Latchkey vs Blacksmith: GitHub Actions Runner Costs

DEV Community

Latchkey vs Blacksmith for GitHub Actions runners

Latchkey and Blacksmith both replace ubuntu-latest with a one-line runs-on change and both bill per minute, so the choice comes down to three things: the rate, what you need beyond Linux x64, and whether a failed job costs you a re-run. Latchkey is $0.0025 a minute at 2 vCPU against Blacksmith at $0.004, and Blacksmith ships arm64, Windows and macOS runners plus 3,000 free minutes a month, none of which Latchkey has. One month of 10,000 Linux minutes at 2 vCPU on a private repository, at each vendor's published rate with its free allowance applied. Latchkey's plan fee of $5 to $49 sits on top of its bar and is drawn separately. Rates read 20 September 2026. Blacksmith sells managed GitHub Actions runners on its own hardware in Ashburn, Phoenix, Amsterdam and Frankfurt, adopted by installing a GitHub App and changing runs-on to a label such as blacksmith-4vcpu-ubuntu-2404. It publishes $0.004 a minute at 2 vCPU with 8 GB and an 80 GB disk, 3,000 free minutes a month on every plan, a colocated cache that intercepts actions/cache with 25 GB free per repository per week, and sticky disks for Docker layer reuse. Latchkey sells managed runners the same way and at $0.0025 a minute for the same 2 vCPU and 8 GB, on a 100 GB disk, with a self-healing agent that diagnoses and retries transient failures inside the run rather than handing them back red. It is missing things Blacksmith has shipped for a while: no arm64, no Windows, no macOS, and no free monthly allowance outside the trial and the plan tiers. Every cell below was read from the vendor's own public pricing or documentation page on 20 September 2026. Where a vendor does not publish a number, the cell says "not published" instead of carrying a guess. Comparison Blacksmith Latchkey Price per minute, 2 vCPU Linux x64 $0.004 (2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 80 GB disk) $0.0025 (2 vCPU, 8 GB RAM, 100 GB disk) Price per minute, 4 vCPU Linux x64 $0.008 (4 vCPU, 16 GB RAM, 80 GB disk) $0.005 (4 vCPU, 16 GB RAM, 100 GB disk) Free tier 3,000 free minutes a month, printed on every runner card 30-day trial, then 2,000 included minutes a month on Developer, 4,000 on Launch, 6,000 on Scale Billing granularity Not published Per minute Runner sizes and OS 2 to 32 vCPU on Linux x64 and arm64; Windows Server 2025 at 2 to 32 vCPU in public beta; macOS M4 at 6 and 12 vCPU 2, 4, 8 and 16 vCPU, Ubuntu 24.04 on x86_64 only. arm64, Windows and macOS are not offered Cache: type, limit, persistence Colocated cache intercepts actions/cache, 25 GB free per repo per week; sticky disks are ext4 volumes, 5 per job, evicted after 7 days idle, $0.50/GB/month Size not published. latchkey-dev/cache-action@v1 replaces actions/cache with a restore step and a save step, keeping path and key (no restore-keys); entries are isolated per organization, versioned by OS, kept 14 days; a failed restore warns rather than failing the job Docker build acceleration useblacksmith/setup-docker-builder@v2 and useblacksmith/build-push-action@v2; layers sit on a sticky disk per cache key, garbage-collected after 8 days unused latchkey-dev/docker-cache-action@v1, layers held in a Latchkey-managed private registry per organization Concurrency limits None imposed, per the runner docs Developer 20, Launch 40, Scale 80 busy runners per workspace; idle warm runners do not count Where jobs run Blacksmith's own regions: Ashburn, Phoenix, Amsterdam and Frankfurt Latchkey's own AWS estate on m6a-class hosts, one job per runner, no inbound access, destroyed after the job Self-healing or retries Not offered Built in: transient failures are diagnosed and retried inside the run Setup change required Install the GitHub App, then change the runs-on label to blacksmith-4vcpu-ubuntu-2404 A runs-on label change. GitHub organization accounts only Where Blacksmith wins, before anything else Blacksmith covers hardware Latchkey does not sell at all. arm64 is generally available at every size from 2 to 32 vCPU, Windows Server 2025 is in public beta across the same ...

Powered by Readybot.io