AI agents made my CI bill 5× bigger. So I built Codemany

By Arpit Agarwal, maker of Codemany

I started Amaltash in July 2025. Its CI used about 2,300 Linux minutes on GitHub in its first month, and 76,000 in October 2026. This is the bill, month by month, and why I now run CI on machines I own.

My story

I have been a mobile developer for 10 years. I worked at startups like Beepi and Lumi Labs, and at Google on Google Maps, Google Keyboard and Android Messaging.

On my personal projects, I always ran CI myself, on a machine at home. It was cheap and fast.

In July 2025, I started Amaltash, an investing app, and I built it with AI coding agents (Claude Code). At first, CI was small. From August to December 2025, it used about 1,300 to 4,700 Linux minutes a month, and the bill was $25 or less.

Then it kept climbing. In January 2026, the bill was $76. It went over $400 a month in July, and reached $553 in October. My Linux minutes went from about 15,000 in January to 76,000 in October. That is 5 times more.

My work hours stayed about the same. What scared me was the pace. From January to October, my minutes grew about 20% every month. Even at half that pace, a quick estimate puts my bill near $1,200 a month by June 2027. And this was just me.

I looked at other runner providers. Many are cheaper or faster than GitHub. But they still charge for every minute, so the bill grows with the work, with no end. I wanted the opposite: build as much as I want, on my own machines, with a layer that runs and manages them for me.

So I built Codemany.

The numbers

These numbers come from GitHub's billing data for the private Amaltash repo only. My other repos are left out. The charts start in August 2025, Amaltash's first month of CI, and end in October 2026. In February 2026, my CI ran in a different repo, so Amaltash shows zero that month. GitHub's price is $0.006 a minute for Linux and $0.062 a minute for macOS.

In 2026, Amaltash ran almost all of its CI on GitHub-hosted runners. Self-hosted jobs were under 0.1% of minutes, so the billed minutes are about all of my CI minutes.

What changed? Coding agents commit all day, and every commit runs CI. One agent opens a branch, pushes a small fix, waits for the tests, then pushes again. Several agents do this at the same time.

From July 13 to November 12, Amaltash ran 63,925 workflow runs across 96 workflows. That is about 530 runs a day. Many are small checks that finish in under a minute. GitHub rounds each job up to a whole minute, and in a sample of runs that rounding added about a third to my billable minutes (an estimate).

Here is what GitHub billed each month. "Billed" is what I paid. "List price" is before the free minutes in my plan.

In October, GitHub billed me $553.44 for Amaltash's Actions ($573.13 at list price).

Where this was going

The total was not the scary part. The pace was. From January to October 2026, my Linux minutes grew about 20% a month. To be careful, the chart uses half that pace, 10% a month. Even then, the bill doubles about every 7 months.

By June 2027, that is about $1,200 a month, for one person. Hosted runner services would cut the price per minute, but the bill would still grow with every minute. Owning the machines changes the shape of the curve: you pay for the machine once, and then you can build as much as you want.

Linux vs macOS

A macOS minute costs about 10 times a Linux minute ($0.062 vs $0.006). So a small number of Mac minutes can be a big part of the bill. In October, macOS was 2.3% of my minutes but 19.6% of the cost.

The reasons to own a machine are different for each:

• Linux: the minutes are cheap, but there are a lot of them. At high volume, the bill adds up fast, and a small Linux box pays for itself quickly. For me, it was about 2 months.
• macOS: each minute is expensive. And many developers already own a Mac. That Mac can run the jobs while it sits on the desk, so it costs nothing extra. A new Mac mini would take me about 10 months to pay off.

And these numbers are me being careful. On macOS, I run builds but no tests yet. On Linux, I cut my tests down to only the critical ones, to save money and time. I don't recommend that. Skipping tests to save on CI is a bad trade, and the costs still grow out of proportion.

It will only go up from here. As I build more features in the iOS and macOS apps, those jobs will take more minutes. At about 10 times the price of a Linux minute, that Mac mini would pay for itself much sooner.

