- host your own set of static runners on AWS -- which, have a fixed monthly cost.
- pay a provider for hosted runners -- most providers bill in CI Minutes. So you will run out of minutes if jobs run amok, not run up your bill.
- Set up auto-scaling runners that ebb and flow based on demand. This case is the one that represents the risk you are describing of an unexpected bill increase.
2/3 cases of "paying someone else for CI compute" are just as predictable as your solution cost-wise. Yours could be cheaper, but the risk of "unexpected bill increase" is not really there.
fyi GitHub bill in minutes, and rounds up. So if you use 1 minute and 1 second, you get billed for 2 minutes. This is applied at job level, so it quickly gets out of control if you use matrix builds.
You could:
- host your own set of static runners on AWS -- which, have a fixed monthly cost.
- pay a provider for hosted runners -- most providers bill in CI Minutes. So you will run out of minutes if jobs run amok, not run up your bill.
- Set up auto-scaling runners that ebb and flow based on demand. This case is the one that represents the risk you are describing of an unexpected bill increase.
2/3 cases of "paying someone else for CI compute" are just as predictable as your solution cost-wise. Yours could be cheaper, but the risk of "unexpected bill increase" is not really there.