Cost of slow CI calculator
Every minute an engineer waits for CI is paid time. Enter your team size, how often they wait and for how long to see the yearly cost of slow pipelines and what a faster one would save.
- Cost of waiting a year
- $386,400
- Saved at 40% faster
- $154,560
- per year
- Per engineer
- $9,660
- per year
Your team waits 10,733 hours a year on CI, of which about 4,293 hours are lost.
Everything runs in your browser; nothing you type is sent anywhere.
How to use it
- Enter the number of engineers and how many times each waits on CI per working day.
- Enter the average wait in minutes, and the share of that wait that is truly lost to idling and context switching.
- Set a loaded hourly cost and a target speed-up to see the yearly saving.
Frequently asked questions
Why not count the full wait as lost?
Engineers do not stand still for every minute: they review, reply and start something else. Research on context switching suggests a large share is still lost, so 30 to 50 percent is a fair planning figure.
What is loaded cost?
Salary plus benefits, taxes, equipment and overhead. A common rule is 1.3 to 1.5 times salary; 90 dollars an hour is a typical engineer in the US.
How do I make CI faster?
Cache dependencies, shard tests, run only what changed, cancel superseded runs and use faster runners. Measure the median and 90th percentile wait, not just the mean.
Is this just the CI bill?
No. This is the people cost, which for most teams is many times larger than the runner minutes they pay GitHub for.
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