DevGhouse
DevGhouse

How a $4 bill convinced us to build our own task manager

By Boris Zarinski
28 June 2026
3 min read
How a $4 bill convinced us to build our own task manager
# How a $4 bill convinced us to build our own task manager Picture it. Two pull requests, green on our machines, end to end tests passing, ready to merge. We open the checks on GitHub and both light up red in about one second flat. Not a failing test. Not a flaky runner. Just a small annotation at the bottom of the run: > The job was not started because recent account payments have failed or your spending limit needs to be increased. We had hit a four dollar cap on GitHub Actions minutes. Four dollars. In the middle of shipping a feature. The code was fine. The wallet was the bug. ## This was not our first rodeo Here is the part that made us laugh, because it was not the first time a tool we depend on tapped us on the shoulder and politely refused to work. Same project, a while back: **Trello**. Free boards, free automations, right up until the automation runs dried out and the power ups we leaned on wanted a plan. The board did not break. It just quietly stopped doing the one thing we set it up to do. Before that: **Jira**. Different shape, same lesson. Seat limits, plan tiers, that very specific feeling of your own roadmap sitting behind someone else's upgrade button. Now **GitHub Actions**, with a four dollar full stop on our CI. Three different tools. One repeating story. We kept renting the critical path of our own workflow from services that can throttle it at the worst possible moment. ## The uncomfortable part DevGhouse is, among other things, a planning product. We help people run their work. And there we were, running our own work on a patchwork of other people's free tiers, each with its own ceiling, none of them talking to each other. So we did the obvious thing we had been putting off. We started running our own roadmap on our own task management, and we made it sync with everything else instead of asking anyone to change their habits. ## Own the backlog, rent the conveniences The idea is simple and a little stubborn. Your tasks live in DevGhouse. Projects, sections, labels, filters, the usual furniture. Then they mirror out to wherever your team already lives: Todoist, Notion, Trello, and Jira. Plan it in one place, see it in the others. The point is not to win a tab war with any of them. The point is that no single third party owns your backlog, and no single quota can freeze your planning halfway through a sprint. If one sync target hits a wall, the work itself is still right there, intact, and still flowing to the rest. ## And the CI cap that started all of this? Same medicine. The jobs that actually gate a merge are moving onto our own self hosted runner, the same box that already ships our deploys, so a billing meter can never again stop a green build from landing. Own the critical path. Rent the conveniences. ## The wink We are fully aware of the irony. A company that builds task tools, blocked by a task tool. A company that automates CI, stopped by a CI bill. That is exactly why this post exists. The best features tend to arrive the moment your own workflow embarrasses you in public. If you have ever watched your roadmap go read only because a card expired or a seat ran out, you already understand the whole pitch. Keep using the tools you like. Just stop letting any one of them hold the only copy.
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