Depot alternatives for GitHub Actions, after the price change

By Kaveh Alemi·Latchkey

The Depot alternatives GitHub Actions teams are pricing today are being priced for one reason: Depot now lists its GitHub Actions runners at $0.006 a minute for 2 vCPU with 8 GB, which is GitHub-hosted list price to the cent, where the same page read $0.004 on 2026-08-20. That removes the cost argument for Depot entirely and leaves the cache, the billing model and the Docker builders, which are still the best in this comparison.

Start with what Depot is genuinely good at, because it is a short list of real things. Its runner docs state that it tracks builds by the second and bills for whole minutes used at the end of the month, with no one-minute minimum enforced, so a matrix of 70-second jobs does not pay for 80 whole minutes the way per-job rounding makes it. Its cache is 25 GB on the $20 Developer plan or 250 GB on Startup, at up to 1,000 MiB/s. It runs unlimited concurrency on every plan, and it sells the widest hardware range here: 2 to 64 vCPU, arm64, Windows, macOS and GPU.

The reason to shop is the rate. At $0.006 a minute Depot is level with GitHub-hosted, so the pitch is no longer "the same job for less" and every alternative below undercuts it. That is not a criticism of the product, it is a change in what the product is competing on, and any business case written against an older figure needs redoing.

The ranking criterion here is the published Linux x64 rate at 2 vCPU for a private repository, read on 2026-09-20, with the memory it buys alongside. Every vendor below is a runs-on label change, and Depot is one too, so trialling a replacement costs one job for two weeks.

Every alternative, ranked by published Linux rate

This is a shortlist, not the field: Depot itself, and the four its users actually move to. Ubicloud for the 80% cut, Blacksmith for a third off plus 3,000 free minutes, Latchkey for re-run waste, and GitHub-hosted because it is now level on rate and needs no third party. Namespace and WarpBuild are in the next table; all eight vendors are priced side by side in the roundup. Read the billing column beside the rate: on a wide matrix of short jobs, tracking by the second can return more than the gap between two vendors.

What each alternative has that Depot does not

The rate is one column of eleven. This table is the rest of them, written against Depot rather than in the abstract, and the full side-by-side matrix for all eight vendors is in GitHub Actions runner alternatives.

Ubicloud: the rate argument Depot used to make

Ubicloud sells 2 vCPU with 8 GB at $0.0012 a minute on AMD EPYC Genoa, or $0.0020 on Ryzen 9, with 1,250 free minutes a month and 30 GB of cache storage on standard. Against Depot at $0.006 that is an 80% cut at the same shape, and it is the single largest rate gap on this page.

What it lacks is most of what makes Depot worth its price. Linux x64 only, so Depot Windows, macOS, arm64 and GPU runners have no counterpart. No published billing granularity, no concurrency ceiling, no Docker build acceleration, and headline cards still quoting the pre-September rates: RunsOn's benchmark changelog, read 2026-09-20, records a 25% rise on both tiers effective 1 September 2026, which is why the size table reads $0.0012 and $0.0020 while the cards still read $0.0010 and $0.0016.

Blacksmith and Namespace: the middle of the table

Blacksmith undercuts Depot by a third on Ubuntu x64 at $0.004 and by 58% on ARM at $0.0025, and it includes 3,000 free minutes a month rather than bundling them into a plan fee. What it lacks against Depot is the cache economics: layer caching and sticky disks are add-ons at $0.50 per GB per month, and it publishes no billing granularity at all, so a matrix of short jobs has to be priced at the worst case.

Namespace is cheaper again at $0.002 a minute for a 2 vCPU 4 GB shape, and level with Blacksmith at $0.004 for 8 GB. It publishes a Linux concurrency ceiling of 32 to 160 vCPU by plan, sells remote Docker builders billed per build, and covers Windows and macOS. What it lacks is any standing free allowance and a cache priced as storage rather than included.

Latchkey: a cheaper minute that spends itself once

Latchkey sells managed Linux runners at $0.0025 a minute for 2 vCPU with 8 GB, 58% under Depot at the same shape, with 2,000 to 6,000 free minutes a month and a dependency cache carrying no separate meter, though no size is published for it either. Its distinctive row is the one Depot does not have: a transient failure is diagnosed and retried inside the run, so the failed minutes and the re-run minutes are not both billed.

What it lacks against Depot is substantial and worth stating before anything else. Linux x86_64 only, against Depot at 2 to 64 vCPU with arm64, Windows, macOS and GPU. Per-minute billing against tracking by the second. No published cache size at all, against Depot's 25 GB on Developer and 250 GB on Startup, and no remote BuildKit builders. If your pipeline is Docker builds, Depot is the better product and the rate is the price of it.

How to choose

The rate change makes this easier, not harder, because it separates the two reasons anyone was on Depot. The rest of the field is priced in Blacksmith alternatives and BuildJet alternatives.

1. Work out what share of your minutes is Docker build time. If it is most of them, Depot at list is still the cheaper total, because the builders and the cache do more than a cheaper minute can.
2. Count the jobs shorter than about 90 seconds. On 40 jobs of 70 seconds, tracking by the second removes 33 of the 80 minutes that per-job rounding would bill, which can exceed the gap to a cheaper vendor.
3. Check whether you need anything beyond Linux x64. Windows, macOS, arm64 and GPU rule out Ubicloud and Latchkey immediately.
4. Count your re-runs across a month of runs. That share is the one number none of these rate cards prices.

Switching, in both directions

Depot is selected by a runs-on label like everything else here, so a trial is one line on one job. The repository has to be owned by a GitHub organization for Depot and for Latchkey; personal accounts are out on both. If the jobs you keep re-running are failing on a registry rate limit, no rate card on this page prices that.

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: depot-ubuntu-24.04              # today
    # runs-on: blacksmith-2vcpu-ubuntu-2404
    # runs-on: namespace-profile-default
    # runs-on: latchkey-small
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v7
      - run: docker build .

The short answer

Stay on Depot if Docker builds are most of your minutes, if you need a cache size the vendor has committed to in writing, or if your matrix is wide and made of short jobs. Those three properties are what the rate is buying now, and they are worth real money on the right pipeline.

Move to Ubicloud if the work is Linux x64 and you want the 80% rate cut. Move to Blacksmith if a single-threaded compile is the critical path, or to its ARM card for the rate. Move to Namespace if you want a published concurrency ceiling and cheap unit minutes. Move to Latchkey if the minutes you keep buying twice are the ones spent re-running failures that had nothing to do with your code.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

References

• Depot GitHub Actions runners: per-second tracking and whole-minute billing (verified 2026-09-20)
• Depot runner types: Linux, Windows and macOS rates (verified 2026-09-20)
• Depot pricing: plans, cache storage and the GitHub Actions rate (verified 2026-09-20)
• GitHub Actions runner per-minute rates and rounding (verified 2026-09-20)
• Ubicloud GitHub Actions runner sizes and rates (verified 2026-09-20)
• GitHub Actions documentation