SuperCI vs Depot, Blacksmith and Namespace
The services run your jobs on their machines, tuned for speed, and bill by the minute. SuperCI starts machines in your own cloud account, at your cloud's price.
Depot, Blacksmith and Namespace sell GitHub Actions runners as a service. You change runs-on, your jobs run on their machines, and they send a bill by the minute. SuperCI is a different kind of thing: software that starts the machines in your own cloud account, where the bill comes from your cloud and nobody else runs your code.
Side by side
| What | SuperCI | Depot | Blacksmith | Namespace |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jobs run on | Machines in your own cloud account | Depot’s AWS account | Blacksmith’s own hardware | Namespace’s own hardware |
| 4 CPUs on Linux, a minute | About $0.0014, AWS spot | $0.012 | $0.008 | $0.004 to $0.006 |
| Fee | None | From $20 a month | None | Pay as you go, or from $100 a month |
| Minutes included | None | 2,000 in the $20 plan | 3,000 a month, 2-CPU | 100,000 unit minutes in the $100 plan |
| You operate | A small control plane in your account | Nothing | Nothing | Nothing |
| Their own cache | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| macOS | No | Yes, from the $200 plan | Yes | Yes |
| Works with | GitHub Actions and GitLab CI | GitHub Actions | GitHub Actions | GitHub Actions; Buildkite by arrangement |
GitHub’s own price for 4 cores is $0.012 a minute. Namespace’s two prices are for minutes inside a plan and beyond it, on a machine with 8 GB. The SuperCI price is AWS’s spot price for a c8a.xlarge in us-east-1 on 8 October 2026, with its disk and public address.
What the services do better
Nothing to run. There is no cloud account to open, no quota to raise and nothing to update. You connect your GitHub organization and change a line.
Speed is what they sell. In their own words: Depot’s runners are “up to 3x faster than a GitHub-hosted runner”, Blacksmith’s are “2x faster than GitHub’s runners”, and Namespace promises “2x-10x faster builds”. A job that finishes in half the time costs half as much at any price per minute. We have not measured SuperCI against them, and make no such claim.
Caches built for CI. Each has its own cache close to its machines. SuperCI adds no cache: jobs use GitHub’s, as on GitHub’s own runners.
macOS. All three have Mac runners. SuperCI has none.
What SuperCI does differently
Your code runs in your account. With a service, the checkout, the build and the job’s secrets are on someone else’s machines. Blacksmith’s own words for the permission you grant: “to execute your GitHub Action jobs on Blacksmith’s infrastructure”. With SuperCI the machine is yours, in your account and your network, and it is gone when the job ends. Depot offers something similar, its data plane in your AWS account, on its Business plan.
You pay your cloud, and nobody else. There is no fee and no price per minute on top. A spot machine with four CPUs comes to about $0.0014 a minute, against $0.004 to $0.012 at the three services.
It is open source. SuperCI is under the MIT licence, so what runs in your account can be read.
GitLab CI too. The same machines serve GitLab jobs.
Which to pick
Pick a service if you want faster builds today with nothing to look after, or need macOS, and are content for jobs to run on a vendor’s machines. Pick SuperCI if the code or its secrets should not leave your cloud account, if the lowest price per minute matters more than a tuned cache, or if you also run GitLab CI.
Sources
Read on 9 October 2026.
- Depot: pricing, runner types and prices, overview (the speed claim, plans with macOS), security (where jobs run), Depot Managed (in your own AWS account).
- Blacksmith: pricing (prices, the speed claim), runners overview (free minutes, macOS), security (its own hardware), quickstart (the permission quoted), caching.
- Namespace: pricing (plans, unit minutes, prices by size), compute (its own hardware), GitHub Actions, caching, its summary for agents (the speed claim).
- GitHub: Actions runner pricing.