trending_down CI/CD Reality Report · 2026

More than 1 in 5 main-branch builds still fails. You pay for every single one.

TrimCI turns your pipeline data into a dollar figure — the estimated cost of broken builds — and a ranked list of fixes. You can't cut what you can't see.

76.7% Main-branch success rate CircleCI · Q2 2026
+250 h Extra debug hours / year when main-branch success falls 90% → 70% CircleCI · benchmark
72 min Median time to recover from a failure (all branches) CircleCI · 2026 report
51% of 1,960 Java repos on GitHub Actions hit by flaky builds arXiv preprint · 2026
Loss Calculator

How much is broken CI/CD costing you?

Plug in your numbers. The model is anchored to CircleCI's published delivery benchmarks — the only third-party data it uses.

Only splits the total into a per-developer figure — it does not change the annual bleed.
$ / h
%
Default is 76.7% — CircleCI's most recent published main-branch average (Q2 2026 Pulse).

Method: failures = runs × 250 working days × (1 − success rate). Debug time = 40 minutes of engineer attention per failure. CircleCI prices a failure at 60 minutes of recovery — wall-clock time covering debugging and blocked deployments, not only engineer attention — so we take two-thirds of it and charge it to every failure rather than only to those above a 90% baseline. Rework tax = 15% of labor cost. Estimates are directional and deliberately conservative — we would rather under-promise than leave a buyer feeling oversold.

The Data

Every CI/CD metric is moving the wrong way

Platform telemetry from CircleCI (28.7M workflows, September 2025) and Bitrise Mobile Insights, plus an academic study of 1,960 Java repositories on GitHub Actions. Measured pipeline data rather than survey opinion — and every figure links to the source it came from.

+250 h

Additional engineering hours a team burns on debugging each year when it pushes five changes a day and main-branch success falls from 90% to 70%. A team already at 90% carries none of it.

CircleCI benchmark
51.28%

of 1,960 open-source Java repositories had at least one flaky build. Reruns are rare — 3.2% of builds — and among the 52,610 developer-initiated reruns the authors studied, 67.73% came back with a different outcome.

arXiv preprint · 1,960 projects
+59% / −7%

Average throughput up 59% YoY — but that average belongs to the top 5%. The median team gained just 4%, and its main-branch throughput fell 7%.

CircleCI 2026 report

“More code enters the pipeline, more of it fails, and recovery takes longer. The result is not acceleration — it is congestion.”

Rickey Zachary · Thoughtworks, on CircleCI's 2026 State of Software Delivery — a report Thoughtworks sponsored

What TrimCI Does

Every pipeline. Every run. Analysed.

Put a dollar figure on broken builds, get ranked fixes from static and AI analysis, and give every team — engineering, platform, finance — the visibility they need to act.

dashboard

One dashboard, every provider

GitHub Actions and GitLab CI are live today, with Bitbucket, Jenkins, CircleCI and AWS CodeBuild coming soon — every connected pipeline in one unified view. One login, one source of truth for where your time and money are going.

lock_person

Read-only. No repository access.

We never request repository-content permissions and never clone your repo — a runtime allowlist rejects any provider call outside pipeline endpoints, so source files, workflow YAML and diffs are unreachable. What we do store is the last 8,000 characters of failed-job logs, which carry whatever your build prints.

payments

Estimate what broken builds cost you

We translate your actual run volume, success rate and recovery time into dollars. Stop debating whether flaky pipelines are a problem — know the estimated annual bleed.

leaderboard

Find where the waste hides

TrimCI ranks your slowest pipelines, most-failing jobs and flakiest builds from real run history — so you see exactly which pipelines burn the most time and money, and where to fix first.

auto_awesome

Savings from AI analysis

AI reads your build logs, failure patterns and flaky-test history and proposes concrete fixes — ranked by the failure-rate reduction and monthly dollars they would save. It runs on our self-hosted model: your logs never leave TrimCI's servers and are never sent to OpenAI, Anthropic or any external AI provider.

visibility

Put the real numbers in front of your team

Pipeline failure rate, debug hours, cost per team — in one view your engineers, tech leads and finance can all read. Knowing the number is the first step to fixing the problem.

Who Runs TrimCI

Built for the people who answer for CI

Different roles, one access model: read-only pipeline data, no repository access. That is also why handing a free dashboard login to your client, investor or finance team is a small decision — we never request repository contents, so there is no codebase to hand over. What they see is run history, cost, and the failed-job log excerpts those numbers are built from.

build

The hands-on CI owner

You own CI health because you broke it last. The cost Pareto, flaky-pipeline flags, retry tax and error fingerprints turn a dozen open provider tabs into one ranked fix-this-first list.

analytics

The accountable engineering manager

Your director asks what CI instability costs, and 'a lot' is not a number. The estimated-loss card, SLO targets and a monthly PDF turn the budget argument into arithmetic — with before/after proof for the cleanup work you sponsor.

bolt

The startup founder-CTO

Nobody on the team owns CI, so TrimCI watches it for you: silent red nightlies get called out, failure spikes are detected automatically on Business and throughout the trial, and the zero-code-access app is a two-minute security decision even on private repos.

shield

The platform lead under EU compliance

Self-hosted GitLab CE/EE on every plan, EU-only hosting, a two-entry sub-processor list and AI that runs on TrimCI's own servers — pipeline observability your DPO can actually clear.

Live now: GitHub Actions and GitLab CI. More providers coming soon.
Pricing

Priced per active contributor — never per seat

Start free, upgrade when the numbers tell you to. Every feature is in every plan except automatic spike detection, which is Business-only — otherwise paid plans widen history, quotas and sync cadence. You pay only for people who trigger pipeline runs; inviting members is always free.

Free

For side projects and a first honest measurement.

$0 / month

2 repositories · 7-day history · daily sync

See plan

Business

For organizations that run on their pipelines.

$16 / active contributor / month

Unlimited everything · 60-day history · auto spike detection

See plan

Paid checkout is not live yet, so after the trial every organization simply continues on the Free plan. Paid subscriptions launch with at least 30 days' notice, per our Terms of Service. Every new organization starts with a 14-day Business-equivalent trial — no credit card. Questions or feedback? office@trimci.com

schedule Fast setup · 14-day free trial

The pipelines that break tomorrow are already in main today.

Connect GitHub Actions or GitLab CI — more providers coming soon. Quickly see your actual pipeline failure rate, an estimate of what broken builds are costing you, and a ranked list of fixes that pay off fastest. Join TrimCI before the next broken build writes your roadmap for you.