Blacksmith

Blacksmith is a drop-in replacement for GitHub Actions runners that provides faster, more cost-effective CI/CD execution.

In plain text, that means: with Blacksmith, we run CI/CD pipelines on Blacksmith's boxes that are faster than GitHub's hosted runners, and cheaper than GitHub's hosted runners on a per-minute basis.

We use Blacksmith across all of our GitHub Actions workflows, from running tests and linting to deploying applications. The setup is remarkably simple—we just specify runs-on: blacksmith-4vcpu-ubuntu-2204 in our workflow files, and Blacksmith handles the rest. The adoption process is painless.

The primary benefit for us is speed. Our CI/CD pipelines run significantly faster on Blacksmith's dedicated runners compared to GitHub's shared infrastructure, especially during peak times when GitHub's runners can be slow or unavailable. This means faster feedback loops for developers and quicker deployments to production.

Prior solutions

Depot

We replaced Depot with Blacksmith in early 2025. At that point in time, Depot's pricing was a little higher (they hadn't shifted to metered billing yet) and their performance was a little worse, but otherwise it was still a great option. Since then, Depot has shifted to metered billing — but we don't have any incentive to switch back.