Blacksmith alternatives for GitHub Actions (2026)
Depot, Namespace and WarpBuild sell the same kind of hosted runner; Ubicloud lists the lowest hosted price; RunsOn and SuperCI run jobs on spot machines in your own cloud for the lowest price per minute.
Blacksmith runs GitHub Actions jobs on its own hardware and bills by the minute. Teams look for an alternative for four reasons: a lower price, jobs that stay in their own cloud account, macOS or Windows needs, or a second supplier. These are the options, with each one’s own published prices.
Side by side
Prices are per minute for Linux on x64 with 4 vCPUs, the size most teams compare, unless a cell says otherwise.
| Option | Jobs run on | 4 vCPU Linux x64 | Linux Arm | Plan fee | Free minutes | macOS |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Blacksmith | Blacksmith’s hardware | $0.008 | $0.0025 (2 vCPU) | None | 3,000 a month | Yes, $0.08 (M4) |
| Depot | Depot’s AWS account | $0.012 | Not listed | From $20 a month | 2,000 in the $20 plan | Yes, on every plan |
| Namespace | Namespace’s hardware | $0.004 to $0.006 (8 GB) | Not listed | Pay as you go, or from $100 a month | 100,000 unit minutes in the $100 plan | Yes, $0.04 to $0.06 |
| WarpBuild | WarpBuild’s cloud, or yours (BYOC) | $0.008; $0.002 a minute plus your cloud on BYOC | $0.006 | None | Not listed | Not listed |
| Ubicloud | Ubicloud’s hardware | $0.0025 (Standard), $0.004 (Premium) | Not listed | None | 1,250 a month | No |
| RunsOn | Your AWS account | About $0.0015, AWS spot | About $0.0015 (Graviton) | €300 to €3,600 a year | Not applicable | No |
| SuperCI | Your AWS, Cloudflare or Modal account | About $0.0014, AWS spot | About $0.0014, AWS spot (Graviton) | None (MIT) | Not applicable | No |
| GitHub larger runners | GitHub’s machines | $0.012 | $0.008 | Team or Enterprise plan | None for larger runners | Yes |
| Actions Runner Controller | Your Kubernetes cluster | Your cluster’s cost | Your cluster’s cost | None (open source) | Not applicable | No |
Where a vendor gives one price without a size, or a range, the cell says what the vendor says. Spot prices move: RunsOn’s are its own 7-day averages in us-east-1, SuperCI’s are AWS’s spot prices in us-east-1 with the disk and public address counted in, for a c8a.xlarge on 8 October and a 4-CPU Graviton machine on 12 October 2026. On RunsOn and SuperCI you also pay your cloud for the small control plane; RunsOn puts its own at about $7 a month.
Which alternative fits
The same experience, another supplier. Depot, Namespace and WarpBuild work like Blacksmith: change runs-on, and your jobs run on their machines with their caches. Each says its runners are faster than GitHub’s (“up to 3x” for Depot, “2x-10x faster builds” for Namespace). Blacksmith says “2x faster than GitHub’s runners”. None of the four publishes a comparison against the others on the same jobs, and neither have we.
The lowest price while someone else runs the machines. Ubicloud lists the lowest hosted price per minute: $0.0025 for 4 vCPUs on its Standard runners, with 1,250 free minutes a month. Its own page lists other figures in places, so check the table there for the size you need.
Jobs that stay in your own cloud account. RunsOn and SuperCI start a fresh machine in your account for each job, mostly on spot capacity, so the checkout, build and secrets never reach a vendor and the bill is your cloud’s price. WarpBuild’s BYOC option does the same for $0.002 a minute on top of your cloud, and Depot offers its data plane in your AWS account on its Business plan. RunsOn is GitHub Actions on AWS with a licence; SuperCI is open source and also runs GitLab CI and Cloudflare or Modal machines.
macOS. Blacksmith, Depot, Namespace and GitHub have Mac runners. Ubicloud, RunsOn and SuperCI do not.
Kubernetes you already operate. Actions Runner Controller is GitHub’s own and runs runners as pods in your cluster. It costs nothing beyond the cluster, and someone has to run the cluster.
Questions
What is the cheapest alternative to Blacksmith?
Running jobs on spot machines in your own cloud account is the cheapest per minute: about $0.0015 for 4 vCPUs with RunsOn or SuperCI, against Blacksmith’s $0.008. Among hosted services, Ubicloud lists the lowest price, $0.0025 for 4 vCPUs. Blacksmith’s 3,000 free minutes a month can make it the cheapest for small workloads.
Can I keep using Blacksmith-style labels with an alternative?
Every option here is chosen with the job’s runs-on label, so switching is a one-line change per job. Each vendor names its labels differently; SuperCI’s are superci and superci/cpu=4, superci/arch=arm64 and so on.
Is Blacksmith cheaper than GitHub’s own runners?
Yes, per minute: $0.008 against GitHub’s $0.012 for 4 vCPUs on Linux, and 3,000 free minutes a month. Blacksmith also says its runners are twice as fast, which halves the cost again if your jobs see that speed-up.
Which alternatives run GitLab CI as well?
SuperCI runs GitLab CI jobs on the same machines. The others here are GitHub Actions only, apart from Namespace, which lists Buildkite by arrangement.
Sources
Read on 27 October 2026.
- Blacksmith pricing: prices for Ubuntu x64 and Arm, Windows and macOS M4, 3,000 free minutes, add-ons.
- Depot pricing: plans, minutes included, the 2-vCPU price ($0.006), macOS on every plan, the Business plan.
- Namespace pricing: the 4 vCPU prepaid and overage prices, plans and unit minutes, macOS prices.
- WarpBuild pricing: x64 and Arm prices by size, the BYOC price.
- Ubicloud GitHub Actions: Standard and Premium prices by size, 1,250 free minutes.
- RunsOn pricing: licences, spot prices by runner size, the control plane’s cost.
- GitHub’s runner pricing: larger runner prices for x64 and Arm.
- The speed claims, in each vendor’s own words: Depot’s overview, Namespace’s summary for agents, Blacksmith pricing.
- Namespace’s GitHub Actions page: Buildkite by arrangement.
- SuperCI: spot machines (how it picks them), Arm (Arm spot prices), SuperCI vs Depot, Blacksmith and Namespace (the x64 spot price).