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Blacksmith Pricing

freemiumlast verified September 6, 2026official site ↗

At a glance

High-performance drop-in replacement runner fleet for GitHub Actions offering 2x faster execution and 50% to 75% cost reduction. Free tier provides 3,000 runner minutes/month (2vCPU basis). Pay-as-you-go usage bills per minute at $0.004/min for Ubuntu x64 (vs $0.008 GitHub), $0.0025/min for Ubuntu ARM, and $0.008/min for Windows x64 (vs $0.016 GitHub) with no seat fees or minimums. Enterprise tier offers custom volume pricing, dedicated runner pools, private VPC peering, SOC 2 compliance, and custom uptime SLAs.

Free & cheaper CI/CD Tools

same category, free plan or open-source license

Ciliumopen sourceFree and 100% open source under the Apache-2.0 license (with dual GPL-2.0/BSD-2-Clause BPF datapath templates) as a CNCF Graduated project. Cilium has no software licensing fees for self-hosted or cloud Kubernetes deployments (including GKE Dataplane V2 and Azure CNI Powered by Cilium); organizations pay only for their compute infrastructure. For mission-critical enterprise environments, Isovalent Enterprise for Cilium (by Cisco) provides quote-based annual subscriptions (per-node/environment) with 24/7 SLA support, hardened LTS builds, Customer Testing Environments (CuTEs), enterprise BGP/EVPN, and advanced multi-cluster security and observability retention.OrbStackFree for personal and non-commercial use, educational studies, and open-source development. Commercial and business use (or individuals generating >$10,000/year) requires a paid Pro license at $8/user/month billed annually ($96/year) or $10/month monthly, covering up to 5 devices per user with priority support and a 30-day trial. Enterprise plans provide custom volume pricing, centralized billing, MDM/SSO directory integration, and 99.9% uptime SLAs.Rayopen sourceRay is a free and open-source distributed computing framework governed by the PyTorch Foundation under the Apache 2.0 license. It can be self-hosted on any cloud or on-prem cluster with zero licensing costs, while managed execution is available via cloud providers like Anyscale.Actopen sourceFree and 100% open source under the MIT license. Act has no licensing costs or subscription tiers; it runs locally via Docker and saves billable GitHub Actions runner minutes.
Blacksmith overview →alternatives →review: 89/100 →

FAQ

How much does Blacksmith cost?

High-performance drop-in replacement runner fleet for GitHub Actions offering 2x faster execution and 50% to 75% cost reduction. Free tier provides 3,000 runner minutes/month (2vCPU basis). Pay-as-you-go usage bills per minute at $0.004/min for Ubuntu x64 (vs $0.008 GitHub), $0.0025/min for Ubuntu ARM, and $0.008/min for Windows x64 (vs $0.016 GitHub) with no seat fees or minimums. Enterprise tier offers custom volume pricing, dedicated runner pools, private VPC peering, SOC 2 compliance, and custom uptime SLAs. Paid pricing starts at $0.0025/min.

Does Blacksmith have a free plan?

Yes — Blacksmith has a free plan alongside its paid tiers.

What are free or cheaper Blacksmith alternatives?

Cilium, OrbStack, Ray are in the same category with a free plan or open-source license.

pricing is editorial catalog data (last verified September 6, 2026) — vendors change plans; confirm on the official site before you buy. Reuse this data under CC-BY 4.0 via /data.