I'm a front-end developer at a UK agency. We manage around 20 active client projects at any given time — e-commerce builds, custom integrations, the usual — and for the last few years we've been progressively rolling out Cypress and Playwright test suites across them.
It went well, until we looked at the bill.
During the test-building phase alone — not full runs, just iterating on the suites themselves — our Bitbucket pipeline costs jumped by £300 a month. That's before a single complete test run against a client's environment. Some of our larger clients have test suites that run for close to an hour. Across 20 projects, the maths gets painful fast.
The problem isn't that automated testing is expensive. It's that the tooling assumes you're running everything through a cloud CI pipeline, and cloud CI pipelines charge by the minute.
We kept having the same conversation internally: "We need to revisit how we're running these tests." Every suggestion had a catch. Use Cypress Cloud? Per-seat pricing, and now your client's test data is sitting on someone else's infrastructure. Keep everything in the pipeline? You've seen the bill. Run it locally on a project manager's machine? Now you've got a bespoke setup on a personal laptop that nobody else can reproduce, and sharing results means sending a zip file or a screenshot.
None of those felt like a proper answer.
So one evening I started building one.
The idea was simple: a self-hosted control room for Cypress and Playwright tests. Your tests run locally or on your own server — no pipeline minutes consumed, no third-party SaaS in the middle. Results stream in real time so you're not staring at a terminal waiting for a summary email. And when a test run is done, you generate a branded client report with a secure shareable link — your logo, your colours, something you'd actually be comfortable sending to a client.
A month of evenings later, SignalDeck CI existed.
It's not trying to replace your CI pipeline for deployment gating or automated triggers on every commit. It's solving the specific problem of: how do you run, monitor, and share test results across multiple client projects without it costing a fortune or looking like you've just forwarded a log file?
The self-hosted angle matters beyond cost. When you're running tests against a client's staging environment, their credentials and data are flowing through your test runner. Keeping that on infrastructure you control isn't just cheaper — it's the right answer for GDPR-conscious clients and agencies that take data handling seriously.
SignalDeck CI is free to self-host, open source, and available as a native macOS and iPad app. If you're running Cypress or Playwright across multiple client projects and the pipeline costs are starting to sting, it's worth a look.
Ben — Developer & Founder, SignalDeck CI
Top comments (0)