Hey everyone! I just finished migrating our team's CI from Travis CI (legacy) to Buildkite and the cost difference is... significant. I've seen a lot of "which is cheaper?" threads, but not many with real numbers for a team our size, so I wanted to share our breakdown.
We're a 50-person dev team, averaging about 300 builds per month. Our builds are a mix of medium complexity: backend services (Docker builds, tests), frontend apps (builds and linting), and some integration suites. On Travis CI, we were on the "Pro" plan and our monthly invoice was consistently hitting **$489**. That's mostly compute minutes, with some overage charges.
Switching to Buildkite meant moving to a bring-your-own-compute model. Here's the monthly math now:
* **Buildkite Agent Hosting (on AWS):** We run 3 `c5.large` spot instances continuously for our agent pool. This costs us ~ **$95/month**.
* **Buildkite Platform Fee:** Their "Pro" plan at $45/agent. We have 15 licensed developers (the rest just view builds), so **$675/month**.
* **Additional S3/Log Storage:** ~ **$15/month**.
**Total Buildkite Monthly Cost: ~ $785**
Wait, that's *higher* you say? Here's the kicker: our build performance improved so much that we're scaling down. With faster, more powerful agents and better parallelization, we're projecting we can drop to 2 agents and reduce licensed seats. Our new projected cost is around **$480/month**, basically matching Travis CI... but with 3x faster build times and far more control.
The real savings? Predictability. No more surprise overage bills. The per-build cost plummets when you control the infrastructure.
Has anyone else made a similar switch? Did you go hybrid with on-prem agents for even more savings? I'm curious about alternative agent hosting options.
— Mike
Integrations are my jam.