DevOps to finance: Explaining CI costs to your CFO

Greater usage of your CI tool is a good thing. But as your toolchain scales, so does the bill, and it's only a matter of time before your finance team starts asking questions (just ask anyone in DevOps who's had to field a call from their CFO explaining a 40% spike in AWS costs). Sadly, justifying your CI spend to finance leadership can sometimes feel like speaking an entirely different language. This post will help you translate technical realities into financial terms, and to position yourself as a strategic partner, instead of 'just' a technologist.

Quick Glossary

DevOps: a modern software development set of practices that emphasizes collaboration between development and operations/infrastructure teams. The goal is to release high-quality software faster and more reliably by automating workflows, improving communication, and using CI/CD pipelines.

CI (Continuous Integration): the practice of automatically building and testing code every time a team member pushes changes to a shared repository. CI helps catch bugs early, speeds up release cycles, and enables frequent deployments.

FinOps (Financial Operations): a discipline that brings financial accountability to cloud spending. FinOps aligns engineering, finance, and business teams to track, manage, and optimize costs in real time, enabling better decision-making without slowing down development.

Build vs. Buy: a strategic decision on whether to develop custom internal tools or purchase third-party solutions. This is often a key consideration when evaluating CI platforms and infrastructure, with implications for cost, speed, and flexibility.

Why this conversation matters in DevOps

DevOps has grown to encompass more than just engineering velocity: it's about delivering business value efficiently. And it's the CFO's job to measure that value across the company. They're the ones tasked with aligning budget and strategy, sometimes even overseeing HR, which is a key function in DevOps transformation. When they ask, "How are our CI tools working so far?" they're really asking, "Has this been a wise allocation of capital and what needs to change to get better?"

So don't be surprised when you get hauled into a quarterly reporting meeting to justify your team's decisions and how they're panning out.

To thrive in these meetings, the best DevOps teams are increasingly adopting a FinOps mindset. They're expanding beyond the remit of 'ship stuff faster' to ship stuff faster at great business value.

How to explain your CI to a CFO

Start by zooming out. Situate your CI within the broader DevOps toolchain and ground the conversation in a few fundamentals that everyone can agree on: why we implemented this CI tool in the first place; how we measure success; and how we're tracking.

Frame your CI spend around three core pillars:

• Why we bought this tool: Often, it's the CFO who initiated the DevOps process in the first place by asking the CTO and CIO to increase innovation while lowering budgets. Tie the decision back to the speed, quality, and outcome goals that you initially set. Maybe your CI tool enabled your team to jump from weekly to daily deploys. That's the ROI everyone can get behind.

• What metrics we're responsible for: Stick to a few clear ones: lead time to production, build success rate, mean time to recovery (MTTR), and infrastructure cost per build are all strong options. If they ask for more, align on what they actually care about: reduced support tickets, better feature delivery, and fewer rollbacks.

• Where we're succeeding and where we're not: Be honest: if builds are slow or flaky, say so, and show how those hiccups have impacted business KPIs. If you've shaved 30% off build times through parallelization or ephemeral environments, highlight it. Or if CI bottlenecks prevented a bug fix from going out expediently, shine a light on how that hurt your customer commitments and what you recommend to make sure it doesn't happen again. This is your opportunity to show how DevOps aligns with company goals.

How is spend tracking vs. target?

This is where you bring data. Compare current monthly CI spend against your forecast, and normalize it against engineering headcount or number of builds. Are costs scaling linearly with team size? Are we running redundant or unnecessary jobs? Are we hitting diminishing returns?

Summary of 2025 software delivery metrics

Source: The 2025 State of Software Delivery

Use benchmarks. Show what best-in-class CI/CD looks like in your industry. Not to copy them, but to demonstrate you understand what 'good' looks like and where you stand. Highlight any recent optimization wins: maybe you switched to ARM-based runners and cut compute costs 40%, or introduced test skipping logic to avoid redundant runs. Or maybe you increased your build times by 40x by using a 3rd party service.

It's not just about enabling automation anymore. It's gotta be cost-effective automation. When you walk into a stakeholder meeting and show that your team reduced cloud spend by 20% without impacting performance, you're proving that DevOps is a strategic partner in the success of the business.

What's our plan going forward?

This is where the rubber meets the road. Propose a pragmatic plan to improve efficiency. That might include:

• Auditing unused third-party integrations or legacy pipelines
• Standardizing ephemeral environments to reduce runtime
• Moving from on-demand to reserved compute instances
• Consolidating tools
• Jettisoning in-house runners for 3rd party services that are faster and offer lower TCO

Finally, tie it all back to business outcomes. If you're proposing a tooling upgrade or refactor, explain how it improves time-to-market or engineer throughput. And don't forget the HR angle — DevOps transformation means retraining, restructuring, and readiness for change. The CFO is a key stakeholder in making that happen.

On that note, here are a few common questions your CFO might ask, and how to prep an answer for them:

1. Why is our CI spend increasing month-over-month?

   Reply: We're iterating faster and have seen an increase in developer activity, which has naturally driven more builds. However, we're actively managing that growth by optimizing our pipelines. For example, reducing redundant test runs, implementing caching, and moving some jobs to lower-cost compute options. We're tracking spend per build and are working toward keeping that metric stable even as volume grows.

2. What's our ROI from our CI investment?

   Reply: CI helps us detect bugs earlier, release features faster, and reduce incidents in production. Since adopting our current setup, we've improved our deploy frequency by X%, and our lead time to production has dropped from Y days to Z. These improvements directly impact customer satisfaction, engineering throughput, and support load.

3. How might we do this more cost effectively?

   Reply: Yes, and we routinely check in on those options. We've benchmarked internal costs versus vendor solutions and identified areas to optimize. For example, we're evaluating ARM-based runners, ephemeral environments, and usage-based pricing models. We've also looked at build-vs-buy tradeoffs to ensure we're not over-engineering where a vendor tool makes more financial sense.

4. How would we know if we're over-resourced for CI?

   Reply: Our CI system is designed to scale with our team. While we've invested upfront in automation and tooling, that investment reduces manual work and prevents performance bottlenecks. We regularly review usage patterns to ensure we're not over-provisioning, and we've set clear thresholds for scaling resources up or down.

Final thoughts

CI isn't just a technical necessity, it's a vital lever to iterate faster and unlock productivity. Framing your CI spend within the broader goals of innovation, efficiency, and time-to-market helps translate your team's engineering work into business value.

When you clearly explain why tools were chosen, what outcomes you're driving, how your costs compare to targets, and what you're doing to optimize, you shift the conversation from cost center to value creation. It's vital to talk your CFO's language when reviewing your CI performance so you can clearly communicate your wins and highlight what your team is doing to improve engineer velocity more efficiently.

Where Depot fits in

When it's time to prove ROI to your CFO, Depot makes the math simple. Our customers typically see 2-40x faster builds and cut their CI spend in half, the kind of concrete numbers that finance teams love to see.

Whether you're optimizing Docker builds or GitHub Actions workflows, you can show measurable improvements: faster deployments, lower costs per build, and engineers who aren't waiting around. Start a free trial and bring real data to your next CFO meeting.

Related post

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• Remote build caching: The secret to lightning-fast software builds and exceptional developer experience
• Uncovering Disk I/O Bottlenecks in GitHub Actions

John Stocks

Head of Solution Engineering at Depot