BuildJet shut down: move your GitHub Actions jobs to a flat price

BuildJet for GitHub Actions has shut down. It stopped taking sign-ups on February 6, 2026 and stopped running jobs on March 31, 2026. Any job still on a buildjet-* label sits in the queue until GitHub cancels it after 24 hours.

Move those jobs to Skipbox: a flat $39 a month with unlimited minutes. Change runs-on to skipbox and the job runs again, on a machine kept for your account.

Why BuildJet users move to Skipbox

Teams picked BuildJet because GitHub's minutes cost too much. BuildJet's shutdown post sends them back to GitHub's hosted runners, which bill by the minute at higher rates than BuildJet did. Skipbox keeps the reason you chose BuildJet, a lower bill, and drops the per-minute meter.

What happened to BuildJet

BuildJet's post of February 6, 2026 set the dates: no new sign-ups from that day, and on March 31, 2026, "BuildJet stops running jobs". Its reason: "The gap we set out to fill has largely closed." The buildjet-* labels still appear in its docs, but no runner answers to them. To GitHub they are self-hosted labels, so a job that names one shows "Waiting for a runner to pick up this job" until it is cancelled.

Find every job still pointing at BuildJet:

grep -rn "buildjet" .github/workflows

Rarely run workflows, like releases and nightly jobs, are the ones that get left behind.

What the move back to GitHub costs

GitHub's 4-core runner, the size closest to buildjet-4vcpu, at the minutes a busy team runs:

And the larger BuildJet sizes, at 20,000 minutes:

GitHub's figures are after the compute GitHub Team includes; its larger runners have no free minutes of their own and are billed on public repositories too. Put your own minutes into the calculator on the home page.

What GitHub's runners won't give back

• A bill that grows with every minute, and a budget that, once hit, stops jobs until next month.
• A new VM for every job, so each run downloads dependencies and rebuilds Docker images again.
• A 10 GB cache per repository, with entries unused for 7 days evicted, and cache keys you have to get right.

What Skipbox gives you instead

A flat price, unlimited minutes

Jobs beyond what your plans run at once wait their turn. The bill doesn't change.

Caches that stay put

Your account gets its own machine, kept between jobs. Docker images and build cache, package caches and tools installed by setup actions are on disk for the next run, with 7× the room of GitHub's default cache.

No GitHub minutes, no budget stops

Skipbox runners use none of your GitHub minutes, so a GitHub budget never stops them.

Moving is one line

jobs:
  build:
    runs-on: skipbox # was buildjet-4vcpu-ubuntu-2204
    steps:
      - uses: actions/checkout@v4
      - run: npm ci && npm test

BuildJet's runners had 4 GB of memory per vCPU; a job that used most of it goes one Skipbox size up.

1. Sign in to Skipbox with GitHub.
2. Install the Skipbox GitHub app and pick the repositories.
3. Change each runs-on, push, and re-run the runs stuck on the old label.

If you used buildjet/cache, swap it for actions/cache with the same inputs, as BuildJet's post says, or drop it: on Skipbox the package caches are already on the machine. The runner image is Ubuntu 24.04 with Docker, Node.js and Python.

Security

• Your machine runs only your account's jobs.
• Runner credentials, processes and containers are wiped after every job. From 13 November 2026, your checkout and its build output (Cargo's target/) stay on your own machine for your next jobs; Clean every job gives each job a fresh machine.
• Code from people without write access (such as pull requests from forks) runs on a fresh, single-use machine.

More in job isolation.

Get your jobs running today

The trial is free, takes no card, and lasts 7 days or 3,000 job-minutes. Change one stuck buildjet job to runs-on: skipbox, push, and it runs.

Updated November 11, 2026