CI is one of those twilight zone things that by the time you need something like buildkite, you're making a lot of money, otherwise why would you have such a complicated CI setup? To do it right, you basically need to start spending buildkite money either way in staffing or buying buildkite. There are probably under 50k organizations in the world that need something like buildkite.

It does have a big 'it shouldn't be this expensive' energy, but the market has shown it needs to be unfortunately. Nobody really survives in the CI world without going to complete neglect mode or goes expensive like buildkite I've found. It reminds me a lot of home automation / IoT. Lutron costs almost $100 a light switch for really silly economic reasons unfortunately even though the tech is basically unchanged since the 90s.

The interface is also geeky because the only people who are going to even realize you need to spend money on this are other software professionals.