BuildJet alternatives for GitHub Actions, after the shutdown

Q: What replaces the buildjet/cache action?

BuildJet documented that its cache is interoperable with actions/cache and told users to swap straight over to it, which today means actions/cache@v6. The catch is the allowance: BuildJet gave 20 GB per repository weekly, while GitHub gives 10 GB per repository and evicts entries after seven days without a hit. Depot at 25 GB or 250 GB is the closest replacement for the size.

By Daniel Zoghalchali·Latchkey

A BuildJet alternative is no longer optional: BuildJet stopped accepting new signups on 6 February 2026 and stopped running jobs on 31 March 2026, and its own announcement points users back at GitHub-hosted runners. That is the one replacement that costs more than what you had, so this page prices the rest against what BuildJet was charging.

BuildJet charged $0.004 a minute at 2 vCPU; replacements run $0.0012 to $0.006 — What BuildJet charged at 2 and 4 vCPU against every live replacement, read 2026-09-20. The vendor BuildJet itself recommends is the joint most expensive on the chart.

BuildJet was one of the original drop-in runner providers: install the app, change runs-on, and jobs ran on its hardware at $0.004 a minute for 2 vCPU with 8 GB, roughly a third under GitHub-hosted list. It shipped a 20 GB weekly per-repository cache through its own buildjet/cache action, double the GitHub allowance, and its ARM cards matched the AMD prices while shipping less memory. Depot alternatives covers the vendor that inherited that cache argument.

Those figures were read from BuildJet pricing on 2026-08-20, before the page came down; the dates and the migration guidance below come from BuildJet's own shutdown post, read on 2026-09-20. They are here because they are what you are replacing, not because you can still buy them.

Everything else on this page was read on 2026-09-20 from each vendor's live pricing page. The ranking criterion is the published Linux x64 rate at 2 vCPU for a private repository, with the memory it buys, because that is the shape BuildJet sold most of.

Every replacement, ranked by published Linux rate

This is a shortlist, not the field: BuildJet itself, so you can see what you are leaving, and the four replacements its users actually take. Ubicloud for the deepest cut, Namespace for the closest thing to BuildJet ARM economics, Latchkey for re-run waste, and Blacksmith as the like-for-like AMD swap at the same $0.004. Depot, WarpBuild and GitHub-hosted, all at or above what BuildJet charged, are in the vendor table further down, which prices every live vendor against what you were paying.

Vendor	Linux, 2 vCPU	Linux, 4 vCPU	Free tier	Billing granularity	Best for
BuildJet (gone 31 Mar 2026)	$0.004 AMD and ARM	$0.008	One-time $5 credit	Not published	Nothing: the service is shut down
Ubicloud	$0.0012 standard, $0.0020 premium (8 GB)	$0.0025 standard, $0.0040 premium	1,250 min/month	Not published	Replacing BuildJet purely on rate
Namespace	$0.002 prepaid at 4 GB, $0.004 at 8 GB	$0.004 prepaid at 8 GB	30-day trial only	Unit minutes, prepaid or overage	Replacing the BuildJet ARM economics
Latchkey	$0.0025 (8 GB)	$0.005 (16 GB)	2,000 to 6,000 min/month	Per minute	Replacing it and cutting re-run waste too
Blacksmith	$0.0025 ARM, $0.004 Ubuntu x64	$0.005 ARM, $0.008 Ubuntu x64	3,000 min/month	Not published	The closest like-for-like AMD swap

What you are actually replacing

BuildJet sold four things and a replacement has to cover the ones you leaned on. It sold a cheaper minute, which five of the seven live vendors still beat. It sold larger hardware up to 32 vCPU, which everyone above except Ubicloud and Latchkey matches. It sold a 20 GB weekly per-repository cache, which nothing on GitHub-hosted matches. And it sold ARM at the same price as AMD, with materially less memory: 3 GB against 8 GB at 2 vCPU, and 12 GB against 32 GB at 8.

The cache is the part people miss. BuildJet documented that BuildJet Cache is interoperable with actions/cache and told users to swap straight over to it, which today means actions/cache@v6. That works, and it halves your allowance: GitHub gives 10 GB per repository and evicts entries after seven days without a hit.

