What's CI chaos costing you?
Broken builds and flaky tests block engineers and burn through CI budget. Here's what it actually costs your team.
Step 1
Tell us about your team
1%
Best
8%
Median
30%+
Struggling
1%
Best
3%
Median
10%+
Struggling
Step 2
What does time and CI cost you?
Engineer time
CI compute
Implied total CI budget at these inputs
$9k/mo · $112k/yr (422,400 CI minutes/month)
Sanity check against your actual cloud / CI bill. If this is wildly off, tweak PR volume, pushes per PR (Methodology > Constants), or CI duration above.
Step 3
Where you're paying
Toggle each tax on or off — the total below recalculates instantly.
The no-merge-queue tax
Without a real merge queue, teams pay this either way: either main breaks and engineers stop to fix it, or developers rebase manually before merge to avoid conflicts. Most teams pay some of each.
Broken-main incidents?Probability scales with concurrent in-flight PRs (Uber EuroSys 2019).Source: Keeping Master Green at Scale
6/mo
Engineering hours wasted on incidents?Each incident: ~0.4h to investigate and fix + 8 engineers blocked for ~25min to rebase or switch tasks.
investigation, reverts, blocked engineers
20h/mo
$2k/mo
CI minutes wasted?Per incident: ~8 in-flight PRs need to rerun CI (the engineers we count as blocked above) × 100 min of compute per run (20-min × 5 parallel jobs) × $0.022/min.
failed reruns triggered by broken main
4,170/mo
$92/mo
Manual rebases?~2/3 of PRs need a rebase before they merge cleanly, ~2 min each. The bulk are mechanical and fast — the painful ones are caught by the broken-main stream above.
developers manually rebasing to avoid conflicts
858/mo
$3k/mo
Without merge queue
~8 PRs merging at once
With merge queue
Subtotal
$5k/mo
The flaky-tests tax
A share of every CI run fails for non-real reasons — flaky tests, infra glitches, race conditions. Engineers stop to investigate, reruns waste CI budget, and every red build starts as a guess: real bug or noise?
Flaky CI runs?Every PR goes through ~3 CI runs. A share fails due to flaky tests or infra glitches, not real bugs — typically ~1/3 of your CI failure rate.
CI runs that fail for non-real reasons
115/mo
Engineering hours on flaky investigations?~10 min per investigated flaky run: engineer checks logs, reruns CI, waits for green.
investigating false failures, manually retrying
2h/mo
$192/mo
Flaky-vs-real triage time?Without CI Insights, every CI failure starts as a guess: is this a real bug or just flaky? CI Insights flags it before anyone digs in.
time saved knowing if it's the code or the runner
5h/mo
$533/mo
CI minutes wasted on flaky retries
re-running flaky CI pipelines
11,520/mo
$253/mo
Without quarantine
Test runs
Engineers stop, investigate, manually retry
With auto-retry + quarantine
Flaky tests auto-retry or get quarantined (Q)
Subtotal
$979/mo
The large-PR tax
Big PRs ship slower: they take longer to review, accumulate more merge conflicts, and force the author to rebase repeatedly. Mergify Stacks lets developers split a change into a chain of small reviewable PRs that merge in order.
Engineers adopting Stacks
20% of the team is a typical year-one adoption rate
8
Hours saved on smaller PRs?~2 stacks per adopting engineer per week, ~15 min saved per stack vs a monolithic PR (faster review cycle, fewer rebases as the change lands).
faster reviews, less rebase juggling per change
16h/mo
$2k/mo
Subtotal
$2k/mo
The self-hosted CI tax
When you own the runners, someone on the platform team spends real hours deciding how many to keep warm, when to scale, and which jobs to prioritise. CI Insights surfaces the data so capacity decisions stop being guesswork.
Excluded from your total — toggle on to include.
All taxes combined
Total monthly cost without Mergify
$7k/mo
Step 4
Your ROI with Mergify
Mergify cost?Max plan: 40 seats × $216/seat/year.Tiered pricing — under 100 engineers gets the Max plan, 100+ moves to Enterprise with volume discounts. See pricing.
$720/mo
Net savings
$7k/mo
Annual savings?CFOs typically expect a 2-5x ROI on SaaS tools. Anything above 5x is considered exceptional.Source: SaaS benchmarks
$81k
10.4x ROI · payback in 1.2 mo
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