GitHub Actions
‍Twice as fast. Half the cost.

Speed up your GitHub Actions with a one-line code change, by running them on high-performance gaming CPUs instead of GitHub's older server hardware

Get Started

3,000 free minutes per month. No credit card required.

jobs:
build:
- runs-on: ubuntu-latest
+ runs-on: blacksmith|

jobs:
build:
- runs-on: ubuntu-latest
+ runs-on: blacksmith-4vcpu-ubuntu-2204|

Up to 2x

faster than GitHub
hosted runners

Over 50%

cheaper than GitHub
hosted runners

Unlimited

concurrency
for runners of all sizes

Trusted by

Build, Test, Deploy, Faster.

Blacksmith enhances your GitHub Actions experience across multiple dimensions

Built-in Analytics

Slice and dice data across your GitHub Actions and Docker builds to identify performance bottlenecks, flaky tests or suboptimal caching strategies

Accelerated Docker Builds

Blacksmith will dynamically mount sticky disks containing all your Docker layers right into your runners, resulting in up to 40x faster Docker builds

See how Blacksmith outperforms GitHub
in both performance and cost

GitHub Actions

nodejs/node

180m

100m

$1.44

$0.44

android/emulator

$0.072

$0.012

rust/tokio

$0.072

$0.02

Docker Builds

Posthog

8m 38s

1m 27s

$0.072

$0.008

Trieve

9m 32s

2m 22s

$0.08

$0.012

Quadratic

11m 54s

5m 5s

$0.096

$0.024

Powerful CI Analytics

Blacksmith offers out-of-the-box analytics for your GitHub Action pipelines to provide a clear picture of your CI health

Blacksmith is an easy win at any scale. Save money from day 1 and go faster. A rare technical product with no downside

Ted Nyman

Co-founder & CEO of Cased
ex-CTO of GitHub

Blacksmith is amazing! With unlimited concurrency at half the cost, switching from Github Actions is pure upside. Their team's quick and helpful support on slack is the cherry on top.

Luke Zeller

Product & Engineering at Pallet

Blacksmith offered lower cost and faster runners and made it easy to switch and see if those claims were true. Not only were those claims true, they continued to deliver more value with better observability for our CI/CD pipelines. That's allowed us to optimize our build pipelines so we can ship more, faster.

Nick Crohn

Staff Software Engineer at Sibi

Switching to Blacksmith was a game-changer for us. We cut our GitHub Actions costs in half and saw noticeably faster runs thanks to their newer hardware and custom actions. Their wizard made the whole process super easy — I was up and running in no time and service has been rock solid!

Fernando Battistella

DevOps Engineer at Finch

We switched from GitHub-hosted runners to Blacksmith and saw
decreased build times because of their better machines and caching.

Our CI costs were also cut by half.

Gautam Gupta

Co-Founder at Highbeam

Blacksmith is a no-brainer if you're using GitHub Actions. It took less than 10 mins to integrate and cut our CI time by 35% and our CI costs by 70%.

Greg Bergé

Product Engineer at GitBook

Blacksmith has been great for our developer velocity - it’s much faster than GitHub runners so our team spends much less time waiting for code to build.

Advith Chelikani

Co-Founder at Pylon

Switching to Blacksmith was a quick one-line change and we saw an immediate 30% improvement in CI time. It was a noticeable upgrade and made it fun to push commit-by-commit again

Gabriel P Samson

Founding Engineer at Slope

Since switching to Blacksmith, our build times are over 65% faster, our costs have gone down and our engineers are more productive.

We couldn't be happier!

Alex Bilbie

Head of Engineering at Muzz

Ironclad security
with compliance

Blacksmith runs jobs in isolated virtual machines
directly on bare metal

Isolated, ephemeral VMs per job execution
No access to GitHub secrets
Single-use GitHub access tokens per job execution
Memory-safe Go and Rust stack
SOC2 Type 2 compliant

FAQs

Can’t find your answer?

How is Blacksmith so much faster than GitHub runners?
GitHub hosted runners use decade-old server CPUs that have poor single-core performance.

Blacksmith runs your jobs on the latest generation gaming CPUs, which have high single-core performance that drastically speeds up your CI runs.
Is there a free trial available?
Yes, there is a free trial with 3000 free minutes per month included per org. No credit card required.
Can you tell me about how my runs are secure?
Blacksmith runs each GitHub Action job in an ephemeral VM which is destroyed after the job completes.

We use Firecracker, which is a virtual machine monitor (VMM), that uses the Linux Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) to create and manage ephemeral VMs. Firecracker was created at AWS and is the same technology used to power AWS Lambda.

We don’t store any data from your runs, and our GitHub app doesn’t have access to your secrets.
Do you support Mac and Windows runners?
Unfortunately, we don't support Mac and Windows runners at the moment. If this is important to you, we'd love to hear from you - email us at hello@blacksmith.sh.
Is Blacksmith SOC2 compliant?
Blacksmith is SOC2 Type 2 compliant.

Contact us at hello@blacksmith.sh for a copy of our SOC2 report.
How do I learn more about pricing?
Our per-minute cost is exactly half of GitHub.

We do offer enterprise contracts for large customers.
Can I use Blacksmith for personal use (non-organization)?
Unfortunately, Blacksmith only works with organizations on GitHub. This is due to GitHub's limitation of only allowing hosted runners for organizations.