What BuildJet gave you	On GitHub-hosted	Best replacement on this page
$0.004/min at 2 vCPU, 8 GB	$0.006/min, 8 GB	Ubicloud at $0.0012, same 8 GB
20 GB per-repo cache, weekly	10 GB per repo, 7-day eviction	Depot at 25 GB or 250 GB
Sizes to 32 vCPU	Sizes to 96 vCPU	Depot to 64 vCPU, Blacksmith to 32
ARM at the AMD price, less RAM	arm64 at $0.005/min	Blacksmith ARM at $0.0025, 2 vCPU
64 AMD vCPU default concurrency	20 to 500 jobs by plan	Depot, unlimited on every plan
One-time $5 credit	2,000 to 50,000 min by plan	Blacksmith at 3,000 min/month

What each replacement covers, and what it does not

Every live vendor, priced against the $0.004 BuildJet charged at 2 vCPU and against the thing you will miss. Neither column exists on the roundup, which compares vendors to each other rather than to a service that has shut down.

Vendor	Against BuildJet's $0.004	What it does not replace
Ubicloud	70% under	The ARM card, and any size above 16 vCPU
Namespace	50% under at 4 GB, level at 8 GB	The bundled cache: storage is billed at $0.0048/GB-day
WarpBuild	Level managed, 50% under on BYOC	A standing free allowance, which it does not publish
Latchkey	38% under	ARM entirely, and any size above 16 vCPU
Blacksmith	Level on x64, 38% under on ARM	A bundled cache: the layer cache is $0.50/GB/mo on top
Depot	50% above	The cheap minute BuildJet was chosen for
GitHub-hosted	50% above	The cheap minute, and half the 20 GB cache allowance

The label swap, vendor by vendor

BuildJet labels have the form buildjet-<vcpu>-<os>-<version>, so one grep finds every job that needs a destination. Runner selection is per job, which means you can move the expensive jobs first and leave the rest until you have two weeks of real numbers.

Terminal

grep -rn "runs-on:.*buildjet" .github/workflows

# then, per job:
#   buildjet-4vcpu-ubuntu-2204  ->  ubuntu-latest                  GitHub-hosted
#                               ->  blacksmith-4vcpu-ubuntu-2404   Blacksmith
#                               ->  depot-ubuntu-24.04-4           Depot
#                               ->  namespace-profile-default      Namespace
#                               ->  latchkey-medium                Latchkey

Ubicloud and Namespace: the cheapest landing spots

Ubicloud is the largest rate cut available: $0.0012 a minute for 2 vCPU with 8 GB against the $0.004 BuildJet charged, with 1,250 free minutes a month and 30 GB of cache storage included on the standard tier. What it lacks is the rest of the BuildJet catalog. Linux x64 only, sizes stop at 16 vCPU, and there is no ARM card to replace the one you were using.

Namespace is $0.002 a minute for 2 vCPU with 4 GB, which is the closest thing to BuildJet ARM economics, and $0.004 for the 8 GB shape, level with what BuildJet charged on AMD. It publishes a Linux concurrency ceiling of 32, 64 or 160 vCPU by plan against BuildJet's 64 AMD vCPU default, and it sells arm64, Windows and macOS. What it lacks is any standing free allowance.

Blacksmith and Depot: for the cache and the cores

Blacksmith is the like-for-like swap on AMD at $0.004 a minute for Ubuntu x64, identical to BuildJet, with 3,000 free minutes a month where BuildJet gave a one-time $5 credit. Its ARM card at $0.0025 is cheaper than BuildJet ARM and ships 6 GB rather than 3. What it lacks is a bundled cache: layer caching and sticky disks are $0.50 per GB per month on top.

Depot is the answer if the 20 GB cache was the reason you were on BuildJet. It sells 25 GB on the $20 Developer plan or 250 GB on Startup at up to 1,000 MiB/s, unlimited concurrency on every plan, and sizes to 64 vCPU. What it lacks is the cheap minute entirely: $0.006 a minute is 50% above BuildJet and level with GitHub-hosted.

