Cut your CI bill 75%.
Without hiring DevOps.
Monk CI gives Indian engineering teams up to 75% lower CI cost than GitHub-hosted runners, plus 10x faster builds. No servers to manage. No platform engineer to hire. One line in your YAML. Built in Bengaluru, founder-led, IST-responsive.
15-minute call (IST-friendly hours) · No demo theatre · Walk away with your projected monthly savings
One line in your .github/workflows/*.yml
Rollback in 30 seconds. Zero workflow changes.
Sound familiar?
Your CI bill is quietly consuming your runway.
You looked at the GitHub Actions invoice last month and the number surprised you. Self-hosting on AWS looked cheaper on paper, then someone realised it would mean hiring a DevOps person. You are now picking between two bad options. There is a third one your peers are not talking about yet.
The Bill You Cannot Defend to Your Board
At 25 engineers shipping daily, your GitHub Actions bill is climbing past $3,000 a month. By Series B with larger runners, $4,000 to $6,000 is normal. Your finance lead asks why CI is now bigger than your Datadog spend. You do not have a clean answer because nobody is tracking unit cost per build.
Self-Hosted Means Hiring DevOps
You priced out self-hosting on AWS. The EC2 math looks great until you count engineer time. Runner image updates, autoscaling logic, security patches, on-call coverage. That is 0.4 of an engineer you do not have. You either hire a DevOps specialist (₹25-40 lakh/year) or your platform team absorbs the work.
GitHub's 2026 Pricing Hit Harder Than You Expected
The platform fee on self-hosted runners means even your owned infrastructure now carries a tax. Larger runners doubled in cost. Teams that planned a quarterly CI line item are now over budget by month 6. Indian teams paying in USD feel the bill twice. Currency exposure on top of the rate increase.
How the math works
Lower cost. Faster builds. No DevOps hire.
We do not ask your team to migrate platforms or rewrite workflows. We replace just the runner architecture underneath your existing GitHub Actions. Three structural fixes, all from a single config change.
FIX
~75% Lower Cost at Equivalent vCPU
Per-minute pricing matches GitHub Actions standard rates, but our 10x faster compute means your workload finishes in fewer minutes. Less consumption at similar rates equals up to 75% lower effective cost. Indian customer benchmarks show a Series A team saving ~$200/month at 5,000 minutes; a 30-engineer Series B team saving ~$2,000/month at 20,000 minutes. The savings compound as the team grows.
- Up to 75% lower effective cost than GitHub-hosted runners at equivalent vCPU
- Real-time spend dashboard with per-team, per-repo, per-workflow attribution
- Predictable per-minute pricing. No platform fees. No surprise invoices.
FIX
Zero Extra DevOps Headcount
Self-hosted CI looks cheap on paper but turns into a 0.4-engineer maintenance burden. Runner image updates, autoscaling, security patches, on-call coverage. That is the hidden tax on self-hosting. Monk CI is fully managed at the runner level. Your platform team changes one config value and gets back to product work. No fleet management. No on-call rotation. No ₹25-40 lakh DevOps hire.
- Fully managed runners. No infrastructure for your team to operate.
- Drop-in replacement at the runner level. Your platform stays GitHub Actions.
- Self-hosted economics without the self-hosted ops burden.
FIX
10x Faster Builds, 4x Faster Cache (Free with the Savings)
The standard GitHub-hosted runner gives you 2 vCPUs on commodity cloud hardware with a 1 Gbps cache pipe. Monk CI runs on infrastructure with 10x faster per-core performance and a 20 Gbps cache pipeline. Your dependency install drops from minutes to seconds. Your engineers stop tabbing away during builds. Speed is the multiplier on cost. Fewer minutes consumed, lower bill.
- 10x faster compute, benchmarked on real GitHub Actions workloads
- 20 Gbps cache bandwidth (vs 1 Gbps on GitHub-hosted runners)
- Up to 40x faster Docker layer caching with our in-house Docker builder
- AI log summaries pinpoint failure causes in seconds
Why Monk CI
Built in Bengaluru. For teams who pay attention to the bill.
