About BuildBudget

BuildBudget is a tool designed to help teams understand and optimize their costs when using GitHub Actions. By providing clear visibility into spending, identifying inefficiencies, and offering guidance on optimization strategies, BuildBudget enables teams to reduce their CI/CD costs without compromising on performance. Created by Edu Ramírez, a backend engineer with over 10 years of experience, BuildBudget was born out of the need for better control over CI/CD spending.

The Story Behind BuildBudget

While working for a large company, Edu witnessed firsthand the challenges of managing costs associated with GitHub Actions. As teams migrated to the platform, it became clear that there was a lack of adequate tools to understand and optimize spending. Despite investing tens of thousands of euros in CI/CD, inefficiencies such as over-provisioned resources, excessive scheduled tasks, and redundant tasks went unnoticed.

Determined to tackle this problem, Edu developed BuildBudget to provide teams with clear visibility into their GitHub Actions costs, whether using GitHub-hosted or self-hosted runners. By identifying inefficiencies and guiding users on optimization strategies, BuildBudget aims to help teams reduce their CI/CD spending without compromising on performance.

How BuildBudget Works

BuildBudget seamlessly integrates with your GitHub repositories by setting up a webhook to receive workflow_job and workflow_run events. For GitHub.com users, getting started is as simple as installing the BuildBudget app from the GitHub Marketplace for the desired organization or specific repositories. GitHub Enterprise Server users can set up a global webhook to send data to BuildBudget.

Once set up, BuildBudget provides comprehensive insights into your GitHub Actions usage and costs. It goes beyond the basic features offered by GitHub's UI, focusing on cost reduction, analyzing large amounts of repositories and organizations, and providing cost estimations for different runner providers. BuildBudget also makes the distinction between execution times and billable time explicit, helping you understand the true cost of your CI/CD pipeline.

The Future of BuildBudget

In the short term, BuildBudget aims to provide even better tools for visualizing workflow inefficiencies. This includes identifying issues such as overly complex workflows with more jobs than needed, redundant tasks in pull requests, poorly managed scheduled tasks, and the impact of caching strategies. By guiding users on actions to tackle these issues, BuildBudget strives to maximize cost savings.

Additionally, BuildBudget plans to introduce a feature that allows users to estimate the costs of using different runner providers, empowering teams to make informed decisions about their CI/CD infrastructure.

Looking further ahead, the vision for BuildBudget is to automate optimization as much as possible. This includes generating automated pull requests that optimize workflows and provide explanations of the impact of the changes, making it even easier for teams to continuously improve their CI/CD processes and manage costs effectively.

About the Founder

Edu Ramírez is a backend engineer with over a decade of experience, specializing in CI/CD and platform development. Through his work at a leading global company, Edu gained deep insights into the challenges of managing GitHub Actions costs at scale. Driven by a passion for efficiency and optimization, he created BuildBudget to help teams unlock the full potential of GitHub Actions while keeping costs under control.