Managed GitHub Actions Runners Compared

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Managed GitHub Actions runners compared, by how you pay

Managed GitHub Actions runners compared on rate alone will tell you to pick the cheapest row, and the cheapest row is frequently not the cheapest vendor. What separates them is structural: whose cloud the job runs in, what you still have to operate, and which meters run beside the one on the pricing page. The three commercial shapes in this market and which vendors sit in each. Rates and tiers read from each vendor page on 2026-09-21. Every vendor in this market sells the same first sentence: cheaper and faster than GitHub-hosted, attached with a label change. Most of them deliver it, which is why the sentence is useless for choosing between them. The useful distinctions are three. Where the compute physically runs, because that decides your data path and who gets paged. What the bill is shaped like, because a licence, a meter and a prepaid pool fail differently as you grow. And what the headline rate excludes, because several vendors meter things beside minutes. Three shapes, not one market Fully managed and metered is the shape most people mean: the vendor owns the fleet, you change runs-on, and you pay per minute. Blacksmith, Depot, Namespace, Ubicloud, WarpBuild managed and Latchkey are all this. Setup is a GitHub App connection and a label, and nothing about your cloud account changes. Bring-your-own-cloud is the second shape. The vendor supplies the control plane and the runner image, and the machines are started in your AWS, GCP or Azure account, so the compute bill and the network boundary are yours. WarpBuild publishes this at a flat $0.002 a minute. The third shape is a licence with no meter at all: RunsOn charges from EUR 300 a year at its Starter tier and states that the compute is your AWS bill, not ours, with no markup, billed per second by AWS. Vendor Shape Where jobs run What you still operate Setup change Blacksmith Managed, metered The vendor's cloud Nothing GitHub App plus a runs-on label Depot Managed, metered The vendor's cloud Nothing GitHub App plus a runs-on label Namespace Managed, metered The vendor's cloud Nothing Connection plus a runner profile label Ubicloud Managed, metered The vendor's cloud Nothing GitHub App plus a runs-on label Latchkey Managed, metered The vendor's cloud Nothing GitHub App plus a runs-on label WarpBuild Managed, or bring-your-own-cloud The vendor's cloud, or yours Your cloud account, in BYOC mode GitHub App, plus cloud credentials for BYOC RunsOn Licence, your account EC2 in your own AWS account The AWS account, quotas, AMIs, spot capacity A CloudFormation stack you own GitHub-hosted First party GitHub's cloud Nothing None; it is the default Shapes and setup steps read from each vendor's own documentation on 2026-09-21. The rates behind these rows, with free tiers and billing granularity, are in GitHub Actions runner alternatives; this table deliberately compares structure instead, because two vendors at the same rate can still be different products. The meters beside the meter Three vendors charge for things the minute rate does not include, and on a Docker-heavy or cache-heavy pipeline those lines can be larger than the difference between two rates. This is the part that a rate-card comparison hides, and it is published, so there is no excuse for leaving it out. None of these are traps; they are honest unbundling, and in each case the feature is genuinely optional. They just have to be added before you compare. A pipeline with a 50 GB Docker layer cache on Blacksmith is paying $25 a month for that cache on top of its minutes, and a pipeline restoring a WarpBuild snapshot on every one of 20,000 jobs a month is paying $800 for the restores. Vendor What else is metered Published price Blacksmith Docker layer caching $0.50 per GB per month Blacksmith Sticky disks $0.50 per GB per month Blacksmith Static IPs $100 per IP per month WarpBuild Cache storage $0.20 per GB-month WarpBuild Cache write or restore $0.0001 per operation WarpBuild Snapshot restore $0.04 per job WarpBui...

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