Every paying customer benchmarked us against Blacksmith, Depot, Namespace before picking us. They had funded options. The decision came down to three things specific to teams operating from India.
💰 Savings Math That Stands Up to Your CFO
Most CI vendors quote a 10x speedup and dodge the cost question. We lead with the cost number because that is what matters to your finance team. Real-time spend dashboard, per-team and per-workflow attribution, predictable per-minute pricing in USD or INR-equivalent rates. Your CTO can defend the line item to your board without reconstructing the bill from three sources.
"We cut our monthly CI bill from $3,400 to $850 in 30 days. The math was the same workflow, fewer minutes consumed, lower per-minute rate. Finance stopped asking questions."Head of Engineering, Bengaluru SaaS, Series B
🇮🇳 IST-Responsive, Founder-Led Engineering
You will talk to Ujjwal (CEO) and Nitin (CTO) directly during evaluation. Both are based in Bengaluru. When your platform engineer raises a question at 6 PM IST, you do not wait until the next US business day for an answer. Pricing flexibility where commercially viable. Annual lock-in available. INR-anchored pricing on request.
"They debugged a Docker layer caching issue with our team on a Saturday at 10 PM IST. Try getting that response time from a US-funded vendor."DevOps Lead, Pune-based fintech, Series A
⚡ One-Line Migration, 30-Second Rollback
Indian teams are especially careful about tools that look cheap but create migration cost. Monk CI is a runner replacement, not a platform replacement. Your existing GitHub Actions workflows, secrets, integrations, and policies stay exactly as they are. One YAML line in. One YAML line out. If Monk CI is not measurably better on your workload after a 30-day pilot, your config rolls back in 30 seconds.
"We piloted on one workflow first to verify the savings. Numbers checked out. Migrated the rest in an afternoon. Total ops investment: 4 hours of platform engineer time."Platform Lead, Bengaluru ecommerce, Series A
Your roadmap
From cost audit to a smaller bill in three phases.
You will know exactly what is happening, when, and why. No demo theatre. No "let me get back to you with a custom proposal."
Day 0 · 15 minutes
CI Cost Audit Call
You walk us through your current GitHub Actions setup. We look at your monthly minute consumption, your runner mix, your slowest workflow, your cache hit rate. By minute 15 you have a specific projected monthly savings number for your workload on Monk CI in INR or USD. No commitment. No demo of features you do not care about. A clean read on whether the math works for your team.
Days 1-7 · Pilot setup
Single-Workflow Pilot
You pick one workflow to test, ideally your most expensive or slowest. We run a one-line YAML change on a feature branch. Side-by-side benchmarks against your current setup, with cost-per-build and time-per-build measured. Real numbers on your real workload. If the savings do not beat your current spend by a meaningful margin, we tell you and the pilot stops.
Days 8-30 · Full rollout
Full Migration with IST-Hours Engineering Support
Your CTO and platform team lead the rollout to all workflows. Founders are on Slack-equivalent for any questions, IST hours. Mid-pilot review at Day 15, decision review at Day 30. Exit clause built in. No auto-renewal. By Day 30 you have a measured month-over-month bill comparison, a savings dashboard, and a defensible answer when your CFO asks where the savings came from.
Day 0 · 15 minutes
CI Cost Audit Call
You walk us through your current GitHub Actions setup. We look at your monthly minute consumption, your runner mix, your slowest workflow, your cache hit rate. By minute 15 you have a specific projected monthly savings number for your workload on Monk CI in INR or USD. No commitment. No demo of features you do not care about. A clean read on whether the math works for your team.
Days 1-7 · Pilot setup
Single-Workflow Pilot
You pick one workflow to test, ideally your most expensive or slowest. We run a one-line YAML change on a feature branch. Side-by-side benchmarks against your current setup, with cost-per-build and time-per-build measured. Real numbers on your real workload. If the savings do not beat your current spend by a meaningful margin, we tell you and the pilot stops.
