate with compliance features runs 600K annually. Add consultants for another 300K. Audit prep costs more. Compliance tax is brutal.

Healthcare/HIPAA - Everything needs dedicated environments and BAAs. Self-hosted GitLab on dedicated AWS costs 3x normal pricing. Compliance consultants charge like $500/hour. Budget double for everything.

Government/Defense - FedRAMP certification means CloudBees or GitLab Dedicated. Pricing starts at 1M annually with 3-year minimums. Air-gapped environments need on-prem hardware. Budget 2M+ for the first year.

The Reality Check Nobody Talks About

Azure DevOps looks cheap until you realize one parallel job means your entire team shares a single build queue. Each extra job costs $40/month, turning that "$6/user" into way more.

"Unlimited" build minutes becomes meaningless when 50 people fight over one build slot. You'll buy 10+ parallel jobs just to stay sane during releases.

The math: $6 × 45 users + $400 parallel jobs = $670/month base. Add storage, test plans, and other features, and you're at over 1K/month. Still cheaper than GitLab, but not the "$6/user" they advertise.