All 100 ideasServers and DevOps
#94 of 100 · Servers and DevOps
CI runners for every platform
Affordable CI with macOS, Windows, Linux and ARM runners and real devices, building every platform from one command.
Asks per year
What the askers want
- Would pay0%
- Want it local or private14%
- Object to subscriptions14%
- Want it open source or self-hosted14%
- Want AI to do it0%
Share of the 7 asks that say so, as judged by Jev.
What exists on Show HN
Never launchedNobody has launched this on Show HN.
Instead of: GitHub Actions, Bitrise
The idea, as matched
A CI service with cheap or free macOS, Windows, Linux and ARM runners and real devices, for building, testing and releasing desktop and mobile apps across a platform matrix from one command.
Jev first matched 8 requests to this idea; a second reader kept 7 of 8.
Every ask, newest first
Each line is an AI paraphrase of what the writer wanted. The link goes to their own words on Hacker News.
Reader’s note. Recent asks follow GitHub Actions cost and outages.
- May 2026Wants a GitHub Actions alternative with affordable runners, especially macOS ones. Read it: a comment in “GitHub Is Down”
- Mar 2026Wants a free CI service covering AMD64 and ARM64 on macOS, Windows and Linux. Read it: a comment in “Moving from GitHub to Codeberg, for lazy people”
- Dec 2025Wants a Vercel-like CLI that builds and tests desktop apps across macOS, Windows and Linux with one command. Read it: a post: “Vercel for Desktop Apps?”
- Mar 2024Asks for a CI service with physical iOS and macOS devices for testing Network Extensions. Read it: a comment in “Writing Gnome Apps with Swift”
- Apr 2019Wishes for free CI on rarer operating systems and CPU architectures. Read it: a comment in “Darling – macOS Translation Layer for Linux”
- Apr 2018Wants a cloud service to test Mac/PC software across OS versions and proxy configurations. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: How to test app (Mac/PC) software in cloud”
- Jun 2015Wants an open-source, Travis-like CI that builds for OS X, Windows and Linux cheaply. Read it: a post: “Ask HN: Is there an open source alternative to Travis CI”
Building this?
Read ten of the asks above first, because they say what the existing launches miss. If you ship it, post it as a Show HN so the next run of this list finds it.
Ship it like Vercel, on a server you own
This site runs on ShipTiffin. A push to GitHub deploys it, the way it would on Vercel, but the server is a Hetzner box in your own account. Postgres, sign-in, email, jobs and analytics are already on it, every project gets a hard limit, and nothing is billed by usage.
$19 a month per box, plus about $10 for the server at Hetzner. Open source, so you can also run it yourself for free.