I've found TeamCity's pricing to be pretty reasonable; It's free to start, $300 per extra agent after 3 agents, or $2500/year for support with 5 build agents (which is where we're at right now). It's also 50% off for startups. Compared to any other bring-your-own-agent solution, it's very reasonable.

The dependency bug sounds rough; have you got a youtrack link to it by any chance?

> I've found TeamCity's pricing to be pretty reasonable

Well, compared to Jenkins it's very expensive :). I guess the cheaper options may be newer, or maybe that employer ran the evaluation in a dysfunctional way (wouldn't be the first time). All I can say is that was a consideration for us.

> The dependency bug sounds rough; have you got a youtrack link to it by any chance?

No, this was three jobs ago and was all handled verbally with their representative (who gave off a pretty unprofessional vibe, frankly, so may not have recorded it in youtrack even if that's their policy). If you want to test it out, set up something like 10 maven projects with SNAPSHOT versions all depending on each other, and set to rebuild on commit or when their dependencies change: B depends on A, C depends on B (and so implicitly on A), D depends on C (and so implicitly A and B), etc.. And then commit a change to A and see what happens. Whether you think this is a good way to set up your projects or not, it's what we were doing at that place, and Jenkins handles it fine (it will rebuild A, B, C, ... in order) whereas TeamCity (at least when we were evaluating it) will rebuild A, then rebuild B-L, then rebuild C-L because B has changed, and so on.

It's even better than that, because you can pay just once and stay on the same version forever, as long as you don't need new features and support. And JetBrains gives 50% discount for license renewals, which makes it not $2500 but $1250/year – I believe this applies to all JetBrains products, not only TeamCity.