A team successfully reduced their GitHub Actions usage from 46,144 minutes to 19,155 minutes, cutting their bill by 63% and speeding up pull requests by eliminating unnecessary CI checks. Initially, all checks ran for each pull request regardless of whether changes were relevant, which led to inefficiencies and higher costs. By utilizing an open-source Action called paths-filter, they were able to detect file changes and conditionally run relevant checks, significantly reducing server usage and wait times. Looking ahead, the team plans to further optimize costs by using custom runners, as the default GitHub runners are comparatively expensive. They are considering using AWS EC2 instances, which offer more resources at a lower cost, or a service called Warpbuild for easier setup. Additionally, they are developing an alternative to AWS CodeBuild for faster builds and aim to use their build system as GitHub Action runners.