What about a 10-person team?

At October's prices, 4 to 20 times my $553.44 bill is about $2,200 to $11,000 a month. That is $26,000 to $133,000 a year, for CI alone.

A bigger team would also connect more machines to one Codemany account, so queued builds start sooner. Each extra machine is $10 a month, with no per-minute bill. So 10 machines cost $100 a month to run (plus buying the machines once), even at 20 times my volume.

Rent or own?

Hosted runners bill per minute. A machine you own costs money once, then a small amount each month. With Codemany, that is $20 a month for 2 machines. So the math is simple:

Months to break even = machine price ÷ (monthly CI bill − $20)

Here it is with October's Amaltash bill and the machines we use. If you already own the machine, its price is $0, and you save from the first month.

The mini PC is the MINISFORUM UM870 that runs our public benchmark; we paid about $500–600 for it (prices change). The Mac mini price is from apple.com on November 12, 2026 ("Buy from $899"). Each break even is the price ÷ (that bill − $20). Power, setup time and repairs are not included.

The chart adds it up over a year: GitHub-hosted at $549.70 a month, against both machines (counting the mini PC at $600) plus $20 a month.

What about GitHub's fee for self-hosted runners? On December 16, 2025, GitHub announced a charge of $0.002 a minute for self-hosted runners. It then postponed it, with no new date. As of November 12, 2026, GitHub's pricing page lists no self-hosted charge. If it does come, my October minutes would cost about $156 a month in fees. That is still far below the hosted bill.

Think about capacity too. A machine runs as many jobs at once as fit in its memory, CPU and disk. My 76,247 Linux minutes in October are about 1,271 hours. That is like 1.7 jobs running every hour of the month, and busy hours have more. So one machine is often not enough, and that is why the plan includes 2. macOS was only about 30 hours in October, so one Mac mini would sit idle most of the time.

Renting still wins in some cases. Be honest with yourself about these:

• Low volume. If your CI bill is small, a machine takes a long time to pay off.
• No hardware. If you don't have a spare machine and don't want one, hosted runners are easier.
• Big bursts. If you sometimes need far more jobs at once than your machines can hold, hosted runners scale up for you.
• Windows. Codemany runs jobs on Mac and Linux. Windows jobs stay on hosted runners.

What Codemany does

Codemany runs your GitHub Actions jobs on your own Mac or Linux machine.

• A fresh runner for every job. It is removed after the job, and its folder is wiped. On Linux with KVM, you can also give each job its own virtual machine.
• Warm caches. Caches, toolchains and package mirrors stay on your machine, so installs and checkouts start warm.
• No upkeep. It updates itself and cleans up its disk.
• Simple price. $20 a month for 2 machines. Try it free for 14 days, with no card.

Speed is a bonus. In our public benchmark, Codemany built private code 2.9× faster than GitHub-hosted runners. The test code and runs are open at github.com/codemanyhq/bench.

To see what your own bill could look like, try the savings calculator. To try it on a repo, use the try-codemany template or follow Get started.

Questions

Why do AI coding agents make CI cost more?

Agents push many small commits, all day, often on many branches at once. Every push runs your workflows. More pushes means more CI minutes.

Is it worth running macOS CI on my own Mac?

Often, yes. A macOS minute on GitHub costs about 10 times a Linux minute, and many developers already own a Mac that can run the jobs.

When should I keep using hosted runners?

When your CI bill is small, when you have no machine to use, when you need far more jobs at once than your machines can hold, or when you need Windows.

Does every job start clean on my own machine?

Yes. Codemany gives each job a fresh, single-use runner and wipes its folder after the job. On Linux with KVM, you can also run each job in its own virtual machine.

Data appendix

January to October 2026 from GitHub's billing data, for the Amaltash repo only. "List price" is before the free minutes in my plan, and "Billed" is what I paid.

Related

Read next: savings calculator, benchmarks, cut GitHub Actions costs, minutes running out and a self-hosted runner on a Mac.

Start a 14-day trial No card needed. $20 a month for 2 machines after that.