Days 8-30 · Full rollout
Full Migration with IST-Hours Engineering Support
Your CTO and platform team lead the rollout to all workflows. Founders are on Slack-equivalent for any questions, IST hours. Mid-pilot review at Day 15, decision review at Day 30. Exit clause built in. No auto-renewal. By Day 30 you have a measured month-over-month bill comparison, a savings dashboard, and a defensible answer when your CFO asks where the savings came from.
Is this for you?
Monk CI is built for a specific kind of Indian engineering team.
This is for you if:
- ✓You're a Series A, B, or C funded company with 10+ engineers, primarily based in India
- ✓You ship daily or near-daily (consumer tech, ecommerce, SaaS, dev tools)
- ✓You're using GitHub Actions and your monthly bill has crossed $1,000 USD
- ✓Your team has discussed self-hosting and quietly hoped someone else would solve it
- ✓You're the CTO, VP Engineering, Head of Platform, or DevOps Lead with budget or strong recommendation authority
- ✓You want savings math that you can defend to your finance team or board
This is probably not for you if:
- ✕You're pre-seed or pre-revenue with under 10 engineers
- ✕You're using GitLab CI, CircleCI, Jenkins, or Bitbucket as your primary CI (we're GitHub-only)
- ✕You're an enterprise fintech or regulated entity needing SOC 2 Type 2 + RBI compliance today (we're Type 1 in progress; Type 2 on roadmap)
- ✕You need on-premise deployment or air-gapped infrastructure
- ✕You're looking for the cheapest CI option regardless of speed (we are not the rock-bottom option, we are the lowest-effective-cost option)
- ✕You want a self-hosted product (we're a managed runner replacement only)
Our offer
5,000 free minutes. No credit card. 30-day pilot.
We are confident enough to put the savings math in your hands before asking for a contract. If the numbers do not work on your workload, neither of us has wasted time.
Three things we put on the table
Before you commit to anything, you get to see the savings on your own workload.
5,000 Free Minutes
Run Monk CI on real workloads. No credit card. No commitment. Cancel any time.
Side-by-Side Cost Benchmark
Run Monk CI alongside GitHub Actions on the same workflow. We give you the cost-per-build comparison, you make the call.
30-Second Rollback
If Monk CI does not produce measurable savings on your workload, your YAML reverts in 30 seconds. No support tickets, no friction.
Proof
Numbers, not adjectives.
Where we are right now, honestly stated. The numbers grow as our customers grow.
Your point of contact
Built in Bengaluru, by engineers who lived this problem.
Monk CI was born inside Deutsche Bank's CI infrastructure. The founding team built this because they had the same problem you do, and didn't want to hire more DevOps to solve it.
Ujjwal Prashant
CEO + Co-Founder · Bengaluru
The idea for Monk CI was born during my time as a software developer at Deutsche Bank. We faced a daily 30 to 40-minute build bottleneck. With 10 developers sharing a single test environment, every deployment blocked the team for 45 minutes. Stakeholder demos got derailed. Engineers context-switched continuously. Productivity collapsed quietly under what everyone treated as "just how CI works."
Nitin and I realised the math was simple. If we could cut deployment time to 5 minutes, three developers could test per hour instead of one. We built Monk CI to fix exactly that: eliminate the deployment queue, maximise shared resources, give engineering teams their momentum back, without forcing them to hire extra DevOps to manage it.
Every engagement is personally architected by Ujjwal and Nitin from Bengaluru. Not handed off to a junior account manager. The conversation you book is the conversation you get, in IST hours, with the engineers who built the product.
Book your audit
15 minutes. Real savings math on your workload. No demo theatre.
You walk away with your projected monthly bill on Monk CI, your projected savings vs current GitHub Actions spend, and an honest answer on whether the math works for your team. Whether you work with us or not.
Typically books 3-5 days out. Book now to secure a slot this week.
Common questions