Latchkey vs BuildJet after the BuildJet shutdown

By Kaveh Alemi·Latchkey

Latchkey vs BuildJet is no longer a comparison you can act on: BuildJet announced the shutdown of BuildJet for GitHub Actions on 6 February 2026 and stopped running jobs on 31 March 2026. What is left is a migration, so this page is about the buildjet-* labels still sitting in workflow files and what the surviving options cost against the rate you used to pay.

BuildJet sold managed runners on its own bare metal, adopted with a one-line runs-on change, at $0.004 a minute for 2 vCPU and 8 GB rising to $0.048 for 32 vCPU. It published arm64 variants of every size and a drop-in cache action with 20 GB per repository per week, which was double the GitHub-hosted allowance. Its site is still up and still shows that rate card, under a banner reading "BuildJet for GitHub Actions has been shut down", so do not price your migration from it.

Latchkey sells managed runners the same way, at $0.0025 a minute for 2 vCPU and 8 GB, with a dependency cache that swaps in for buildjet/cache in one line and transient failures repaired on the runner. It is the closest thing on price to what BuildJet was, and it is missing the thing a good share of BuildJet users were there for: there is no arm64, Windows or macOS runner, so an arm64 job has to land somewhere else.

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.

BuildJet as it was, GitHub-hosted and Latchkey (read 20 September 2026)

What happened, and what it means for your workflow files

BuildJet posted the notice on 6 February 2026: new signups closed that day, all concurrency subscriptions became free, pay-as-you-go billing continued as normal, and on 31 March 2026 the runners stopped taking jobs. The company's own migration advice was to move to GitHub-hosted runners, use GitHub's native arm64 runners for arm workflows, and swap the BuildJet cache action back to actions/cache, which it describes as interoperable.

If a buildjet-* label is still in a workflow file today, the job does not fail loudly with a helpful message. It queues, waiting for a runner with that label to appear, until it hits the job timeout or somebody cancels it. That is worth grepping for across every repository and every branch that still builds, including the ones nobody has touched since March.

The label map

Every BuildJet size maps to something, but not to one thing: GitHub sells its 4 vCPU and larger sizes as larger runners with labels you define yourself in organization settings, so there is no drop-in string to paste. Prices are per minute, read 20 September 2026.

The migration, in the order that avoids surprises

The label is the easy part. What catches people is everything that was tuned around BuildJet: cache keys sized for a 20 GB weekly allowance, matrices sized for a concurrency subscription, and arm64 jobs that quietly have nowhere to go.

• Grep every repository for buildjet- and list the branches, not just the default one. Scheduled workflows on stale branches are the ones that queue forever.
• Move the x64 jobs first, one label at a time, and check the run times rather than assuming parity: BuildJet was bare metal, and a cloud runner at the same core count is not always the same wall-clock.
• Swap buildjet/cache@v4 back to actions/cache@v6 and re-check what you were caching. GitHub allows 10 GB per repository against BuildJet's 20 GB, so a cache tuned to the old ceiling will start evicting.
• Re-home arm64 jobs explicitly. ubuntu-24.04-arm at $0.005 is the no-new-vendor answer; Blacksmith at $0.0025 and WarpBuild at $0.003 are cheaper if you are adding a vendor anyway.
• Re-check concurrency. GitHub allows 20 to 500 concurrent jobs by plan, which is a different ceiling from a bought concurrency subscription, and a wide matrix is where you notice.
• Price the result before you settle. The rate you were paying was $0.004, and the default you were told to move to is $0.006, which is a 50% rise on every Linux minute.

 jobs:
   test:
-    runs-on: buildjet-4vcpu-ubuntu-2204
+    runs-on: latchkey-medium
     steps:
       - uses: actions/checkout@v7
-      - uses: buildjet/cache@v4
+      - uses: actions/cache@v6
         with:
           path: ~/.npm
           key: npm-${{ hashFiles('package-lock.json') }}

   test-arm:
-    runs-on: buildjet-4vcpu-ubuntu-2204-arm
+    runs-on: ubuntu-24.04-arm

Speed

Not benchmarked yet; the runner benchmark report will replace this section. We have not run the same workload on these runners ourselves, and until we have, there is no number here worth quoting.

The cheap way to get a real answer is to point one slow job at each candidate for a week, because runner selection is per job and the Actions run log gives you the timings for free.

Cost: the month you used to pay for, priced where you can actually run it now

The same workload as every comparison here, 10,000 Linux minutes at 2 vCPU plus 2,000 macOS minutes a month on a private repository. BuildJet never sold macOS, so that column always landed on GitHub-hosted, which is exactly where it lands for Latchkey too.

Doing nothing but taking BuildJet's advice costs $20 a month more on this mix, because $0.004 became $0.006. Latchkey is $149 plus a $5 to $49 plan, so at the Launch tier it lands within a few dollars of the BuildJet bill, and at Scale it is above it. Latchkey's own plan is $5 to $49 a month on top of that compute, and its 2,000 to 6,000 included minutes are not netted off, so the figure is gross on both counts.

That is the honest shape of this migration: nobody is getting a windfall out of a vendor closing. The options that beat BuildJet's old rate on Linux are Namespace at $0.002 a minute prepaid for a 2 vCPU shape with 4 GB, half the memory BuildJet gave you, and WarpBuild BYOC at $0.002 plus your own cloud bill. The options that match it are Blacksmith and WarpBuild at $0.004. Latchkey undercuts all of the managed ones at $0.0025 and is the only one that also repairs a failed job, at the cost of a plan fee and no arm64.

Where BuildJet users can actually land

Every option below is a runs-on label change from where you are now, which is the one thing that has not changed since BuildJet. Rates are the published 2 vCPU Linux rate, read 20 September 2026.

The verdict

There is no version of this that makes BuildJet's closure good news, and the default path its own post recommends, moving everything to ubuntu-latest, raises your Linux rate by half. If you are editing every workflow file anyway, that is the cheapest moment you will ever have to price the alternatives, because the edit is identical whichever label you paste. Latchkey is the lowest published managed x64 rate of the group and the only one that repairs a transient failure instead of billing you twice for it, and it is the wrong answer if your matrix has arm64, Windows or macOS in it, because it has none of those. Blacksmith and WarpBuild both match BuildJet's old $0.004 with arm64 included, and GitHub-hosted is the answer that adds no vendor at all. Pick on the shape of your matrix, not on the closure.

Frequently asked questions

Related guides

References

• BuildJet: we are shutting down BuildJet for GitHub Actions
• BuildJet runner tags and per-minute rates
• BuildJet Cache: 20 GB per repo per week
• GitHub Actions per-minute rates by runner
• Latchkey pricing: plans and per-minute runner rates
• GitHub Actions documentation