BuildBudget - Analyze and optimize your Actions runner costs

[eduramirezh]

Hi ARC community! I've built a tool that helps teams understand and optimize their GitHub Actions usage, with a particular focus on self-hosted runners. If you're using ARC, you're probably managing a significant Actions workload and dealing with the associated infrastructure costs.

What BuildBudget does

Right now, the tool provides:

• Top 100 most time-consuming workflows and jobs across your organizations
• Usage breakdowns by repository, organization, workflow, job or labels
• Cost estimations if using GitHub-hosted runners or AWS CodeBuild runners (with plans to add more runner types)
• Execution time vs billable minutes analysis

Why I built it

Managing self-hosted runners at scale comes with its own set of challenges. While ARC handles the runner provisioning brilliantly, understanding the actual usage patterns and optimizing costs can be tricky. BuildBudget aims to provide the visibility needed to make informed decisions about your runner infrastructure.

How it can help ARC users

• Identify which workflows and jobs are consuming the most runner time
• Get insights into usage patterns to better plan your runner scaling strategy
• Compare costs across different runner options
• Track usage across multiple repositories and organizations

Getting Started

The service is free during beta and available at buildbudget.dev. It gets the data via webhooks for workflow_run and workflow_job events. We support both:

• Direct integration with GitHub.com accounts
• GitHub Enterprise Server integration

For Enterprise Server users, you'll be guided through a simple setup process to configure the necessary webhooks for data collection.

Looking for feedback

As fellow Actions power users, your input would be incredibly valuable. I'm particularly interested in:

1. What metrics would help you optimize your runner infrastructure?
2. What cost insights would be most valuable for your setup?
3. What additional data points would be useful to collect via webhooks?

Feel free to try it out and share your thoughts. You can reach me here through discussions or at [email protected].

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I'm actively developing new features and would love to shape the tool around real use cases from the ARC community. Looking forward to your feedback!