> Basically paying like 5-10 bucks per commit

Which isn't actually all that much, compared to the amount you pay your developers.

And not much compared to a bug in prod or waiting 3 weeks for a release (the value proposition of CI/CD)

Still, saving cloud spend by making the build faster or using self hosted runners is probably worth it.

Definitely, if you can cut costs, do it.

An additional several thousand dollars per month for any moderately-sized team, especially if you've got a bunch of microservices, sounds very expensive to me, and would probably get axed quickly by any devops team I can think of that's actively working on reducing their costs.

I mean if you're paying 5+ digits a month on CI it starts being reasonable to say "maybe I should do things to lower the absolute cost of this". 5 dollars time a big enough number is real money!

Is there an alternative service that offers similar service? I am not sure if I have ever seen anything else come close to what these guys do. I recall them going into battle with apple and it looks like they had won. But it sucks that we do not have any open source solution for iOS or Android to emulate the OS for these devices.

I remember we paid Circle CI ungodly amounts to host a dozen trash can Mac Pros to run our iOS CI. Early Swift versions caused huge spikes in build times.