With Bitrise reducing how long their retain build artifacts to as low on 90 days on paid plans, Buildstash offers an alternative for long-term artifact archival, with full control over how long you store your builds
Bitrise have just announced that from the 31st March 2026, they'll be slashing the maximum retention period for build artifacts on their paid plans. The new periods look like this:
Coming less than 3 years after the max retention period was set at 365 days, this reduction to 150 days for installable artifacts, just 90 days for other artifacts like build logs, or even 7 for some other pipeline files, represents a significant limitation on using Bitrise to manage your build artifacts including installable binaries.
In Bitrise's announcement they say this aligns more with "industry standards" as well as how "most teams actually use their build data". If you have a need or wish to retain and archive build artifacts older than this, their advice is simply to download them and store them somewhere else yourself.
All of this makes Buildstash an interesting option for teams who may exploring alternatives for managing their build artifacts without such limits on retention.
For background, Buildstash is a platform for managing software binaries, build artifacts, and releases.
It connects to any CI/CD platform, or allows easy upload via web or API. Once you store your builds, there are powerful features to organize by streams, into platforms, by defined labels, and so on. You can distribute builds to collaborators, to testers, or even out to users - with support for any target platform, and including integrated beta distribution for iOS and Android.
Importantly - with Buildstash retention policies are fully customizable. You can set your desired retention on a per-stream basis even: for example, you may wish to keep your last month's of nightlies, but keep stable builds forever. And what's key to note there also is that your retention policy really can be from any as small as a week, up to 'forever' if you want to never delete your builds.
So, if you're looking for either an alternative for managing your build artifacts with fully customizable retention, or for a tool to use in tandem with Bitrise for archiving older critical builds you wish to keep without having to worry about them potentially being deleted, then it could be worth exploring Buildstash.
Top comments (1)
Nice write-up, and always good to see more options in the artifact-management space. One bit of context worth adding: tools like Buildstash, Artifactory, and Nexus are complements to CI/CD, not replacements. CI platforms like Bitrise are built to compile, test, sign, and ship builds quickly — dedicated artifact repositories are purpose-built for long-term archival, governance, and retention. Pairing the two isn't a workaround; it's the recommended pattern for a mature pipeline.
Seen that way, aligning CI retention with common industry norms and pointing teams toward dedicated storage for anything long-lived is really a healthy separation of concerns: the build platform stays fast and lean, and your artifact repo owns the retention and compliance story. So "CI + a dedicated artifact store" is genuinely the best-practice setup and it's great that teams have solid choices like Buildstash on that side of the stack. 👍