WarpBuild Migration Costs: Runners, Cache & Snapshots

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Migrate from WarpBuild, and what the snapshot was doing

Migrate from WarpBuild and the label is the easy part: every size maps onto a size somewhere else at a comparable rate. What does not map is the part of WarpBuild that is not a runner, which is a metered cache and a snapshot restore priced per job, and those are the lines that decide whether the move saves money or just moves it. The four metered lines a WarpBuild pipeline can carry, and which of them have an equivalent elsewhere. Prices read from warpbuild.com/pricing on 2026-09-21. WarpBuild sells two different products under one name, and which one you are on changes the whole migration. The managed runners are an ordinary metered fleet in its cloud. The bring-your-own-cloud mode is a control plane over machines in your own AWS, GCP or Azure account at a flat $0.002 a minute, and leaving that is a decision about your cloud account rather than about a rate. Either way, three things come off the bill with their features attached: cache storage, cache operations and snapshots. Read those before the label map, because the label map is the trivial half. The label encodes the vCPU count WarpBuild labels read warp----x, where the suffix is the core count rather than a tier number. That is worth stating carefully, because it is an inference rather than a quotation: the rate card prices exactly one macOS shape, 6 vCPU with 14 GB, and the macOS label in the NativeScript/NativeScript workflows is warp-macos-15-arm64-6x, which only lines up if the suffix counts cores. The Linux side behaves the same way, with warp-ubuntu-2404-x64-4x in FuelLabs/fuel-core sitting against a published 4 vCPU with 16 GB row. Once you read it that way the map is mechanical. Sizes double the same way everywhere and the memory ratio is the standard 4 GB per core, so a WarpBuild size lands on the same shape at every destination up to the point where the destination stops publishing sizes. WarpBuild label Shape Published rate Closest Latchkey label Rate there warp-ubuntu-2404-x64-2x 2 vCPU, 8 GB $0.004 a minute latchkey-small $0.0025 a minute warp-ubuntu-2404-x64-4x 4 vCPU, 16 GB $0.008 a minute latchkey-medium $0.005 a minute warp-ubuntu-2404-x64-8x 8 vCPU, 32 GB $0.016 a minute latchkey-large Published per size warp-ubuntu-2404-x64-16x 16 vCPU, 64 GB $0.032 a minute latchkey-xlarge Published per size warp-ubuntu-2404-x64-32x 32 vCPU, 128 GB $0.064 a minute None No equivalent above 16 vCPU warp-ubuntu-2404-arm64-2x 2 vCPU, 8 GB on arm64 $0.003 a minute None Blacksmith arm64 at $0.0025 warp-windows-2022-x64-4x 4 vCPU, 16 GB on Windows $0.016 a minute None GitHub-hosted, or Namespace warp-macos-15-arm64-6x 6 vCPU, 14 GB on M4 Pro $0.08 a minute None Depot or Blacksmith at $0.08 Rates read from warpbuild.com/pricing on 2026-09-21; comparison rates from each vendor's own page the same day. Two labels are quoted from workflow files in named public repositories, warp-ubuntu-2404-x64-4x and warp-macos-15-arm64-6x; the rest of the first column applies the inferred naming rule to each published size rather than reproducing a label we have seen. The rule itself is inferred from those two against the rate card, not quoted from a WarpBuild page, which is a weaker claim and is flagged as one. Three meters leave the bill, and so do their features WarpBuild unbundles several things that most vendors either include or do not sell. Its published add-ons are cache storage at $0.20 per GB-month, cache write or restore at $0.0001 per operation, snapshot restore at $0.04 per job and snapshot storage at $0.025 per hour per snapshot. On a large pipeline those are not rounding errors: 20,000 jobs a month each restoring a snapshot is $800 in restores alone. The useful consequence for a migration is that the saving is easy to compute and is often bigger than the rate difference. The uncomfortable consequence is that the features go with the meters. A destination that includes cache in the price is cheaper and may publish no size at all, where WarpBuild would h...

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