3 teams that moved to aws spot
3 teams moved to aws spot. Most left GitHub Actions (2) or CircleCI (1). The typical team cut 87% of its bill. Each team's old bill, running cost and net saving.
Every story here is about CI. All three teams stopped paying a hosted CI service for build minutes and moved the jobs onto AWS Spot or EC2 spot capacity that they run themselves. Two left GitHub's hosted runners and kept GitHub Actions as the workflow tool. JMDC left CircleCI and moved its backend builds to GitHub Actions on self-hosted spot runners.
The bills are very different sizes. SODA was paying about $800 a day, roughly $24,000 a month, and now pays about $100 a day using RunsOn on EC2. DevOpsNess went from about $3,400 to about $1,000 a month on EKS Spot. JMDC went from about $575 a month, compute included, to about $76.
All three give a running cost, so the roughly $24,000 a month saved is a net figure, with cuts between about 70% and 88%. DevOpsNess's smaller cut has a clear cause. Its macOS jobs stayed on GitHub-hosted runners, which the team says still cost about $800 a month. The moves went live in 2024, 2025 and 2026.
Written from these stories, updated Nov 2026. Numbers as each team reported them. How this ledger works
What they left for aws spot
Left GitHub Actions2 teams · median $11.7K/mo saved · cut 70%–88% of the bill
| Team and what they built | Since | Old bill | Running cost | Net saved | Bill cut |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SODASelf-hosted EC2 runners with RunsOn · AWS SODA moved CI from GitHub-hosted runners to self-hosted EC2 runners with RunsOn, taking the cost from about $800 a day to about $100. | Jul 2025 | $24K/mo | $3,000/mo | $21K/mo | 88% |
| DevOpsNessSelf-hosted runners on EKS Spot · AWS · GitHub The DevOpsNess team moved most CI from GitHub-hosted runners to self-hosted runners on EKS Spot instances. macOS jobs stayed on GitHub-hosted runners, which they say still cost about $800 a month. | Apr 2026 | $3,420/mo | $1,010/mo | $2,410/mo | 70% |