Your best bet is to self host woodpecker CI.

Hetzner has cheap VPS that I host my CI on. It costs like $10/month.

Pick the cheapest region, since CI runners location doesn’t matter much.

Yeah, I did hertzner runner for a bit.

But I think the issue is that my situation (solo dev, mono repo) is just not right for a dedicated instance.

With only 1-2 runners, the pipeline is slow (low parallelism) and resource constrained. And at least 50% of the time its idle (I'm not working/sleeping).

I guess what I'm really looking for is for some kind of aggressive autoscaling, and aggressive caching.

I tried a couple of things (GHA, Dagger + Hertzner, Buildkite)

And Im just not too sure theres going to be any out of the box solution since my priority is essentially to minimize cost and maximize efficiency. Not really a great customer for any providers.

Im tempted to just get agent to build something out quickly with cloudflare workers + spot instances.

I also have some other nice to have requirements:

- ts/code over config

- locally runnable and testable

- preferably no lock in

- repeatable/reproducible

Not sure of what current prices look like but an old desktop sitting on the floor of your office might work well for you. You would need decent internet but running a single node kubernetes cluster as a GitHub action runner has worked well for others I know.

A buddy of mine runs his whole CICD setup off an old gaming desktop. They use tailscale to connect to their hosted infrastructure and set it up as a GitHub action runner.

For a solo dev this might be the way to go.

Yeah, I’ve been thinking in this direction as well.

My wife uses my old gaming desktop for her ux design work as well.

And I was thinking of using the gpu to run some tts models.

Now to just figure out a way to run it all on windows and have it auto start when she logs in.

Ephemeral, beefy fly.io instances?

> And at least 50% of the time its idle (I'm not working/sleeping).

So what? its $10 a month. Why do you need to chase 100% utilization?

And use can use that to host your website, a game server, maybe some other projects...

I have Gitea and Gitea Runner apps running on TrueNAS on an extra mini PC in a closet. Works better than GitHub for me.

Gitea is one of the best in the space.

I self-host Drone CI still. I think Harness is in the slow process of letting it rot (it still gets at least some updates, though), which is kind of a shame, but it still does just fine for my CI needs (solo usage as well).

https://docs.drone.io/server/provider/github/

Very easy to stand up, does just fine. Definitely doesn't have the "library" of prebuilt actions that GHA does, but for the most part... I consider that a plus.

Otherwise it's very similar in concept - define actions in a yaml file, run commands on an image, webhook integration with most repo providers.

I run it on some old hardware locally (k3s cluster on old machines) and it outperforms the 1000 minutes from GHA easily, and costs basically nothing but some maintenance and time.

I've been keeping my eyes open for something new in this space since Harness bought it, though - so if other folks have recommendations I'd be interested in alternatives.

We use jayporeci.in and have never hit capacity problems since we can choose to run it in laptops / servers / spare VMs etc.

Best decision we ever made

There is a free tier for on-prem TeamCity.

Host your own GitLab runner?