How much does mobile CI/CD actually cost?
When you think about CI/CD costs, license fees and compute minutes probably come to mind first. But that's just part of the story—especially for mobile.
The real cost? Engineering hours lost to fiddly VM maintenance, endless stack upkeep, tooling drift, and waiting on slow builds. This inefficiency hits your bottom line hard, but it's pretty tough to quantify it on a spreadsheet.
That’s where the Bitrise ROI calculator comes in.
Cut through the guesswork with hard ROI data
Bitrise exists to help mobile devs take control of their pipeline, from building and testing all the way through to release. We have a strong understanding of how stitched-together solutions can sap a team’s time and focus, and we built this calculator to help you put real numbers on those hidden costs.
Using the calculator is simple: just input your team size, hosting costs, and CI/CD workload. You'll instantly see where you're bleeding time and money—plus, you can pinpoint when a dedicated mobile platform starts paying for itself.
Whether you're building a business case or you’re just frustrated with your current setup, the calculator gives you clear insights based on your own data before committing to any big changes.
Why do mobile development costs pile up so quickly?
Every CI/CD pipeline requires maintenance, but mobile presents unique challenges that generalist CI/CD solutions struggle to address. Without the right tools to handle these complexities, a mobile team’s operational load can spiral out of control, tanking productivity and resulting in hefty hidden costs.
Infrastructure headaches
Managing macOS infrastructure means paying for premium hardware, working around strict virtualisation limits, and grappling with special licensing considerations. It's expensive and complicated and increases the total cost of infrastructure ownership signficantly.
Complex virtual environments
iOS and Android builds need specialised virtual environments, and most teams underestimate the cost of setup and maintenance. Emulators eat compute, device testing requires complex networking, and macOS virtualisation in particular needs expert-level knowledge. And that’s all before you even get to the scaling challenges faced by larger teams and multi-app orgs.
Stack upkeep
The mobile stack moves very fast. Xcode alone updates multiple times yearly. Apple and Google regularly introduce breaking changes to build systems. SDKs, CLI tools, simulators, device farms, certificates—everything needs constant updates just to keep builds working.
DevOps burdens
So, your mobile toolchain requires constant attention to avoid build failure and performance regressions. This means senior devs get pulled into maintenance instead of shipping, or you need a dedicated platform team to keep the show on the road—both expensive options.
Productivity black holes
Slow builds and flaky steps don't just waste compute time—they destroy focus. Every delay and interruption costs engineers precious cognitive cycles and kills momentum, ultimately slowing down delivery and tanking team morale in the process.
How Bitrise lifts the burden
Bitrise is a full-stack, purpose-built platform for mobile CI/CD, designed to reduce the operational load across precisely these areas.
Here’s how a managed mobile-first platform reduces cost and unlocks efficiency:
- Zero infrastructure to manage. No maintaining runners or grappling with scaling issues.
- Super fast SDK updates. Get the latest Xcode and Android support within hours.
- Automated stack maintenance. Updates, patches, and dependencies are all handled for you.
- Self-serve workflows. Devs control their own pipelines without heavy DevOps support.
- Built-in observability. Get instant insights on bottlenecks and failure trends.
- Smart build caching. Lightning fast feedback loops keep engineers in flow.
- Integrated release management. Ship confidently without glue code or custom scripts.
As the ROI calculator shows, these features are far more than just nice-to-haves—each one eliminates a real cost driver in your mobile infrastructure.
So, what’s your number?
Every team's savings will look different based on size, structure, and current setup. So why not try the calculator and see what you uncover? Got questions or feedback about the results? Want to discuss how teams like Shopify have applied these insights at scale? Then get in touch—we’d love to chat.