Latchkey: the cheaper minute, spent once

Latchkey sells managed Linux runners at $0.0025 a minute for 2 vCPU with 8 GB, 38% under what BuildJet charged at the same shape, with 2,000 to 6,000 free minutes a month and a dependency cache that replaces buildjet/cache in one line and keeps entries 14 days, though it publishes no size to set against the 20 GB BuildJet gave you or the 10 GB GitHub gives you. Its distinctive row is that a transient failure is diagnosed and retried inside the run rather than failing the job and billing the re-run.

What it lacks: Linux x86_64 only, so BuildJet ARM jobs have no equivalent and must go to Blacksmith ARM, Namespace or GitHub-hosted arm64. Sizes stop at 16 vCPU against BuildJet's 32. It bills per minute, it caps concurrency at 20 busy runners per workspace and jobs at four hours, and Ubicloud, Namespace and WarpBuild BYOC all undercut its rate.

How to choose

The deadline is behind you, so the useful question is not which vendor is closest to BuildJet but which BuildJet property you actually used. The step-by-step cutover is in migrate from BuildJet.

Grep for runs-on:.*buildjet and sort the hits by how many minutes each job burns. Move the top three first.
Check every hit for an ARM label. Those jobs were running on 3 GB at 2 vCPU, so a move to a 6 or 8 GB shape may change their timings for the better and their cost for the worse.
Swap buildjet/cache@v4 for actions/cache@v6 before you change the runner, so you are debugging one thing at a time.
Price the 10 GB GitHub cache allowance against what you were storing in 20 GB. If you were near the ceiling, the cache row matters more than the rate row.

The short answer

Take BuildJet's advice and go back to GitHub-hosted only if your usage now fits inside your included minutes, or if the repository is public, where standard runners are free and unlimited. Otherwise it is a 50% rate increase on the shape you were paying $0.004 for.

Go to Ubicloud for the deepest cut on Linux x64. Go to Blacksmith for a like-for-like AMD swap with 3,000 free minutes, or to its ARM card to replace BuildJet ARM with more memory for less. Go to Depot if the 20 GB cache was the draw. Go to Namespace for cheap unit minutes and a published concurrency ceiling. Go to Latchkey if the minutes you want back are the ones you spend re-running red jobs.

Key takeaways

BuildJet halted signups on 6 February 2026 and stopped running jobs on 31 March 2026, per its own shutdown post.
Its guidance is to return to GitHub-hosted, which at $0.006 a minute is 50% above the $0.004 BuildJet charged at 2 vCPU.
Five live vendors sell a Linux card under the $0.004 BuildJet charged; only Depot and GitHub-hosted, at $0.006, do not.
buildjet/cache swaps for actions/cache@v6, and the per-repository allowance drops from 20 GB to 10 GB.

Frequently asked questions

When did BuildJet for GitHub Actions shut down?

BuildJet stopped accepting new signups on 6 February 2026 and stopped running jobs on 31 March 2026, both dates from its own shutdown post. The pricing page is gone, so the rates quoted here were read on 2026-08-20 while it was still live and are historical. Any workflow still pointing at a buildjet- label has had no runner since that date.

Do I have to move back to GitHub-hosted runners?

No. BuildJet's shutdown post recommends it and documents the label mapping, for example buildjet-2vcpu-ubuntu-2204 to ubuntu-latest or ubuntu-24.04-arm, but any drop-in vendor works the same way. GitHub-hosted at $0.006 a minute is 50% above what BuildJet charged at 2 vCPU, which makes it, with Depot, the most expensive destination on this page.

What replaces the buildjet/cache action?

BuildJet documented that its cache is interoperable with actions/cache and told users to swap straight over to it, which today means actions/cache@v6. The catch is the allowance: BuildJet gave 20 GB per repository weekly, while GitHub gives 10 GB per repository and evicts entries after seven days without a hit. Depot at 25 GB or 250 GB is the closest replacement for the size.

Is WarpBuild a like-for-like BuildJet replacement?

On managed runners the rate matches almost exactly: WarpBuild lists $0.004 a minute for Linux x64 at 2 vCPU with 8 GB, where BuildJet charged $0.004 for the same shape. WarpBuild arm64 at $0.003 is cheaper than BuildJet ARM and ships 8 GB rather than 3. Its bring-your-own-cloud mode is a flat $0.002 a minute with no size tiers, cheaper still, but puts capacity planning back on you.