We have an application that is 3 months into development worked on by 2 developers. The website is relatively small and only 1/3rd completed, but the tests are reasonably comprehensive.
Running Protractor on our dev machines takes 60 minutes when running in serial, and under 40 minutes when running sharded with 2 concurrent sessions.
Running Protractor against BrowserStack with 6 compatibilities over 2 concurrent sessions takes under 4 hours.
Extrapolating these test times for the completed product (i.e. 4 hours + 200%) implies a total test time of around 12 hours. That exceeds the 120 min limit on travis-ci.com and puts us into the $999/mo tier on Browserstack. This also means that, at best, any change (including bug fixes) will take 12 hours to appear live.
Do other people encounter these same problems, and if so, how do they solve them?