Blacksmith

What it actually replaces

Blacksmith does not replace GitHub Actions. It replaces the machines that run your Actions jobs. Your workflow files, secrets, triggers and marketplace actions stay where they are, and you change the runs-on label so jobs land on Blacksmith's bare-metal runners instead of GitHub-hosted VMs. That narrow scope is the whole pitch: no pipeline migration, no new YAML dialect, and a rollback that is the same one-line edit in reverse.

The price list, read carefully

Billing is per minute, by runner type, according to the vendor's pricing page:

• Ubuntu x64: $0.004/min
• Ubuntu ARM: $0.0025/min
• Windows x64: $0.008/min
• macOS M4: $0.08/min

Every runner type includes 3,000 free minutes per month, and signing up does not ask for a credit card. Add-ons are priced separately: Docker layer caching and sticky disks are $0.50 per GB per month (Ubuntu only), and static IPs are $100 per IP per month. A 99.9% SLA, priority support and higher concurrency sit in an Enterprise tier with no published price.

The advertised savings (67% on Ubuntu x64, 35% on macOS) are not a rate cut alone. They combine the lower per-minute rate with an assumed 2x faster runtime, so jobs bound by network calls, test servers or a slow external service will save less than the headline. Run your own slowest workflow on both before extrapolating.

Where the speed comes from

The runners use high single-core-performance CPUs, and the cache backend is advertised as 4x faster to download than GitHub's. Builds that restore large dependency trees or Docker layers benefit most. Docker layers persist on NVMe disks between runs, which helps image-heavy repos but is the feature that adds a per-GB monthly line item.

The console

Alongside the runners there is a Console for CI observability: searching logs across runs, spotting slow or flaky jobs, and showing failed-test output inline in pull request comments. It is useful on its own for a team that has outgrown the Actions tab's views, though it only sees jobs that ran on Blacksmith.

Discounts and programs

A Startup Program offers a discount to companies under 100 employees, under $50M raised and under five years old, but you apply and negotiate rather than get a listed rate. An OSS Program exists for actively maintained public repos under permissive licences; the pricing page does not say what it grants.

What is awkward

You are tied to GitHub Actions twice over: Blacksmith has no story for GitLab CI, Jenkins or Buildkite, and a move off Actions later means abandoning the speedup too. The pricing page also shows a vCPU selector (2 to 32) without explaining how core count changes the per-minute rate, so budgeting for large runners means asking the vendor or testing.