How Namespace Reduced Our CI Spend by 70%

Executive Summary

At Coast we offer a new solution to companies for managing fleet's expenses as well as a smart Visa fleet and fuel card. As our engineering organization scaled, CPU‑intensive CI workflows running on GitHub‑hosted runners drove costs up and slowed developers down. After evaluating several alternatives, we partnered with Namespace, achieving a remarkable 70% reduction in our CI costs while speeding up builds and establishing a repeatable, reliable delivery process.

The Challenge

• Cost growth: GitHub‑hosted runners became a significant line item in our platform budget.
• Maintenance burden: Keeping our workflows reliably green required an ongoing effort from our platform team.
• Test performance degradation: Growing volumes of CPU‑heavy tests caused long queues and ever slower execution times.
• Developer experience: Engineers were forced to wait for workflows to finish, impacting velocity and morale.

The Solution: Switching to Namespace

Our team began actively searching for alternatives. The goal was to find a way to reduce our spend while keeping our high testing standards without making compromises for our devs to wait around forever for their code to get through the pipeline.

We evaluated some different options on the market and decided to go ahead with Namespace.
The main differentiators and deciding factors for us in the end were:

• The speed and reliability of Namespace simply convinced us.
• The team's support throughout the PoC and during implementation was excellent: very responsive, proactive, and collaborative.
• The insights we could get from the dashboard help to optimize usage.

Implementation & Adoption

Over the first three months, we collaborated closely with Namespace to tune runner configurations, cache strategy, and concurrency settings. We migrated critical pipelines first, then progressively moved the entire fleet, without developer disruption.

I did a demo for our full engineering team yesterday, and jaws were on the floor. I actually got asked what the catch was.

Zack Stayman, Lead Platform Engineer, Coast

Results and Impact

Performance

• 70 % reduction in CI spend
• Dramatically shorter end‑to‑end pipeline times—no more waiting
• Stable, predictable builds even under peak load

Operational Efficiency

• Confidence to scale workloads without surprise cost spikes or slowdowns
• Fine‑grained cost and performance visibility via Namespace analytics

Developer Experience

• Engineers regained productive hours previously lost to CI waits
• Our platform team can focus on the product instead of infrastructure upkeep

Conclusion

By working with Namespace we didn’t only increase our efficiency but at the same time developed a real partnership. The support and insights provided by the Namespace team are just outstanding. The decision to switch to Namespace has proven transformative for us. The cost reduction and improved performance have exceeded our initial expectations. As we continue to grow our platform, we're confident that Namespace will continue to be a crucial partner in our technical infrastructure.

For financial services companies like ours, where reliability and performance are paramount, finding a CI solution that delivers both cost savings and improved performance is invaluable. Namespace has proven to be precisely that solution for Coast.