How ClassPass sped up their iOS development with Namespace
“We evaluated many options, and Namespace is the only one that could deliver the performance our iOS team needed.”
Ray KimMobile Engineer, ClassPassPlaylist is the parent company behind a portfolio of wellness products, including ClassPass and Mindbody. Through ClassPass, the company serves millions of reservations for fitness, wellness, and food and beverage experiences through a subscription marketplace. They’re trusted by consumers, studios, and wellness businesses across those platforms.
For Ray (Mobile Engineer), Chris (Mobile Engineer), and the ClassPass mobile team, Mac CI infrastructure matters because it sits directly in the path of how they ship their iOS app. Their team runs a large mobile codebase, invests heavily in automated testing, and depends on parallelized UI test execution to keep developer feedback loops fast. As pull request volume has grown, CI performance, cost, and visibility have become core infrastructure concerns for the team.
Problem: Mac CI made up ~90% of spend, and GitHub runners still weren’t fast enough
Before adopting Namespace, the ClassPass mobile team ran its iOS CI pipelines on GitHub’s macOS runners. That setup became harder to justify as the team invested more in automated testing, UI coverage, and mobile infrastructure. Mac runners accounted for about 90% of CI spend, and the team had to explain why those costs were so concentrated.
The problem was not just budget. It was also speed. The team runs a large suite of iOS UI tests and shards them across multiple runners per pull request to ensure code changes do not take too long to merge in. Even with that parallelization, GitHub’s runners were slower than the team needed, especially as CI became more central to day-to-day development.
“Things were so slow that it would take over an hour to run our CI on GitHub. I had to bump our timeouts twice just to get CI to pass.”
This was becoming more urgent as they onboarded many more mobile engineers to their repo and increased the amount of automated tests in their CI pipeline. Agentic workflows were driving more pull requests, and the introduction of a merge queue pushed CI volume even higher. What had been barely manageable was no longer a stable long-term setup.
“As more and more engineers are leaning into agentic workflows to write the code and self-validate in some way, it’s even more important that we have the right infra, the right hardware, the right vendor.”
Solution: Selecting Namespace over GitHub
The ClassPass team went looking for a Mac CI platform that could handle heavy iOS usage at the right price, with enough concurrency for parallel tests, and without adding maintenance overhead.
Namespace macOS runners seemed to match those needs as a drop-in for their existing GitHub Actions workflows. In particular, the team was unexpectedly delighted that they could configure runners through the UI, including swapping Xcode versions without constantly editing YAML. Our dashboard also gave engineers better access to the data they needed to debug issues.
“The added visibility made it much easier for me to audit, visualize, and reason about our usage, performance regressions, and other potential CI issues.”
Still, they needed to put it to the test. During their trial, Namespace came out faster, with a projected cost reduction of at least 50% after a full migration. After those initial results, the ClassPass team started moving everything over.
Results: 55% lower CI cost, faster CI, and great support
Today, the ClassPass mobile team runs all of their iOS CI on Namespace. Compared with GitHub macOS runners, that cut CI cost by about 55%. Run times improved too. During the pilot, Namespace came out faster. The team continues to see performance gains using Namespace compared to their previous setup.
The gains went beyond cost and speed. Engineers got better visibility into usage and concurrency trends, easier runner configuration, and direct support through Slack when issues came up. As CI demand kept growing with more pull requests and more automated validation, Namespace stayed a partner the team could keep scaling on.
“The responsiveness, the willingness to go deep, to talk things through, and to really tailor the relationship to our actual usage needs. That’s been very helpful for us. Namespace has given us a more personalized relationship, and that’s made a real difference.”
If you’re scaling iOS CI and dealing with slow, expensive Mac runners, give us a try. We know a faster, lower-cost way.