In what sense do they not "scale well"? Performance, administration, other? For me the run time is not measurable (I tried and couldn't see a difference). Telling the developers to insert a one line apply at the top of the init.gradle was not too hard (they can't hit the Nexus server otherwise and the proxy blocks most other repos). CI server uses the exact same init.gradle apply from: as the developers do so it is always in sync. --offline mode works after I added my own caching for pluginManagment rules configuration.