Blacksmith CI pricing, explained

By Kaveh Alemi·Latchkey

Blacksmith CI pricing is one published rate per platform that doubles with each size step: $0.004 a minute for Ubuntu x64 at 2 vCPU, $0.0025 for Ubuntu ARM, $0.008 for Windows and $0.08 for macOS M4, with 3,000 free minutes a month printed on every runner card. That makes it a third cheaper than GitHub-hosted on Linux, level on nothing, and more expensive on macOS, so whether it lowers your bill depends entirely on your platform mix.

Blacksmith prices compute, not seats. There is no per-user fee, no agent fee and no plan to pick on the pay-as-you-go tier: you change a label, jobs run, and minutes are billed at the rate for the platform and size you chose.

Everything below was read from blacksmith.sh/pricing and docs.blacksmith.sh on 20 September 2026. Rates move, so the date is the point of the page; where Blacksmith publishes no figure, this page says so rather than filling the gap.

The rate card, by platform and size

The rate doubles with each vCPU step, which makes the arithmetic unusually easy to do in your head: an 8 vCPU Ubuntu runner is four times the 2 vCPU rate, and finishing four times faster leaves you exactly level.

Read the Linux column against the GitHub column and the "33% cheaper per minute" claim on the pricing page checks out at 2 and 4 vCPU exactly. It does not hold further up the ladder: the discount narrows to 27% at 8 vCPU, 24% at 16 and 22% at 32, because GitHub's larger-runner rates do not double at every step the way Blacksmith's do. The dollar gap still widens over the same range, from $0.002 a minute to $0.018, so the saving grows in cash while shrinking in percentage terms. It disappears entirely on macOS, where Blacksmith is 29% more expensive at the small size and roughly double at the large one. Blacksmith is selling newer Apple silicon for that premium, which is a speed purchase rather than a saving, and the pricing page is upfront that its headline "67% total cost savings" combines the rate cut with an estimated 2x faster runtime rather than being a rate comparison.

ARM is the quiet story on this rate card. At $0.0025 a minute, Ubuntu ARM is cheaper than Blacksmith's own x64 rate, cheaper than GitHub's $0.005 arm64 rate, and cheaper than GitHub's x64 rate too. The trade is memory: ARM tiers carry 3 GB per core against x64's 4 GB, so a 2 vCPU ARM runner has 6 GB and a job that was already close to the ceiling will find it.

Free minutes, and how they are counted

Every runner card on the pricing page carries "3,000 free min/mo.", including the macOS card, and the footer offers "3,000 free minutes per month" as the way to start. For a small team running Linux CI that is a meaningful fraction of a month.

The pricing page does not say what those minutes are denominated in. The runner documentation does, in its FAQ, and the answer settles both questions a budget needs. Blacksmith provides 3,000 x64 2-vCPU minutes free per month per organization, not per platform and not per runner card, and every other platform is counted against that same allowance with a multiplier: one ARM 2-vCPU minute is 0.625 x64 minutes, one Windows 2-vCPU minute is 2, and one macOS 6-vCPU minute is 20. Larger sizes scale in proportion, so a 16 vCPU x64 runner does drain it eight times faster than a 2 vCPU one.

Those multipliers track the rate card exactly, which means the allowance is worth the same wherever you spend it. Three thousand x64 minutes at $0.004, 4,800 ARM minutes at $0.0025, 1,500 Windows minutes at $0.008 and 150 macOS minutes at $0.08 all come to $12 a month. That is the whole value of the free tier, and it does not change with your platform mix.

For comparison, GitHub includes 2,000 minutes a month on Free, 3,000 on Team and 50,000 on Enterprise Cloud, applies them to private repositories only, and consumes them at the runner multiplier, so 2,000 macOS minutes draw down 20,000 included minutes.

The add-ons

• Docker layer caching: $0.50 per GB per month. The layers live on a sticky disk, and layers unused for 8 days are collected.
• Sticky disks: $0.50 per GB per month, up to 5 per job, evicted after 7 days without a job mounting them.
• Static IPs: $100 per IP per month, for allowlisting a Blacksmith runner against a private service.
• The colocated actions/cache replacement is not an add-on: 25 GB per repository per week is included, against GitHub's 10 GB, with sccache and the docker/build-push-action cache option documented as still going to GitHub's backend.
• Enterprise adds a 99.9% SLA, 24/7 priority support and what the page calls enterprise-grade concurrency, at custom pricing.
• A startup programme exists for companies under 100 employees, under $50 million raised and under 5 years old.

How much does Blacksmith CI cost? A worked month

Take 10,000 Linux minutes at 2 vCPU and 2,000 macOS minutes a month, price it at the rates above, and compare with the two obvious alternatives. The free allowance is applied to Linux, and because the multipliers track the rate card it would be worth the same $12 applied to the macOS line instead.

On this mix Blacksmith is not a saving, and the reason is the macOS line. Change the mix to 30,000 Linux minutes and no macOS and it becomes $108 against $180, a 40% cut, which is the case Blacksmith's own page is making. The rule that falls out: Blacksmith wins on Linux, wins by more on ARM, wins slightly on Windows, and loses on macOS. Price your own platform mix before you price the rate.

One more figure is missing and it matters for short jobs: billing granularity is not published anywhere on the pricing page or in the docs read here. GitHub rounds every job up to a whole minute, and on a forty-job matrix of 70-second jobs that rounding is 42% of the line. Whether Blacksmith does the same, meters to the second, or something else, is not something the published page answers.

Is it cheaper than the alternatives?

Against GitHub-hosted, on private-repository Linux, yes, by a third at 2 and 4 vCPU. On public repositories no, because standard GitHub-hosted runners are free and unlimited there and give you a 4 vCPU machine with 16 GB rather than the 2 vCPU tier you would be paying for.

Against Depot, yes: Depot lists $0.006 at 2 vCPU and $0.012 at 4, which is GitHub-hosted list price. Against Namespace, it depends on how you line the machines up, because Namespace pairs 2 GB of RAM per vCPU against Blacksmith's 4 GB; at matched memory the two are level at $0.004 prepaid, and the full comparison is here. Against Latchkey, no: $0.0025 against $0.004 at the same 2 vCPU and 8 GB size is 38% less, and Latchkey has no macOS or Windows runner at all, so a mixed-platform team is running two vendors either way.

The line item none of these rate cards contains is the re-run. A job that fails on a registry timeout bills the minutes it burned and bills again on the retry, on every vendor here except one. Count those in your own Actions history before you decide that a 33% rate difference is the biggest number on the table.

Key takeaways

• Ubuntu x64 $0.004/min at 2 vCPU, doubling per size step; ARM $0.0025, Windows $0.008, macOS M4 $0.08.
• 3,000 x64 2-vCPU minutes a month per organization, with ARM counted at 0.625x, Windows at 2x and macOS at 20x, so the allowance is worth $12 on any platform.
• Add-ons: $0.50/GB/month for Docker layer caching and sticky disks, $100/IP/month for static IPs.
• Cheaper than GitHub-hosted on Linux and Windows, more expensive on macOS, and irrelevant on public repositories where GitHub is free.
• Billing granularity is not published, which matters most if your matrices are wide and your jobs are short.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

References

• Blacksmith pricing
• Blacksmith runner instance types
• Blacksmith dependency caching and the 25 GB weekly allowance
• GitHub Actions per-minute rates and minute multipliers
• GitHub Actions billing, included minutes and multipliers
• GitHub Actions documentation