Flaky Test Cost Calculator
How much are flaky tests really costing your team? Adjust the sliders to find out.
Your team
% of CI runs that fail due to flaky tests
Cost assumptions
Fine-tune for your setup
GitHub Actions Linux: $0.008/min
Salary + benefits + overhead
Estimated monthly waste
$3,313
$39,759 per year
24 wasted CI minutes/week from 2 flaky re-runs
1.0 hours/week of context switches and investigation
Delayed PRs, stacked merge conflicts, batched deploys
What this means
- ●CI compute is only 0% of the total cost — the number on your bill dramatically understates the problem.
- ●Developer time accounts for 11% of the cost. Each flaky failure triggers ~30 minutes of lost focus.
- ●Reducing your flaky rate from 5% to 3% would save roughly $1,657/month.
Stop estimating. Start measuring.
Kleore scans your actual CI history and shows you the real cost of every flaky test — ranked by impact.
Scan my repos — freeHow we calculate this
CI compute
Flaky re-runs × CI run duration × cost per minute. Straightforward — this is what shows up on your GitHub/cloud bill.
Developer time
Each flaky failure triggers investigation + context switch. Research shows ~23 minutes to regain deep focus. We use 30 minutes total per interruption (conservative).
Velocity tax
Flaky tests extend PR lifecycle, increase merge conflicts, and batch up deploys. We model this as a small percentage of total engineering capacity proportional to flaky rate.
Further reading
- How Much Do Flaky Tests Actually Cost? — Deep dive into all four cost layers.
- How to Fix Flaky Tests in GitHub Actions — Practical code fixes for the most common patterns.
- What Are Flaky Tests? — The fundamentals of test flakiness.